Has Science Buried God?

“Has Science Buried God?”
Talk by: John Lennox, author of “Seven Days That Divide The World”(amzn.to/26bTbxf)
and Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at The University of Oxford. 
Notes taken by: Victor Tan, at The Chicago Festival of Thought, The University of
Chicago.
These are notes from “Has Science Buried God?”, a public event that was carried out at
The University of Chicago, and one of the best apologetic/theological defenses of the
Christian faith that has ever been carried out in the United States, alongside Paul
Tillich’s Systematic Theology, Volumes 1, 2, 3. These notes were typed out
contemporaneously with John Lennox’s speech. Within the notes, there will be links to
some of the books mentioned in the talk: If you are interested in following through with
some of these ideas mentioned, in particular with John’s book, do click the links and
purchase the books! 
 
Science and God.
Has Science Buried God? It’s an odd question in a way because in a way, we are
looking at it naively. What is Science, even? It’s a discipline that studies nature. How
could studying something that is given, be an argument against a Creator who put it
there? We didn’t put the universe there, though some people say they did… But the
reality is clear:
We didn't invent The Mind.
Now, here in Science, we study a given with a given, but there’s more to it to that:
L goes on, to describe some images that he puts on a board, featuring himself,
Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Hawking. He says, Dawkins and
him have a debate in the place where there is a debate between Thomas Huxley and
Dawkins. The bottom picture on the right is a debate with the late Christopher Hitchens.
Hitchens had felt strongly about the matter, and said that Science had Buried God.
Well, there’s a widespread impression that Science is here, God is there, the two won’t
meet: L said he was talking to a physics PhD student in another city in the state and he
said when his colleagues discovered he was a Christian, he said well, they criticized
him for doing physics and believing in God.
But not only has science not buried God, but faith in God and Science sit very close
together.
The real conﬂict is not within Science and God, but Naturalism and Theism.
As evidence, L cites Nobel Prize winners in Physics: There are these Nobel Prize
winners in Physics, consisting of Stephen Winberg, Charles Townes invents the laser,
the maser… They are Christians. These men won the Nobel Prize, and their Physics did
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not divide them: What divided them was their world view: Weinberg an atheist, Charles
a Christian.
In other words, the first thing to take onboard in this debate is that it’s not a conflict
between science and religion alone… Nobel Prize Winners logically would none of
them be Christians, if this were the case.
On the contrary, 65% of Nobel Prize winners believe in God, so the skeptics can soothe
themselves with the idea that God stops science: It is a delusion.
Now, we put these things side by side, Atheism on one side, Theism on another.
These two world views distinguish themselves in the way they answer questions. What
is ultimate reality and what is real? The universe seems all that exists, and no
transcendence is not in the Theism philosophy, for a God is there and creates it and
upholds it. Naturalism cares about mass/energy, Theism posits Ultimate Reality as
God, L notes:
He gives lots of lectures on Nothing these days, which paradoxically means that he has
lots of things to talk about, he says.
On the theistic side, it is a universe that explains itself “bottom up”, and the universe
requires both bottom up and top down explanation in Theism. All explanations, however,
must be reductionist.
Everything must be reducible, on the naturalistic side, to principles… Science in the
same way as Christianity is, let us say.
Theism, however, is not contradictory to these facts - Naturalism on the other hand
gives no evidence of God in the universe, and Theism regards evidence to be present.
Scientists disagree, but Where Does Science fit? Science, Naturalism, or to
Theism? Is it neutral, and how do you investigate these things?
An intellectual fog hangs over the western world, generated by thinkers he shall name.
It gets blocked by some title like The God Delusion: This book is claiming to use
psychology and psychiatry in thinking that there’s no point in thinking about God
and it is not alone: The idea is that God is a Freudian creation.
Now, Hawking says that…
“Religion is a fairy story for those afraid of the dark.”
L’s reply is as follows: 
 
“Atheism on this basis is a fairy story for those who fear the light”.
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The point is that assertion doesn’t carry the day, and the next principle he suggests is
statements by scientists that are not necessarily statements of science. His reply was
not a statement of science either - We must look elsewhere to get evidence. He is
annoyed by Scientists claiming that he follows these things. There are 2k students
there, he is accused, like Santa Claus, and he asks this question. The Scientist asks,
“How many of you came to believe in Santa as an adult, how many adults become
Christians?”
He says that he had said, “Professor, please don’t insult our intelligence.”
He has noted that these people thought and believed - He knows that there is a huge
volume of literature, and that does not exist with Santa Claus. The things creating fog
consist indeed of the concept of Faith, which is clarified in the following section.
What is Faith?
We use the word “Faith” with religion, and etc, but what exactly does it mean? We use
it not just in this context, but more commonly also as the subjective response to
something: It means different things. I believe it I have faith in it, a fact, a proposition, or
a person. The fact is, however, these things are confused in debate.
Faith in the Original Latin means Trust, and we have friends we trust them, etc, but
the new Atheists have very cleverly defined faith to believe in something that has no
evidence - And they have redone it to make a cheap intellectual copout - Other faith
might speak for itself, but Christian faith.
The Doctrines of the New Testament and the Apostle John at the ned of the 4th Gospel,
he writes of signs that will take place, and the idea is that Jesus is the Son of God,
and this is the evidence of which belief- based faith, and these atheists, regarding faith
as belief without evidence, write, for instance, that… 
 
“A case can be made that faith is one of the great evils.”
In other words, faith, “Belief that is not based on evidence”, is redefined - It is made
out as blind faith by Scientists, leading to amusing absurdities.
And thus, we can accept that Dawkins says Theists have no evidence, but also that he
writes a 400 page book about it with the very same lack of evidence(amzn.to/1Qj8ZCV):
Hypocrisy.
Faith is not just a religious concept.
Often, the Scientists forget that Faith is essential to Science, and what we find with
people who say that they have no science, these people have unlimited faith in the
ability of science to obtain the question.
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Bertrand Russell says that whatever knowledge is attainable must be obtained by
science and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know - So it is said.
It is logically incoherent, L says. Peter Medawar, he says, is claiming “Science is made
clear by inability to answer questions… But the questions that science cannot answer
are important.
As we look at the Science and God question mathematically, people have often
challenged L to prove the existence of God.
L thus asks, What is the meaning of the word “Proof”? 
 
To the Scientists, think about the Axiomatic methods that you use - These proofs, you
get it not in any other branch of science let alone any other discipline. Physics
Chemistry Engineering, we can’t speak of mathematical proof, but we speak of powerful
evidence getting us beyond reasonable doubt: A week ago, L trusted an A-380 and he
can prove that he couldn’t get there - But well, he got there didn’t he?
He can’t prove that his wife married to him for 48 years loves him, but he would stake
his life on it: We can stake lots of truth on things we can’t believe through science all the
time, we do it all the time in our daily life.
Where do we get evidence all the time, then? 
 
We consider the History of Science, the nature of the Philosophy of Science, and the
Philosophy of Science itself. He said that scientists are believers that believe in
Science, believing that science can be done, the rational intelligibility of the universe,
the mathematical intelligibility of the universe. Look back in history if you can, and the
pioneers of science, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, believers in God as they were, they
believed in God.
C.S. Lewis says well, Man becomes Scientiﬁc because they expect law in nature,
and expect law in nature, implying belief in a lawgiver.
This is why the major universities of the world used to have Biblical mottos, because
the people who created them were theologically literate and saw no contradiction
between Science and Reason.
This is because of the essential role Christianity played in modern science.
The historians say that the history of creation is the origin of Modern Science: God does
not ask us to abandon all reason.
Galileo says, after all, that the God did not ask them to forgo reason, as did Kepler, who
in turn said that the discovery of rational order, reveled by mathematics, was imposed
by God:
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Newton, then, said that we should not doubt the Creator, denying the possibility of the
lack of God.
Hawking claims, then, that God did not create the universe.
Newton, he says, discovered Gravity, but also used the law of gravity as evidence
there was an intelligent creator: The Principia Mathematica, for instance, expressed
the hope that the book would help the thinking person to believe in a deity.
Hawking, however, did it differently.
A genius, bound to a wheelchair, creates a shock when he Claimed that God did not
create the Universe. This fascinates L.
Newton uses Gravity to believe in God, Hawking to deny it.
But what exactly is it that is denied here? We think, asking ourselves the question of
how we get from Newton’s theism to Hawking’s atheism. He suggests that there are two
major reasons - The two reasons are:
Stephen Hawking directly says to people:” You must choose between Science and God”
- He knows the power of the pressure, and he hopes that Hawking radiation wins a
Nobel, but he also says that well, when he was our age, he was in Cambridge, meeting
his ﬁrst Nobel Prize Winner.
He as a student was feeling chill with the Laureate. He knew so much about the
universe, he claims, and he thought he would have a conversation with him. The
laureate had said, after a pleasant dinner, “Please come to my room at once”… And he
invited 3 other professors, and no other students, to have a dialogue.
They sat him in a chair, and The Laureate had said to L: “Do you want to make a career
in science?” 
 
L had said yes. 
 
Then The Laureate and the Professors had said, “You give up your infantile belief in
God, it will cripple you, your peers will reject you, you’ll never make it. Give it up”.
L was courageous and he said: ”What would you offer me than what is better than what
I’ve got?”
After a long conversation, he said that he would stick with what he’d got.
He looked at Stephen Hawking’s career, and he considered the example of a young
person was driving along with a “Hawking Says that there is no God” - His thought was
that if Hawking said that he was God, then what was he to say that there was -
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Who was he to challenge an eminent Scientist? Reputation mattered, whether
that was a good thing or a bad thing.
Yet, the first thing he realized when he debated Dawkins? Hawking didn’t use the
same definition of God that he does.
Hawking is talking about the God of Lightning, and about how God did certain things. if
you do one class on Atmospheric Physics, God no longer exists - God of the Gaps, so
it is said, becomes a concept created, such that God is used to explain everything
we do not know.
There are scientists who criticize the concept of God, pushing God into the gaps of
knowledge, and God is squeezed out until he disappears like the smile on the face of a
Cheshire Cat.  
What he realizes is that if you define “God” to be the explanation for what Science has
not yet explained, naturally you must choose between God and Science as a matter of
logic. If you’ve defined God in opposition to Science, no doubt you must choose
between the Two: This holds true by construction.
Yet, God is not the God of the Gaps.
Many of you have seen the first statement in the Bible: “God created the bits of the
universe that we don’t understand”… Was it? Is that what it is said? That’s not what he
said.
Rather, “In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth” are the words in the
Bible, from Genesis 1:1.
He created the Heavens and the Earth.
When Newton understood Gravity, he said “What a brilliant God to do that!” - He did not
deny God.
The reality is, the more you know about engineering, the more you know about an
engine. The more you know about art, the more you understand Rembrandt… As so it
goes, the more you understand the Universe, the more you understand the God that
created it.
This refocuses the debate: A lot of the debates are about opposing a “Greek” kind of
God. If you know anything about the Ancient World, you know that these Greek Gods,
so to speak, are utterly distinct from the God of the Bible. The man who was most
proficient on this wrote that the Gods of the Ancients all appeared from the basic matter
of the universe. All those mythologies has not only have a cosmology but also a
deontology - The Egyptians and the romans and etc came out of the Fabric of the
Cosmos - Then this expert says… The God of the Bible is distinct because he created
the Heavens and Earth and to put them in the same category is to create a grave
mistake. We have thus these profound statements, that the beginning was the Word,
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that all things came to life, and without him nothing came to be that came to be,
answering the question “Who created the Creator?” 
 
That is Problem #1: The Problem of the Creation of the Creator. But now, what do
we mean by “Explanation”? 
 
L was a classicist and wanted to be a linguist and he was told he could only go to
Cambridge if he did Math. Explanation began to fascinate him, because Science, it was
said, explained, but what was Science explaining? When he went to School, and his
Physics teacher told him that it had explained Gravity, he had realized: This was a lie.
Newton himself claimed he didn’t understand Gravity, he knew that one could capture
calculations that would allow landing rockets on the moon, but he didn’t know about it. If
you are skeptical about it, he proposes reading Richard Feynman to facilitate
understanding.
Nobody knows what energy is and what Gravity is, he remembers the physicists
saying… And at the time, he was fascinated. Everyone believed in Gravity, but nobody
understood it. Many of the ultimate realities, the deep things we deal with in Physics, we
don’t know what they are - But we know enough about equations and laws governing
them that we can do brilliant things we them.
Ludwig Wittgenstein got it dead right when he said “The great delusion of modernity is
that the laws of nature explain the universe - The laws of nature describe the
universe, the regularities, but they explain nothing.”
The laws of gravity give you a limited range of explanation - According to your own
standards for what constitute an appropriate explanation… They explain nothing.
Consider this. 
 
Why does water boil?
The idea is that the heat energy is conducted through the kettle, agitating the
molecules… Is it? No, the answer is “No, it’s boiling because I want a cup of tea!”
A pause.
“No, of course that’s the reason!”, L says - Because the question was asked upon the
wrong premises. But the scientific explanation is not as important as the other
explanation. The question - The explanation is important in a Physics lesson but not
outside it - People have been boiling tea for hundreds of years before they knew about
conduction, and it has never stopped them from doing so.
Professors, he often says, can’t see it, but well, there are different levels of explanation:
The explanation, scientific in intent as it may be, does not contradict the explanation of
personal agency. The people who move in the direction of scientific explanations, they
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often say the only explanation is science - But that’s not true, certainly not with a whole
range of things.
The explanations are both necessary, and are not necessarily in conflict.
Newton’s Law of Gravitation no more competes with God as an explanation of the
Universe than the law of Internal Combustion competes with Henry Ford for the
execution of the Car.
His colleague, Swinburne, claims that “He does not deny that science explains, but he
postulates God to explain why science explains. The success of science in showing us
how deeply orderly the natural world is provides strong grounds for an idea that this is
more exotic”. 
 
Explanation, to be valid, he notes, must proceed from the simple to the Complex: To
take something complex, explaining it in terms of things that are simpler to merit an
explanation.
Dawkins says, “Using God as an explanation is absurd since God is by definition more
complex than the thing you are explaining” - That’s a good argument… If you apply it to
Dawkins.
He asked once, concerning The God Delusion, “What is the origin of this Book?”
“Dawkins”, is the response by the interlocutor.
L’s response is: “Well, the explanation is more complex than the thing you are
explaining - It is a non-argument.”
Why is it a non-argument? 
 
Because it is an area where explanation flows the other way and causality cannot be
determined. Dawkins’ book has a semiotic content, words with meaning… But now,
suppose L was going through a cave in China with a Chinese lady tour guide, seeing
the marks on the Cave wall, and he has a scientific archeologists, and he says… “Don’t
be stupid!” because he does not understand the semiotic content of the sign on the wall
- The Chinese lady would know that there is intelligence, and in turn would question his.
Because it has semiotic content, he must postulate a mind behind it, which interestingly,
does not stop science. The next question we ask is “What is civilization?”
We infer. We infer upward through language, and he recalls when he had tested this.. At
Oxford.
Oxford, some undefined time period in the past:
A Biochemist asks L:
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”What do you do?”
L says Math, and The Biochemist replies:”How boring!” 
After a brief argument after a question about whether the Universe is related to God or
not, the Biochemist declares that he is an atheist, thus a terrible evening will be had
because of their incompatible beliefs. 
 
L says he is fascinated by reductionists. He asks The Biochemist:
“Are you a reductionist?”
The Biochemist says, “You are a methodological reductionist, but we are both.
Chemistry, Physics, Biology, it reduces to these things.”
A lively discussion takes place, and L says that the ontological reduction is what they
agree on - The reduction of big things into smaller parts.
Reduction of big things into smaller parts?
They do an experiment with the Menu, and the Biochemist says… “Well, how do you
know this is chicken? Isn’t it through reductionism that you have that knowledge?  
 
L says… “You seek an explanation, but you seem already to have determined the
answer for yourself. Look at this roast chicken on the menu. Let’s take away the ﬁrst
letter. Now, explain the ‘oast’ part of this word - Use the physics and chemistry of paper
on ink.”
The Biochemist’s Wife is there, smirking silently - She says: ”Get out of that if you can”.
 
He said that it was devastating because certain ideas cannot be constructed with these
ideas - L notes that one cannot cannot construct everything with everything, because
one must Postulate a mind. Postulating a mind is postulating the best explanation - It’s
better an explanation for the menu than with these ‘laws of nature’ that we form for
ourselves.
He asks the audience:
“Do you recognize these things?”, and shows us a picture of DNA, which is composed
of A, T, G, C genetic code units combined together to create semantic meaning.
 
“Here’s a word, and we use computer language to describe it in semiotic codes and stuff
for proteins. Well, what’s behind this? A ﬁve letter word, you postulate intelligence, you
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see a 3.5 billion letter word we call DNA, and you postulate that there is science - You’re
looking at natural processes like a black box, and stamped over it are semiotics and
mind.” - John Lennox.
His last point is,  
 
“We’ve done brilliant math because of thinking” - Let’s think about thinking.
Look at these equations on the board: They explain things. Consider, that Einstein,
though, said “The only thing comprehensible about the universe is that it is
incomprehensible” - Wigner says that math is mysterious, and there is no rational
explanation for it. 
 
L asks: Is he right, and is mathematics unreasonably effective? L, quoting his old
Professor Polkinghorne, claims the following:
“Physics is powerless to explain its fundamental belief in the mathematical intelligibility
of the universe… For the problem is that you must believe in mathematics as describing
that reality.”
To build on the story of the Menu, to have an interesting conversation with his
Colleagues. He asks these Colleagues:
“Well, what do you do science with?” 
 
They say, “The mind”… But oops his colleagues disagree, because in their eyes, there
is no mind: He thinks that the mind and brain story are different - You do science with
the brain, he says… It is interesting, he says. 
 
L says, “Tell me about the brain, the short story” - As he debates his colleagues from
start to ﬁnish.
Eventually, the phase is reached in the argument where the mind under discussion
becomes simply “a series of unguided mental processes”. 
 
L then recalls, that he had asked… “And you trust it?” 
 
If you knew the computer were the end product of some series of Guided processes,
would you trust it? Well, if not, L says… Why do you trust your brain?
He is getting at Darwin’s Doubt.
“With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind,
developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value are at all trustworthy” -
Darwin said, and it bothers many philosophers, for the problem.
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Plantinga notes,
“If Dawkins is right that we are the product of mindless unguided natural processes, he
has given strong reason to doubt reliability of human cognitive faculties and to doubt
validity of any belief - Including Dawkins’ own atheism.”
Note, then, that this science is undermining the rationality that was used in
formulating the answer.
Well, L says, Nagel notes that this is a problem.
“Mind and Cosmos claims, “If the mental is not itself merely physical, it cannot be fully
explained by physical science,”
Evolutionary naturalism implies that we should not take convictions seriously including
the scientiﬁc world picture on which evolutionary naturalism… But you cannot indeed
reduce the mind to some few structures - Over-reductionism. To L, the very assertions
of the reductionist himself are nothing but blips in the neural network of the brain.
The world of rational discourse is just some neuron ﬁring, some say… But few if any
believe that, not even in the community of science.” 
 
Returning to The Question - Has Science Buried God? 
 
L’s answer: 
 
“Absolutely not, it was believing in God that drove science. However, Science buries
Atheism. You can’t pull those together - Atheism, taken to reductionist extremes,
undermines the discipline of any rational discourse, including science. Atheism is the
danger of burying science, which doesn’t mean there aren’t great atheists, and there are
mismatches when we think about thinking…
As C.S. Lewis noted, ‘Any theory depends on assuming the validity of human
rationality’.
Any theory that brings rationality to question cannot be valid.
If reason is called into doubt, it cannot be perfect.
The describability of the universe can be seen in words, and in Biology, the ideas are
expressed in well, words: This is a Words Based Universe. The beginning was the
Word, and All Things Came Through Him…
The alternative is that there was mass energy, and mind was derivative, and not only as
a Christian, but also a scientist, L believes the other world view of faith is pretty much
preferable, although for the scientists, who claim they have valid grounds for what can
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be studied, it is great: Christ and Christianity, L claims, implies historical specifics, and
you cannot get into specifics… You need evidence of a different kind.”
Questions and Answers
Q1: How can we view Christianity as a proponent of Science when Church
blocked developments in the Enlightenment Era?
 
L says, this is an Important Question. Usually they can be cleared up by studying history
- It is commonly supposed that Churches were obscurantist, persecuting Galileo, and it
showed that Science fought religion - Galileo believed in God, did not believe in other
things. He believed in Scripture - It was not the Roman Catholics who fought the
Galileo, it was the philosophers who disliked him for criticizing Aristotle. The Church had
criticized Galileo by jumping on the bandwagon, but the claim from the Church.
He was questioning a scientific paradigm, and he had written a book, and he had written
that the view of the book, was not very good PR with the Vatican. Everyone knew that
the scholars were doing something sneaky… You cannot use the story of Galileo to
illustrate the story of conflict between science and religion because there was none at
the time.
Another great debate involving Huxley was another one where the depiction of the
debate was often construed such that the Ignorant Bishop fought with theology, against
the rational scientist.
Allegedly, Darwin says that he’d found the other argument - L says that he claimed that
well, the analysis did not reveal a war between science and Christianity.  
 
L claims there is not the slightest excuse to do what was done to Galileo.
That doesn’t fit into the kind of paradigm, and well, read John Henry Brook, Peter
Singer, and well… 
 
But what about another perspective?
What about The Falsifiability of Christianity?  
 
Well, God created the Heavens and Earth, and in 1960s, there was a startling
discovery: It was beginning within cosmology, that there was beginning to be stronger
and stronger evidence that there was a beginning to spacetime - The shift of the
galaxies, redshift, suggested expansion of the Universe, and the discovery of the
Microwave background radiation, and you know what happened? it was suggested in
that we were being forced in Science, and there was an editorial - The claim by Maddox
was that we should not go down the route of beginning of Spacetime - He said that it
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would give leverage to people who believed the Bible… Because it paralleled the story
of the Bible.
There are many scientists, and he had discussed this with them - He had said:
“In the beginning, the Gods created the heavens and the earth”, and the reply was as
follows:
“Please tell us you’re joking, because the Bible is not a textbook of science”.
L agrees, with a sigh - He notes that he has never taught calculus from the book of
Leviticus: The audience laughs hysterically.
“Although it is a limited book,” he notes,
“It has statements about the universe you’re talking about.”
Now, God has created the Heavens and the Earth. L says, if you took the biblical
predictions more accurately, you would have created better predictions, but because
you trusted the Aristotelian predictions so much, well, here are the statements and they
are testable, and he believes what the fellow scientists think:
There may be truth we don’t have access we can get there eventually, but yes, it is
important to realize it is falsifiable.
Although, though Falsifiability is important, as is Testability.
Q2: Where do science and rationality fall short in terms of explaining the universe
if human logic is flawed? 
 
L says, this raises more questions than it solves:
“What do you mean it is flawed? Why is it flawed? The logic we use everyday is likely to
be flawed.
The most important statement is not the first part, but rather the ‘and’ - One of the great
confusions of the modern age is that science and rationality are coextensive - If they
are, and science is the only way go… Then well, let us shut down the faculties of UoC,
well, history, economics, Linguistics goes.
Well, rationality is much bigger than science. Theology is rational, I’d like to believe.
A discipline that thinks about God, organizing ideas about God. The response to this is
not that these ideas fall short in explaining the universe… The argument against God is
successful because it asks only a limited kind of question.
Take another matrix - Ethics, we do, and it is very different. This is the dispute about
which I have read - Ethics yields other things. These are other disciplines. Are
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explorations of the universe in terms of the paradigm of “Science-cists” sufﬁcient? We
are not just studying what happens at the moment, we have experimentation- We make
an inference as to what happens, and the next thing is well, is there another category? 
 
Science, Literature, Art, they are all explorations of the universe by the Human Mind. If
there is a God behind the Universe, if he is the Word he speaks and communicates, that
is what we call Revelation.”
There are two sources of evidence in the universe, L says: One is the natural world,
and the Book of God’s Word claims to Revelation, God’s word speaking to us.
Suppose you want to get to know L, you could look at L on a table, do CAT scans up
and down on L, but would you get to know him? You would only get to know him is if L
reveals himself to you.
If L reveals himself to us, do we shut our reason off? We’re using reason to understand
him.
As concerns God, L says… Could it be that instead of just leaving us, he has Spoken
into Space-Time? The central claim of humanity is that well, Jesus Christ is encoded
into humanity. God is incarnate, talk to us in terms of humans we can under humanity…
Never only human, but certainly quite human. We must expound our horizons - If you’ve
seen naturalism, revelation by deﬁnition is nonsense. The University, like this, is great
for Listening to the examples of what Christianity offers, before one writes it off.
How many scientists include their peer-reviewed literature? Almost none. When he
teaches, all that stuff, he doesn’t write that stuff because he’s taught to teach math. He
doesn’t put down things related to God because there is no relation - Here, the papers
written have nothing to do with things. 99.999% of science, he says, isn’t interested in
this issue, why stars pulsate, so on. What is this creature, he asks? It’s not talking about
God at all.
The Scientist will sometimes put in front of a book, “Only to the Glory of God” - A
Dedication written, so it is said - But God appears not in the peer-reviewed articles,
which doesn’t mean that there is no Him, or there are no arguments… It’s just that
it’s not the internal concern of the discussion.
Q: Thoughts on the Age of the Earth?
“Age of the Earth”? Well, L notes that the question says that the creationist view is
wrong, the truth is the opposite, the Earth is 15.7 billion years, not sure about what
yesterday’s version was, he cheekily notes - The Bible claims, he says, The Universe is
Young… The Earth was created in Seven Days… But what does that mean?
He questions, he distances himself from that idea: He considers a Provocative Thought. 
 
“I think it doesn’t say anything about the age of Earth at all” - His logic follows.
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Point One, it is said that In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth: God
talks about The Days: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. It all begins with what God had said: The
Beginning was when God created the Heavens and the Earth: This is not Day One and
we cannot infer the timeline accurately.
Point Two, the different past tenses of Hebrew bear different weights - The first two
verses are one past tense and it changes to the narrative sense. He asked the
professors of Hebrew at Oxford and Cambridge, and they told him that this meant that
the events recorded at the beginning occurred before the sequence described: The
Bible, L says, spoke nothing of that.
Taking the language seriously as regards what it says is important:
He says that many people, particularly Christians are put under pressure to accept a
Young-Earth Interpretation… Because if they don’t accept a Young Earth Interpretation,
they are characterized as not being Christians.
That is a sad thing to do, he says, because for centuries there have been problems
here.
For Christians like him, convinced that there was a creation, that Jesus became
incarnate, that He rose from the dead, ascended, they believe all those, but there are 25
other interpretations, at least, for the same texts: Where people disagree who are men
and women of equal conviction, you can be sure it’s not an easy matter.
Just for the word of the day… These days, people say the day is a day is a day.
He asks:
What is the definition of a day?
Well, Darkness and Light define the day: The very first mention of Genesis is not a 24
hour day, pointing out a multivalent characterization.
Day 7, there’s no formula, and there’s evening and morning. Day 7, and people far back
as Augustine said that there has been no more creation since the times - Most
Christians, so it seems, believe God is keeping in it with creation.
However, Day also means indefinite time in the past, and be careful when you
interpret it in a certain way. The ground comes when we look at the ground:
We look at the Bible, The Third, Fourth, Fifth Days etc, the book discusses the way in
which the definite article persists, in Hebrew. If you were looking at an ordinary article,
or the definite Article, thus opening up a new possibility. God Speaks, something
happens, Day 1, Day 2, everything happens. What is the possibility?
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Well, work six days and you’re retired - And note that people try to draw straight lines,
when they do not exist.
In other words, “seven days” could refer to six days that were spaced many years apart,
and would not be inconsistent with the evolutionary hypothesis.
The final question, is answered by L in a Book written for North America, that many
staff conflicted with… A book titled “Seven Days that Divide the World” .
This question defers to CS Lewis, as L loves listening to CS Lewis… He’s that old, he
jokes. Lewis said that Christ caused a dividing of the pagans: He stood on Planet Earth
20 centuries ago, and he said well, he was the truth.
If one of your friends came to you and said that he was the truth, you would send him to
the psychiatric institution - Jesus was saying that he was The Truth.
What is The Truth about this universe? We can get science, art, historical truth to
explain for us, but as the questions go deeper, Behind It All, There is Christ.
It was hard to say he was important. This is a point Lewis was getting at: It’s a
superficial explanation of Christ that says he is just a teacher… For he made claims
about himself in relation to the Universe and Time.  
 
If I said that there was a discussion about Time, “Before Abraham, I was”, for instances,
these would be huge claims, and how are we going to settle this? We might say, don’t
come around with some patronizing nonsense, maybe we would say he is utterly mad,
but well, this is a thing. Lots of people have given different aspects of these in their own
personal lives.
Here, then, is the question about Falsifiability.
L:”The flip side of falsifiability is testability - All this, it is said, should be testable… But
it’s not testable… Isn’t it?
Well, of course it is: Here is an example.
Christ stood on Earth, meeting friendless people with Evil and Suffering, and he said,
come all of you weary, take rest, and they discovered peace and rest. What Jesus
Christ said to the ancient world, was that well, Jesus would be the last day… He’s not
merely human.
If I face the mess made in my life, and Trust in the Savior and Lord, Trust in Peace in
God, I gain Forgiveness.
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Well, Forgiveness and Guilt? They are a huge issue amongst young people today. L
says he had met so many people and they’ve known peace through God during his
speeches, after they made the Fundamental Step of Faith.
Once, he didn’t know that there was a young Chinese student listening to him, a student
at Harvard.
After he’d finished, the student screamed, “Look at me!”, from a rafter.
Everyone looked at him, and he said to L:
”I heard you speak at Penn State. Something you said resonated.”
A few weeks later, he said he’d gone to the Lord.
When Young people are in despair, he goes back to saying that well, going back to
Jesus is a thing, you see that hundreds of years throughout and meet hundreds of
people, and know there’s something in this, it actually works. In the end, he wouldn’t do
these lectures if he didn’t believe it actually works. He firmly believes that if you tonight
that you’re in that kind of a position, and are ready to make that sort of commitment, you
can experience with God and peace and forgiveness before you leave this building.
Science only gets you so far, then you must get more specific…
“Because ladies and gentlemen, God is not a theory - God is a person, and it is
infinitely more satisfying getting to know a person than to know a theory.” - John
Lennox, April 18th, 2016, The University of Chicago.
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Has Science Buried God?

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