TRANSCRIPT: John Lennox on What is Truth? – Practical Wisdom Podcast

So my question to you, John, is what is truth?

John Lennox: Well, you’ve made quite a number of assertions just now, and we need to tease them out just a little bit. What is, I think, mostly worth discussing is the dominant notion that science is the only way to truth, and we call that scientism. And it’s a strange thing. I love logic, as obviously you do, and that, to my mind, is logically self-contradictory straight away because the very statement: science is the only way to truth, is not a statement of science. So if it’s true, it’s false. So it’s logically incoherent.

And therefore, you’re right in saying truth is hard to define, but so are all the interesting concepts in life. The really big things are hard to define. And my instinctive response to the question is, of course, to talk about the usual criteria for truth, the two main lines of thinking there. And first of all, the idea that if a story is going to be true, it must be coherent within itself. And secondly, it must, at some level, cog into reality.

Now, in your introduction, you made a statement that the idea that God exists is not verifiable. I would contradict that straight away. I think it is verifiable in the sense that you can adduce evidence for it. In other words, you can begin to put up a case that it corresponds to our experience of reality. And I would want to defend that, of course.

I think there’s another dimension to truth because from where I sit as a Christian, ultimately truth is a person. And since my teenage, I’ve been absolutely fascinated by one of the central claims that Jesus made, ‘I AM THE TRUTH.’ And I noticed very early on that his claim was not, I say the truth. Of course, that is true, but I am the truth.

Now, if we step aside from that and we ask, what is the truth about this piece of matter? Well, we start examining it and we can give a list of the various materials of which it’s made. Then we can go down, what’s the truth about those materials? Well, they consist of molecules. Well, what’s the truth about the molecules? Well, they consist of atoms. Well, what’s the truth about the atoms? Well, they consist of elementary particles. What’s the truth about those?

And the question is, does the series of questions go back forever? I don’t believe it does. I think at the end of every question series like this, the huge claim at the heart of Christianity is you find Christ standing and saying, I am the truth. Because ultimately, he is the cause for which all of this exists at all its different levels. So truth is a person.

And I constantly emphasize to people that God is not a set of propositions. There are plenty of propositions about God, but God is personal. And so when you ask the question, what is truth? Then how do I get to know the truth about a person? Now, if I want to get to know you, Samuel, I could lay you on a sophisticated table and scan your brain and I could measure some of the electrical impulses, but I never get to know you. The only way I would get to know you is if you reveal yourself to me.

Now, once you begin to reveal yourself to me, which would normally be in the first instance by your talk and your gestures and your demeanor, I can then apply criteria to that. Does it make sense? If you say, well, I actually come from the moon, I would want to put that up against some kind of measurement. I think this is hugely important because getting to know a person means you have to reveal yourself.

And the basic question, the basic God question to my mind is, if there is a God, has he revealed himself?

Now, the other big claim of the Christian faith is God has disclosed himself in two major ways. One by speaking through his word, which we have written in the Bible and at the deepest level in Christ himself. So that there is a revelation so that we can get to know the truth about God, not by guessing as the philosophers have been doing for years, and that’s fine, I join them, I keep in philosophy.

But by realising there’s another category that will yield truth and it’s not simply human ratiocination, human reason, it’s God’s revelation. The important thing there, and with that I’ll stop because this is a rather long answer, the important thing about reason is it’s not in opposition to revelation.

If you tell me about yourself, Samuel, I will use my reason on your revelation, but my reason unaided will not produce that revelation, and it’s exactly the same with God. God has revealed himself in Christ and in scripture. My reason doesn’t produce that, it’s a given. I’m a scientist, I study a given, the universe, with a given, my mind. They’re both givens, scientists are people that study givens with givens.

The other thing that’s in my orbit, so to speak, as a source of information, is God’s revelation, but I use my reason to study it.

How Can Christians Engage

Samuel Marusca: You raised some very significant points earlier, and I think it’s amazing that actually truth isn’t a concept, it’s a person. And you also mentioned the correspondence theory of truth, which you seem to agree with, and also you use the word category there, and I want to pick up on that.

There are many scientists and people of influence, including actors, who seem to make a category mistake, and they seem to make claims about God, for instance, that simply don’t make sense, or are simply from a different category, they argue for a point using a different category.

So for example, many people would ask you, well, who created God? But if you ask who created God, it already implies that God has a beginning, it already implies a certain understanding of the concept and of the person of God. And also, many people would say, I don’t believe in God, because I don’t believe in ancient deities or the Greek gods, and many people would come to me and say, you seem to be a rational, reasonably rational person, surely you can’t believe in God, you don’t believe in Santa Claus anymore.

When people say that, I feel that there’s a different category that they put God and the idea of God into. And also you have people like Stephen Hawking, who make similar claims outside of science. So how can Christians engage with these types of arguments?

John Lennox: Well, I’ll tell you how I engage, and I think you’re putting your finger on something immensely important because that’s often the main barrier that people put up. And if you can’t get through that barrier, you don’t get any further. I was doing a kind of interview debate in the Netherlands some time ago, and a professor of physics was put up against me, and he said, your faith in God is like belief in Santa Claus, the one you mentioned. So I thought I would do a little experiment, and I said, let’s just test this a little.

I said to the audience, how many of you came to believe in Santa Claus as adults, and not a hand went up. And then I said, how many of you came to believe that Jesus was the Son of God as adults, and there were hundreds of adults, there were a couple of thousand people in the audience.

And then I turned to this professor, and I said, you know, I’m going to be very blunt with you, you’re insulting this audience’s intelligence. Because the finest of minds have spent centuries understanding or trying to understand the nature of God because they believe in his existence. There is not a similar group of intellectuals studying Santa Claus, because we all know he doesn’t exist. So you are making a fundamental category mistake.

Now you mentioned Hawking, and I think he was — he was a brilliant mathematician, but he had very little knowledge of philosophy.

Samuel Marusca: In our popular culture, many people will simply take someone’s argument for granted, just because they are a person of authority. So for instance, I saw a very popular actor saying, well, there’s no God. And the way to prove this, he said, if you take the Bible and destroy it, for instance, in a thousand years’ time, you will never get anything like it.

But if you get a book of science and destroy it in a thousand years’ time, you will get the exact same book because it follows certain tests. And it seems to me that these claims are very, very easy to refute. But because they were made by someone in authority, someone like a scientist, for instance, if we say like Hawking, so who am I to disagree with Hawking in this aspect?

John Lennox: That’s right. That’s why I wrote my book about Hawking, because it had a trigger story. I had received a letter from a young man in Northern Ireland, where I self-evidently come from. And he wrote to me and said he was driving his car along the road and saw a hoarding saying Stephen Hawking says there is no God. And he said it had a shock effect on him.

He had to stop his car. And he thought to himself, well, if Stephen Hawking says there’s no God, who am I to believe there is? And that’s why I wrote my book, God and Stephen Hawking, because I do not think Stephen Hawking actually understood enough of philosophy or religion. And in fact, that was, interestingly enough, said by another person who’s not a theist, Lord Rees, who’s the Astronomer Royal. He said, I know Stephen very well and he knows little philosophy and no theology and I wouldn’t listen to him on either of those two subjects.

But because of this authority, and that’s a huge question, and it’s a question for me because those of us who talk about these things, we’re talking about subjects on this podcast that are not my main field. My main field is pure mathematics. So what right have I to talk about this?

My answer to that is that if you go into a field that’s outside your own professional expertise, you must consult the experts in that field. And I’ve tried to do that. I’m sure I fail to do it rigorously. But to give you an example of the opposite, and I’m afraid it’s Dawkins again, he points out in one of his books, I think it’s The God Delusion, that a good case can be made that Jesus never existed, although he, fair enough, he said he wouldn’t make the case himself.

Well, if he wouldn’t, why mention it? And he quotes a certain professor, but I looked up this professor, and this was a professor of German. In other words, there was no ancient historian he consulted, and that, to my mind, is a cardinal error. And I try to be extremely careful to trace sources of real experts in the field I go into, and I approach things at the level of what one might call the public understanding of science.

Samuel Marusca: You mentioned that if you want to know about something, we would go to that’s outside of our field of expertise, we’d ask the experts. Now, what about the lay Christian who can’t understand, doesn’t understand philosophy or theology, but has faith in God? They can’t explain the ontological argument or the argument from design, perhaps, but they still have faith in God. They can’t quite argue, make a case for Jesus or a case for God.

So what do you say to people who are not able to defend themselves with respect to their faith? So does that mean that because they don’t have the evidence or are not able to point to the evidence, their faith is not valid?

John Lennox: Of course not. You don’t have to understand electricity to be able to trust it and use it. I think the important thing here is not everyone is called upon to be, in that sense, an intellectual defender of the faith. And there must have been many Christians in the early church who were very grateful that people like Paul existed because he was the defender. That’s the first side of it.

But there’s another side to it, that explanation and argument are extremely important. Jesus argued. But when it comes to the defense of the faith, we often use the sorry word, apologetics, for that. We say sorry because transliteration from one language to another can be a dangerous thing and that is exactly what’s happened with the Greek word apologia, which simply means defense. It’s now become an elitist topic for clever Christians and a sort of subdivision of philosophy 101.

But apologia is defending and I find it very interesting that in most of the occasions it’s used in the New Testament and they are by Paul or in that context by Luke describing Paul. His first line of defense is his experience of meeting the risen Christ on Damascus Road. It seems to me that therefore evidence splits into two rough categories although there are grey edges between them and they are the objective and the subjective that some of us have been taught how to argue philosophically and so on and that’s very important.

But that would be valueless in itself when it comes to God as person and Christ as person and Christianity as a personal relationship if we had no personal experience. So it seems to me that there are several in that sense categories of evidence. There’s the evidence from the natural world. There’s the evidence from logic, argument and philosophy. But then there’s the evidence from experience, from psychology and finally and very importantly from history. And putting all those things together I see it as a cumulative thing.

But I would want to say that we haven’t necessarily, and this is a wild generalization. We haven’t in the Christian church done a good job of teaching people to answer questions because you say Christians don’t know how to defend it but if they’ve had an education of any kind and they’re living in a pluralistic complex world they’re going to be faced with questions.

Samuel Marusca: I think that’s a very significant point you’re raising. I think this is a major point in Christianity in general. The fact that some people would say, would argue that Christians don’t need to defend their faith because faith is believing in something that you cannot see and of course many atheists would argue that all faith is blind faith and some would say well why study the evidence, why look at the evidence because that somehow would probably make you doubt the existence of God as a Christian. What is your take on that?

John Lennox: Oh well, my initial reaction is to say it’s very superficial thinking because if you go in to try to get a mortgage for a house you’d better bring some evidence that you’ve got collateral to support your payments and people all understand that. Indeed the notion that faith is blind is a complete invention, that all faith is blind is a complete invention of the so-called new atheists, well they’re old now, because faith is an ordinary word from the Latin fides from which we derive fidelity and trust and the cognate words in most of the languages that are involved in the New Testament are words that lead us to think, you look at the OED on faith.

And they will talk about evidence based commitment or belief and trust and we all know what that means, especially after the financial crisis where we thought we could trust the bankers and until evidence came back it froze the entire market. I find on enquiry that people know what evidence based faith is and the difficulty is it’s a total intellectual cop-out for atheists and I know quite a few of them here in Oxford who keep insisting that faith is a religious word and means believing where there’s no evidence because that actually absolves them from actually seriously considering any evidence which I naturally want them to do and I think we need to help Christians.

I do believe that the average Christian can be taught without having a scientific or humanities education to any high level, just common sense arguments that they can use to break through a lot of this stuff and I do feel our churches ought to take more responsibility for doing it, especially dealing with this kind of argument from the pulpit and not simply, and of course there are many churches that already do this, but there’s a danger of combining Christianity to the devotional rather than having an intellectual dimension. When all these people go out to work, they have an intellectual dimension to their work especially if they’re professionals.

Samuel Marusca: You touched upon this very briefly just now on objective truth and subjective truth which leads us to this concept of moral relativity. Now many people would argue that if you’re making statements about God, for instance, then that’s just your opinion, so if you say that there is a God, you can’t really say that that’s an objective truth, that’s just your opinion.

John Lennox: I have a friend who says people only take that post-modern relativist view in areas that they think are not important. That’s aside from the fact that I know that post-modern is a category within art and I leave that aside, but this idea of moral relativity and truth relativity, people don’t live like it because they can’t live like it.

I think there again it’s important to get across to people that they do believe in truth to a very large extent otherwise life would be utterly impossible. So this idea that we’ve shifted from the pre-modern to the modern to the post-modern in terms of chronology I think is false. We can have all three in the same person, let alone in the same age.

How The Universe Came To Be

Samuel Marusca: Let’s move on and talk about how the universe came to be and the Big Bang because obviously you’re a mathematician and a scientist. What is the Big Bang and what might have been there before the Big Bang if we can contemplate the existence of time and whether something else existed before time was created?

John Lennox: Well the Big Bang is a label and a mystery. The term was coined as a joke by Professor Sir Fred Hoyle whom I met on several occasions to discuss these things because he didn’t like the idea of a start to the universe and it simply means the universe started. And it’s important to emphasize that because I meet a number of Christians and really they ought to know better who are worried about that expression.

It’s simply saying there was a beginning which is wonderful because that’s exactly what the Bible has been claiming for many millennia which in itself is an interesting thing. I’m old enough to have lived through the 1960s and I remember in the 1960s when the most powerful evidence to date came in that there was a beginning to space-time which was then labelled the Big Bang and interestingly enough that idea had been suggested in the 1930s by a Belgian priest called Georges Lemaitre.

And the fascinating thing in England was that this idea that there was a beginning was resisted at the highest levels of the scientific establishment. John Maddox was the editor at that time of Nature and he said we mustn’t go down that road because, and this is a partial quote, it gives too much leverage to those who believe in creation.

And I was at a conference not so long ago with very distinguished philosophers, mathematicians and physicists and I was the token Christian, or one of them, who was asked to talk about this, ask your question, you see, and I quoted, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And I was interrupted, heckled, from the audience by a very leading professor of physics who said, Professor Lennox, I hope that you’re joking when you suggest that the Bible has anything to say to us in the 21st century and there was dead silence.

I said, with a smile, no, I’m not joking at all. I said, actually, I would like to suggest to you that if science hadn’t been so imprisoned by Aristotle’s ideas of the eternity of the universe and time, that you might have taken another worldview more seriously and that is the biblical one that’s been saying for thousands of years that there was a beginning, and if you’d taken that worldview seriously, you might have looked for evidence and found it earlier than you did. I said, of course, scripture is pre-scientific by definition in terms of chronology but it’s not pre-scientific in that it is not discussing the universe that you study.

And although it doesn’t say much about how God created, what it does say is of profound significance particularly in the digital age because it tells us, to put it in contemporary language from linguistics, that the universe was created not by unguided natural processes but by a series of speech acts… ‘and God said’… and I said, in the digital age, that’s fascinating.

And one leading astronomer said to me, how did they get that right?

Samuel Marusca: It’s very interesting that you mentioned the speech act theory of John Austin. You also mentioned that somehow the Big Bang gives leverage to Christianity and also supports the idea that there was a beginning, that the universe might have come into being at one point in the past.

Now, many atheists, the corollary of this is that many atheists would argue, on the other hand, that Christians have changed their views based on the evidence of scientific discoveries. So, for example, following Darwin and evolution theories, there are Christians who believe that actually we evolved and believe some sort of version of the evolution theory. What is your answer to that?

John Lennox: Well, there are two or three separate questions there, Samuel. Let’s take the first one first. Do we use science in understanding scripture? Of course we do. Here’s a simple example. When Jesus said, ‘I AM THE DOOR’, how do we know he wasn’t saying he was made of wood or steel or plastic?

Well, because we know about physical doors. We know something about in that broad sense, science and technology. We can’t avoid understanding words in scripture without having the reference of the surrounding nature around us. We can’t avoid understanding the nature of the world. So, saying that we can’t use science is absurd. We’re already doing so.

Secondly, I would say that one of the very interesting things is this. I look at science and at scripture and we must be careful to talk about the current state of science. In other words, the current state of science appears to me to be teaching that there was a beginning. That correlates with scripture. I’m not saying that science won’t change or the interpretation of scripture won’t change.

But to bore a bit deeper into the question, the notion, and it’s possibly simpler to deal with it, you mentioned Darwin and evolution. Now, in every age there will be Christians who will go overboard, as I see it, on the scientific side. Let me give you a simpler example, which is the one I use in my book on Hawking, and that is this:

There is a controversy among some Christians about how old the earth is, for example. Even before you come to the question of evolution, and that was a controversy. It’s been a controversy in the last century, largely. But at the time of Galileo, the controversy wasn’t anything to do with the age of the earth, but it was to do with the motion of the earth. Now this is a very interesting case at point.

Galileo was a brilliant thinker and he challenged a theory of motion. He challenged a theory of motion, a familiar notion, which was fundamentally Aristotelian. And the interesting thing is often people think that it was Galileo versus the Catholic Church. In other words, in their eyes, the Christian Church.

So the Christian Church was obscurantist and claimed the earth didn’t move. Why did it claim the earth didn’t move? Because the Bible said so. Quote one of the Psalms, ‘God has set the earth upon its pillars so that it cannot be moved.’ In fact, that’s one of the books of Samuel, I think, has said it.

So what is rarely realised is that it wasn’t only the Catholic Church teaching that apparently from Scripture. It was that the philosophers who were the first to challenge Galileo, they accepted Aristotle. So earth was at the centre, motionless and everything else rotated around it.

The interesting thing was there that it was the philosophers first to oppose Galileo and then the church had stepped onto the Aristotelian bandwagon because they thought the Bible supported it. I often speak to audiences and it’s quite amusing because they ask me about evolution and this question of going with science and so on and we must never use science to understand Scripture. And I say, how many of you in this room believe the earth is fixed in space? Not a hand goes up. I say, but the Bible says it is fixed in space. So you don’t believe the Bible clearly. And there’s huge embarrassment often.

And I say, but just a moment, what we’ve realised is over the centuries, and it took a long time, Galileo was probably the first moving earther and everybody else was a fixed earther. But over time people began to see that although, and I’m wording this very carefully, you could interpret Scripture as saying that the earth was fixed. You didn’t have to. You could say that this is referring at a deeper level, not to geometric and motion fixity, but to stability and the earth is stable and it will go on.

And so none of you believe the earth physically moves, although that’s a possible interpretation of Scripture. And I make the point in my book in some detail that you could argue from Scripture that the earth is young and therefore there’s no time for any evolution, for example. But there are other ways of understanding it, that these speech acts that I referred to are separated in time.

Now the matter of evolution is a huge thing that could occupy us for hours. I’ll just make two points. One, there are two issues here. The first is, can you logically deduce atheism from biology? And that clearly is false because there are many people, as you say, who accept evolution at different levels and believe in God. So the first thing is, can you logically deduce a worldview, atheism, from a biological theorem?

The answer to that is no because that’s another category mistake. But then the second question, which is a scientific question, is does the Darwinian, neo-Darwinian synthesis, or the modern synthesis as it’s called these days, bear all the weight that’s put on it? And I’m not a biologist, but what I find absolutely fascinating is that the theory, the neo-Darwinian theory, is now under attack as never before, which is why I wrote my latest book that you mentioned, Cosmic Chemistry, Do God and Science Mix, to point out that within the scientific establishment, among people who are still looking for a naturalistic solution, they are saying, not that Darwinism must be refined, but it must be replaced.

Why? And I think that I understand correctly that the real problem brings us straight back to the speech acts, is that the different levels of informational dimension to all the levels in biology from the human genome to epigenetics and all that kind of thing are just way outside the capacity of simple things like mutation and natural selection to produce.

So I’m fascinated by this, sitting on the outside and watching in. I think mathematicians have got, I must confess to you, a serious track record right from the early days of doubting the Darwinian mechanism. But now the scientific reasons are coming in and I think we need to be open to the fact, and this is now the major issue, and that is the worldview one, that there are two ways of looking at the question of the universe.

There are top-down and bottom-up is the crude way of putting it. Either the universe, the mass energy or nothing, the quantum vacuum, is the basic thing and everything is derived from it, including mind and the idea of God, because there isn’t a God.

Or there is both top-down and bottom-up, that God caused the universe to be. Now you hinted at the question a little bit earlier which I will address now. The cause behind the universe existing. One of the most interesting things from a linguistic perspective, I find, is the statement at the beginning of John’s Gospel, in the beginning was the Word, that is the word already was. This, to my mind, is a clear existence statement.

The ancient Greeks were very interested in two categories, things that are eternal and things that came to be. Now, translations obscure this. In the beginning was the Word, the Word already was. He never came to be. But just a verse or two later it says, all things, now frequently the contemporary translations say all things were made by Him, but actually the Greek text says all things came to be through Him. So there is that opposition.

All things came to be through the Word who is God. Now that is fascinating to my mind. That this is saying that the prime reality is God and God is Spirit. He caused everything to be even though he himself didn’t come to be. And therefore the atheistic worldview is the bottom-up one. The Christian worldview is the exact opposite.

And what fascinates me about the contemporary developments in science is the realisation that information is coming rapidly to be regarded as a fundamental quantity or quality that cannot be derived from matter and energy. Now if that’s the case, as I believe it to be, you cannot get meaning from material process. That’s the end of materialism straight away from within science without even going to theology.

Samuel Marusca: You can’t get to consciousness from a material process.

John Lennox: Well that as well, nobody knows what consciousness is.

Samuel Marusca: Going back to your first point on Galileo, I think that was a significant point you raised there. So Galileo, you’re saying Galileo, didn’t just go against the church, he went against all of science as well, against Aristotle’s view of the world as well and his cosmology. And sometimes science, it seems, doesn’t always get it right.

So Aristotle, for instance, said if you throw a big ball into the air, it will fall very quickly. If you throw it into the air, it will fall very quickly, much quicker than if you threw a small ball. Now science has proven that and we know as a fact that that’s not true. So it seems that science isn’t always irrefutable and sometimes correct itself.

And I wanted to raise this point about the Big Bang. There are scientists and mathematicians like Sir Roger Penrose who say before the universe, there might have been something else like energy. And there is a body of research now saying that the Big Bang might not have been the very initial point when the universe was created and that it was created by something else. What is your take on that? Do we go back to the Aristotelian view of the universe?

John Lennox: I doubt it very much. I’m not a cosmologist. I read as much cosmology as I can. What I understand is that there’s a fundamental theorem that was proved not so long ago by Alan Guth and another man from originally Ukraine called Vilenkin, and I’ve met both of them, who believe from a mathematical perspective that there was a beginning even if you introduce a kind of multiverse theory. In other words, there was a singularity and that you don’t go infinitely backwards.

And in that sense, there’s been a series of speculations that some of them fit with the biblical view, some of them do not. Science changes. And the very difficult thing in this area is the matter of evidence. For example, Martin Rees, our major cosmologist, astronomer royal, he likes the multiverse theory. So did Hawking. But then the man that taught me quantum mechanics, Sir John Polkinghorne at Cambridge, he says, no, no, no, because these other universes, there’s no access to them. We have no evidence that they exist. I think the jury’s out, which is why I said earlier, before you asked me that question, science can change.

I would still maintain that a substantial part of modern cosmology fits with the idea that there was a beginning. Now, the Bible gives us relatively little information. It gives us enough, it seems to me, to indicate this is highly sophisticated writing, Genesis 1, that’s another topic, but also that behind it lies a huge amount of stuff we know nothing about.

One very striking feature is this, the creation story occupies very much less than the story of Joseph at the end of Genesis. And that gives us an idea of proportion. God wants us to know something, he hasn’t told us everything. And that may be for a reason that the Bible itself tells us.

Interestingly enough, biology of all subjects was started by God according to the Genesis text. He told the first humans to go and name the animals. Now, taxonomy is the fundamental intellectual discipline, naming things. And you being a linguistics expert will know that far better than I do.

And that has always fascinated me because in the text of Genesis 1, God names two or three bits of the universe. That is very significant in light of the fact that he later says you go and name the rest of it. And so there’s that mandate to do science which is confirmed in the famous statement from the Psalms that stands above the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, Great are the works of the Lord searched out by those who take delight in them. Still there today, both in Latin and in English.

Samuel Marusca: It’s very interesting. You mentioned that science, again, there are many mysteries that science can’t explain in terms of how the universe came to be. One of them is dimensions. There’s a famous physicist, New York physicist, Michio Kaku, claiming that there is a possibility that there are other dimensions in the universe. He’s saying around 11 different dimensions. The string theory. And he’s saying if you look at a fish in a pond, the fish has limited vision and wouldn’t see you as a human being above looking at the fish. The fish only sees sideways and understands or has some understanding that there is something above water, although the fish might not even see water itself.

It’s a divide there. And the air and all of this reality, this new dimension that the fish doesn’t see is all around him. Might there be another dimension that we’re not aware of? And I think the Bible hints to this actually because it gives us the baby in the womb metaphor. The baby in the womb doesn’t understand that there might be something else like air outside of the womb. There might be a whole new world waiting for him to develop. And that’s actually us. Might it be the case that there is another dimension after death?

John Lennox: I would go further than that. I would say there is another dimension. You know, I owe a great deal to the late C. S. Lewis and he was brilliant I think. Although he was not a mathematician, he claimed he was a good geometer and he used the mathematical notion of dimensionality and geometric dimensions to illustrate this kind of thing. He used a very famous satire, Flatland, to illustrate this.

That if you live in a world of two dimensions on paper, say, you would not be aware of anything above or below you. And if there is such a thing as a third dimension in which a sphere exists and the sphere passed through your world, you would experience it first as a point and then a little circle, a bigger circle, growing bigger and then it would get smaller and smaller and disappear.

And I think this is a superbly good analogy to help understand that. We are used to our four dimensions, three dimensions of space and one of time and the relationship between those is a matter that is much discussed by philosophers and physicists. And then we get string theory that introduces many more dimensions.

Now mathematicians as such are very used to having multiple dimensions in their thinking because they apply in all sorts of different areas of life and I’m not going to go into that. But what is very interesting about this idea that there is nature and there is supernature and C. S. Lewis was always constantly going on about that, that humans have a sense that there is something else, there is something other and he makes the point that we find certain appetites in our persons as human beings.

And it would be very surprising if those appetites existed without some objective satisfaction for them in the world. And he said if we find ourselves longing for another world it may be that we were made for another world that actually exists. And I think quite a bit of the Gospels and the New Testament in particular are arguing that there is what we might term a supernature and Christ claimed to come from above.

Now he wasn’t merely talking geometrically although the geometrical movement was in itself an indicator that there was another reality beyond. There is another world and I feel it’s one of the most important things to say. And what I discover in contemporary society, particularly among some of my very bright friends, is a growing sense that there must be something more.

Iain McGilchrist is a very interesting writer as you probably have come across him with his recent absolutely incredible magisterial work The Matter with Things. And McGilchrist is not a theist, at least not in any conventional sense. He’s a polymath of the first order actually. And as a neuroscientist he tells us that his research of the brain is telling us that what we’ve done over the past centuries is neglect the right side of the brain that looks for meaning and concentrate on the left side of the brain, that’s the logic science side etc. etc.

But in his major book which is nearly two thousand pages and two hundred pages of references which is being hailed as one of the most important books of the last two hundred years. I’ve read quite a lot of it. He writes a very interesting chapter as a non-theist on space for the sacred and he says we must reserve space for the sacred, we must talk about God.

And his book is really a strong anti-reductionist, anti-materialist argument from neuroscience, left brain, that there’s something more. Now he lands up not surprisingly in what he calls the panentheist position that everything’s in God and so on which is just a step removed from pantheism. And you can understand it if you are moving from a position where the left side of the brain has been over-emphasised.

I want to say that he’s not going far enough, that there’s evidence to show that there is something more and that something more is not vague but it has revealed itself to us. And that’s where the category of revelation becomes very important indeed in the modern discussion.

Samuel Marusca: So you’re saying that nature has some clues, there are some clues that we can find in nature and actually scientists point to these, that these signs hint to a different reality of something else, something above us. And it was Francis Bacon that said God left us two books: the Bible and nature.

John Lennox: Yes and I think one of the biggest hints lies in the concept of a written book. You know when the human genome was classified and written out, Francis Collins was it, today we can reveal the book that hitherto has just been known to God. I think one of the most compelling evidences from the intellectual world so to speak, for me, that there is something more and that something is intelligent, lies in the fact that all human beings when they see signs, symbols, marks that carry meaning immediately infer not downwards to material processes alone but upwards to a mind.

All you have to see is the four letter word exit above a door to know that whatever materials are used and material processes are used, robotically created or whatever, there’s a mind behind it because that word has meaning because you’ve independently learnt a little bit of Latin. And that to my mind is the vastly important thing and I find it ironic and I talk to people about it again and again that my scientific friends will admit that argument, admit it clearly.

I often use the illustration of a menu and I’ve done the experiment many times with many scientists who claim to be reductionists, that there’s only material and I say, OK, look at this menu, roast chicken, R-O-A-S-T, five letters, how do you know it’s roast chicken? And they tell me, well, it’s English, I’ve learnt the language, it means roast chicken. And you are a reductionist, yes. OK, you explain to me how those marks on paper with ink carry a semantic dimension.

Samuel Marusca: It’s the arbitrary linguistic sign.

John Lennox: Yeah, and just use the physics and chemistry of the paper and ink to explain it to me. And I remember the first one I tried that on and he said, I can’t do it. And he said, for 40 years I’ve come into my lab in Oxford thinking that that could be done and it can’t. And I was so amazed that I said, look, science has only been going seriously for 400 or 500 years.

He said, it doesn’t matter. The meaning must imply a mind. And then he told me he studied DNA and I said, what’s the origin of this long word which has a semantic dimension because it codes for proteins? Oh, he said, chance and necessity. I said, but look, you’ve just told me that a five letter word requires a mind. Why doesn’t a 3. 4 billion letter word require a mind? Well, he had no answer to that.

And I think that’s one of the important ways in which God has written into each of the 10 trillion or so cells of our bodies this huge database that’s screaming at us, in the beginning was the Word.

Samuel Marusca: You mentioned the human genome and the DNA and hinted to the argument from design and the fine-tuning argument. Now, it seems to me that these are the strongest arguments one can make for theism. Why is it that scientists and atheists reject these?

John Lennox: Well, because the whole issue is not purely intellectual. You’re right that they’re powerful arguments. I have debated a philosopher here in Oxford who’s an outspoken atheist, delightful man. And he invited me to lecture his students and talk to them about God. And he said, by the way, I hope you’re going to use the very best argument against atheism that there is.

And I said, well, if you tell me what it is, I’ll use it. He said, fine-tuning. If ever I were to become a believer, he said, it would be that. There are a few sceptics about the fine-tuning, but the interesting thing is they’re faced with it. Hawking was faced with it. And they realised that it demands an explanation.

And their problem is, if they do not want there to be God as a solution, then they’re forced to look at extremely speculative solutions in terms of multiverses and all this kind of thing. Now, why would someone not want there to be a God? There are several scientists today who explicitly say that. That’s a moral position.

And the problem with the God question is that even the mention of God disturbs some people. Because it raises scary questions. If there is a God, am I accountable? And wasn’t it one of the Huxleys who said what a marvellous thing it was the day I discovered there was no God. I could essentially live as I liked. We’ve got to bring that into play.

If the biblical analysis is correct, which I believe it to be, human beings are not only intellectual beings, they’re moral beings. And they’re in revolt against God. And that is why people are prepared to use the most shoddy and pathetic arguments, intellectual arguments, to put up a smokescreen against God.

Now, of course, I believe there are genuine intellectual arguments and we must try to address them. But I’ve discovered very often in life, talking to individuals, which is where you learn this, that there’s a much deeper seated thing. That maybe they’ve had a very bad experience with some professing church member or Christian.

Samuel Marusca: Maybe they suffered a loss.

John Lennox: Yes, or suffered major loss. And there’s that, there’s the rebellion point of view. And perhaps that’s what you were saying. The other really big reason that people bring, and I can understand this, is the problem of suffering and evil, which is the hard question. And that’s a topic which concerns me a lot.

Because that’s the hardest question that not only I as a Christian face, but that any worldview faces. But dealing with that would take quite a bit of time.

Samuel Marusca: Now, we talked about truth, about science, the beginning of the universe, and arguments for the existence of God. But it seems to me that this wave of new atheism is probably not as significant now as it was 15 years ago. So it seems to me that it’s drying out. And in this secular society, it feels to me that there’s a different, something else coming on, in which people look at religion differently. So you have secular historians like Tom Holland, for instance, who argue that not only European values have Christian roots, but there’s also some value in Christianity itself.

And there are other intellectuals and secular thinkers that appreciate the value of Christianity. So what do you think is coming, and how do you think Christians should equip themselves?

John Lennox: Well, there’s a mass of material in there that’s important. First of all, I think you’re right in that there’s been a change. The new atheists have lost their grip, but partly because of their aggressive attitude. I still find that the science-God debate is very, very much off the moment, particularly among students and young people.

It’s hugely important, but what has happened is that the meaning questions, who am I, are moving into centre stage. Now, there are a lot of dimensions to this. Charles Taylor wrote a book some time ago called The Secular Age, and he pointed out what is clearly the case, that what has happened for various reasons is that you get Christianity pushed, and religion in general, to the margins of the culture. Then you get a reaction from believers themselves, that they move into a private space, and live in a private space, and discover that they’re in a new kind of world.

The new kind of world is a world where Christianity is only one option, among many other options. My reaction to that is, this is exactly the position that the early Christians were in. They were a very minor group, a minority worldview, and yet they didn’t disappear, as the secularization thesis so-called predicted, and we’re still here.

There’s a multiple of things here. We do need to get to know what our fellow citizens believe. I’m very fortunate, I was taught to do that as a teenager. I didn’t have to wait for adulthood to find out other worldviews. I think it’s very important to learn about other worldviews and other religions, so that we can test what we believe.

We started with truth, that Christianity is the truth, and that is my passion. It’s not that I find it helpful, I do, of course. I find it very challenging, and sometimes painful, from time to time. But the fundamental conviction that lies at the heart of my whole life, is that Christianity is true. And therefore, it must go into the marketplace and defend itself.

And that’s hugely important, in terms of its intellectual credibility, and in terms of its moral effects and spiritual effects. And, that it brings meaning into people’s lives. And it’s no accident, to my mind, that all over the world, universities are beginning to develop courses on the good life. What it means to have a life that’s thriving. What does human thriving mean?

These are very important things for a Christian to address. And they have moved a bit away from the purely cerebral science-religion debate. You’re absolutely right there. I’m not a prophet, so what’s going to happen in 70 years, I don’t know.

You mention AI. Now, that’s another topic for a podcast, really, because I’ve written about it. And I think there are hugely important, not only technological issues, but they affect one of the biggest questions that we could ever ask, is what is a human being? And they raise very deep ethical questions, particularly in light of the idea that we’d be able to transform ourselves into trans-human creatures.

And what’s coming out of the Institute for the Future of Humanity here, the so-called long-termism, that we ought to invest the money in the intelligent, wealthy, essentially western part of the world and forget the rest, which is absolutely horrific, because it devalues humans. We’re into a new ballgame completely, Samuel.

Samuel Marusca: John, thank you very much for your time.

John Lennox: It’s my pleasure. Thank you. Well, let me tell you, for your encouragement, that’s one of the best interviews I’ve ever done.

Samuel Marusca: I’m very glad to hear.

John Lennox: Excellent.

Samuel Marusca: I’m very glad.

John Lennox: And I’d be very happy to do more.

Samuel Marusca: I would love to do another one.

John Lennox: Yes, well, there you are.

Samuel Marusca: Thank you.

For Further Reading:

The Loud Absence: Where is God in Suffering?: John Lennox (Transcript)

AI, Man & God: Prof. John Lennox (Full Transcript)

Sam Altman: GPT-4, ChatGPT, and the Future of AI (Transcript)

James Tour: The Mystery of the Origin of Life (Transcript)

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