Transcript: The Nature of Evil and Suffering - John Lennox and Michael Shermer

Here is the full transcript of a debate between Oxford professor John Lennox and the founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine Michael Shermer at The Veritas Forum at Pepperdine 2013.

John Lennox’s Opening Statement

JOHN LENNOX: Well, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for this warm welcome to this magnificent university campus. I’m particularly honored to be here because, to my surprise and delight, I’m meeting Michael Shermer again. I last encountered him in my home University of Oxford last year. So it was on my turf.

Now it’s on his turf. And I’m so thrilled that you take on yourselves the responsibility to get the big ideas into the public by means of dialectical discussion. Now you have asked me to speak to you on why evil, the nature of evil and suffering.

The Problem of Evil and Suffering

Evil and suffering come from two logically distinct sources. They are often intertwined: the human source, the problem of moral evil, the awful things people do to one another.

And then there is natural evil, the natural disasters and diseases, earthquakes, tsunamis and cancer, the problem of pain. And the heart of the question goes back many centuries to Epicurus. And David Hume, writing, said Epicurus’ old questions are yet unanswered. Is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then is he impotent?

Is he able but not willing? Then is he malevolent? Is he both able and willing? Whence then this evil? And some people say that events like 9/11 show us that there is no God.

And early this morning, I walked in your beautiful hero’s garden, and it brought into my mind a reflection that I was at Ground Zero on 9/11 last year. And I listened to the entire service, the reading of the names. And I was deeply moved by something very striking. I heard many assertions of faith in God and his love and the hope it gave to the loved ones left behind. And indeed so vivid were some of the readers’ faith that they spoke about their relatives not in the past tense, but directly addressed them as if they were still alive.

One of the most moving was, “Dad, you’re my hero. Happy birthday.” I didn’t hear one atheistic reaction on 9/11. I found that immensely striking. Now, of course, 9/11 gets eclipsed for many of us by more immediate suffering or pain.

You may be suffering or be close to someone who’s suffering from a terminal disease that has struck without warning. I can remember my reaction years ago when my brother was rushed to hospital after a terrorist bomb had exploded in his face and his life hung in the balance for many weeks. There are no easy answers ladies and gentlemen.

Since this question involves two distinct perspectives, cancer looks very different to the young mother who has just been told she’s three months to live. It looks different to her from what it looks to the oncologist who’s treated her.

We can observe suffering, we can experience suffering. And it has been established that it’s very interesting that the problem of evil seems to be an essentially Western phenomenon. In those countries where they live much closer to suffering, the problem hardly ever arises, which is just a remarkable fact to factor in. They’re hard questions because they go very deep.

Personal Encounters with Suffering

I’ll never forget meeting two brilliant Israeli scientists. And we were chatting and they discovered I believed in God and they said, “Look, we don’t believe in God.” And I said, “Why don’t you?”

And they said, “We’re not going to tell you because we don’t want to upset your faith.” Well, I said, “That’s very kind of you, but if my faith is upset by that, then it’s not worth believing in.” And in the end they told me. They said they read out loud to one another and they were reading a book by the Israeli Nobel Prize winner, Bashevitz Singer, Nobel Prize for Literature. And in the book, he described how some Jewish women and children were buried alive in Russia.

And they said to me, “The light went out. I can forgive God anything but not that.” Now let me make clear ladies and gentlemen, my heart goes out to people like that. Many of my colleagues in Oxford are atheists in part because of this kind of thing. I have stood personally in Auschwitz many times and I’ve wept every time.

It goes very deep and there are no easy, simplistic answers but nevertheless I think there is a way into something that can give us real hope.

The Atheist Perspective and Morality

I understand the atheist reaction and yet I have a problem with it as I observe it from outside. If there is no God, where do the concepts of good and evil that we all possess come from? Because outrage against the evils in the world presupposes a standard of good that’s objectively real and independent of us. But if there is no transcendence, no God, then how can there be such an objective standard of good?

And if there’s no moral evil or good in any case, the concept of ethics disappear and moral outrage is absurd. Friedrich Nietzsche saw this very clearly and he pointed out that the death of God would mean the death of compassion, kindness and forgiveness. I quote, “When one gives up Christian belief, one therefore deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality. Christian morality is a command. Its origin is transcendental.

It possesses truth only if God is truth. It stands or falls with belief in God. Why morality at all when life, nature, history are non-moral?” And Richard Dawkins interestingly agrees with him. He writes, “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect.

If there is at the bottom no design, no purpose, no evil and no good. Nothing but blind pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is, and we dance to its music.” Ladies and gentlemen, that’s correct.

The terrorists who flew the jets into the Twin Towers were simply dancing to the music of their DNA, and therefore you cannot blame him.

Now notice exactly what Dawkins says. I’ve debated it with him. He’s never retracted it. There is no good.

There is no evil. That is the deconstruction of all morality and all moral concepts. And it seems to me he stands with Nietzsche here and it’s the logical outcome of his worldview. Ironically though, if he believes there’s no good and no evil, then what does he mean by saying 9/11 radicalized him as something so evil that it made him determined to get rid of all religion? There’s a doublethink of course and there’s a reason for the doublethink.

It’s an obvious one. It’s the fact that we’re hardwired as moral beings whether we believe in God or not. And from a Christian perspective, that makes complete sense because one of the central claims is that human beings are unique, made in the image of God. They’re moral beings. So no matter what worldview we espouse, we discover that we’re moral beings.

And that’s what we’re faced with, which is why Dawkins philosophically rejects good and evil, but actually is outraged by what he sees to be morally false.

Absolute Moral Standards

Not only that ladies and gentlemen, I dare to say that there are absolute moral standards. Michael Ruse, who’s an atheist, says there are some things that are just wrong. Torturing babies is just wrong ladies and gentlemen. J.L. Mackie was an atheist philosopher at Oxford said this, “Ethics constitutes so odd a cluster of qualities and relations that they are most unlikely to have arisen in the ordinary course of events without an all-powerful God to create them. If then there are such moral values, they make the existence of a God more probable than it would have been without them. Thus we have after all a defensible argument from the existence of moral values to the existence of God.”

And so we find ourselves to be moral beings subscribing to certain absolute standards of good and evil. Those standards, that existence is consistent with the existence of God and very difficult to explain without him. So in one sense, it’s the existence of God that gives rise to the problem of evil. And that is why so many people fail and we can understand it, can’t we?

Free Will and Human Nature

Why couldn’t God, if there is a God, created us without the capacity for moral evil? Could he not have foreseen that things would go wrong and avoided it?

And of course he could. Of course he could. He could have made us automata or robots. But then we would have been less than human. Robots programmed what we wanted to do would be incapable of certain things.

I have a wife. I’ve been married forty-five years. I’m glad she’s not a robot. If I arrived at home and found the iPad in front of my robotic wife and it had instructions on it, “Kiss,” and I pressed this button and I got a kiss, it wouldn’t be very exciting, you know. And you laugh because you see the difference.

You see the difference deep down. You wouldn’t want to be like that. And the interesting thing, we find ourselves wishing for God to do something that would ultimately mean we were wishing ourselves out of existence. You couldn’t have love if you can’t have hate, you see. And that’s the fascinating thing that God has created a world of people in his image who are capable of the richness of love.

And the very odd thing is that a lot of evil has occurred on the way to give you your existence, hasn’t it? Maybe your mom and dad met in a bomb shelter during World War II and it was the evil of the bombing that led to your existence. Life is exceedingly complex and sophisticated, isn’t it?

And here we find ourselves in a world where we have these marvelous choices. The existential writer Jean Paul Sartre said, “The man who wants to be loved does not want to possess an automaton.” And if we want to humiliate him, we need only try to persuade him that the beloved’s passion is the result of a psychological determinism.

So what I’m arguing for is the very existence of the freedom to choose and therefore the capacity for love is inevitable if you want to create people like that. Now we find ourselves like that. And therefore God took a risk. Of course he took a risk. I think there are some parents here.

I’m a parent. I’m a grandparent. I took a risk in allowing my children to be. I knew that they could grow up to reject me. I’ve never met a parent yet that gave that as a reason for not having a child.

Because we all hope, it doesn’t always turn out that way of course, that children will grow up to love them. So like God, we create creatures risky in its effort.

Finding Hope in Christianity

And you know, we can argue till kingdom come, and we have done, and it’s very interesting what a good God might do, could do, should do and so on. We go round and round in circles and we never solve it. So I ask a different question.

Granted, ladies and gentlemen, that this experience of human life is full of ragged ends. We see some beauty. It’s a bit like Coventry Cathedral. You go into it, you see that a bomb is hit, but you can see traces of beauty. And we ask ourselves the question, is there anywhere, any evidence in the universe that you can trust God with the ragged ends?

That’s the key question. We never solve them all, but is it possible to trust God with them? And this brings me to the heart of it. Christianity is unique in having at its center an absolutely stupendous concept of God becoming human. This God said nature who is on a cross, but let me take it seriously.

Ladies and gentlemen, come with me for a moment. If this is really God, what’s God doing on a cross? I’ll tell you what it tells me at least. It tells me that God has not remained distant from human suffering but has himself become part of it. And he didn’t remain on the cross, he was taken down, he was buried and he rose again.

And of course this is the key point because the problem of evil and suffering looks very different if you live within a worldview that’s got a resurrection and a life after death. I wouldn’t for a moment dream of standing here if I didn’t believe that, that Jesus Christ has broken the death barrier and there’s evidence for it and that makes the universe look totally different. It’s utterly unique, ladies and gentlemen. Christianity competes with no other religion for the simple reason that you find us nowhere else and it seems to me that this is a way into the question and I have seen its effect with many people trying to cope with suffering.

I arrived in Christchurch New Zealand 2 days after the earthquake and I had to meet people that had lost their wives and their husbands just like that. And it was wonderful to see them begin to respond as I tried to explain that there were no simple answers but here’s a possible way in.

And a little note was left for me after one such lecture. The lady was too afraid to stay, she’d lost her husband but on the note it said “This is the first ray of hope I now see.” Thank you ladies and gentlemen.

Michael Shermer’s Opening Statement

MICHAEL SHERMER: Hi, everybody. Oh, man, am I excited to be here.

The first class I ever had at Pepperdine was in this room. So I have returned to the den of whatever this is. And yes, had a great day today just touring around campus and went to my old dorm room, Dorm 10, which was the jock dorm at the time. It’s a woman’s dorm now, so I couldn’t go in. I wanted to see my old room.

And no, it was great. We had President Ford spoke here and there was no dancing allowed at the time. Can you dance now? Is that all right? Is that yes.

See, moral progress has happened. There’s even a skeptics group here at Pepperdine. The Pepperdine skeptics, the pep sceps. They’re right here. Yay, skeptics.

So a little shout out to our group here. So Lindsay and Brigid, we’ll talk to you afterwards in the second row right there in the center if you want to join.

The Nature of Skepticism and Evil

MICHAEL SHERMER: Skepticism is just science. It’s just a scientific way of thinking critically about any and all claims. No sacred cows, which my Hindu friend said, uh-oh.

But I do appreciate John’s comment about and also the Veritas Forum that the whole point of being in college here and having these sorts of debates is just to think critically about all of these claims. So that’s what we’re doing here.

My first comment is on evil – what is it? We use the word rather loosely. We say, this is evil like it’s really bad, which is fine as an adjective. Yes, some things are really evil – the Holocaust is truly evil, something like that. But in terms of thinking about it as a scientist would, I claim that this is a myth. The myth that I call the myth of pure evil. The idea that there is like a homunculus in somebody’s brain that makes them do evil things or there’s like a force in the world operating that makes nations or people or races or groups or religions do evil things. That’s a myth.

What we need to do is focus on very specific things like John mentioned, cancer. Well, we know what cancer is. It’s evil in terms of it’s bad, but it’s not a thing in itself that’s evil inherently. It’s just cells massively dividing without a mechanism to turn them off. And once we figure that out, that will go away.

Germs are evil in the sense that they kill a lot of people. But germs are just doing what they’re programmed to do. If they cause people to sneeze and cough and have diarrhea and so forth, these are just mechanisms that germs use to spread themselves, to spread their DNA. This is just what they’re designed by nature to do.

There’s nothing inherently evil in an earthquake. It’s just two tectonic plates moving. It’s all it is. It’s just a physical process. If you build your houses right on a fault line, like some people have done on the other side of the mountain range over there, and there’s a shift in the tectonic plates, yes, it could wipe out houses, people can die. It’s bad, but it’s not evil. There’s nothing – it’s just earthquakes doing what they do.

Serial killers or these mass shootings that we have, we’re trying to get an understanding of this. It doesn’t help to just say, well, they’re evil. It doesn’t explain it. Evil is just a word. It’s just a linguistic placeholder until we can figure out what the problem is.

There’s a famous case written up in the literature of a man who had a tumor in his orbital frontal cortex. So he’s called Mr. OFT (O-F-T, orbital frontal cortex tumor), who became a pedophile inappropriately. They couldn’t figure out why he’d suddenly shifted and become pedophilic. They discovered the tumor, took the tumor out, he went back to normal. Tumor grows back, he became pedophilic again, took the tumor out, back to normal. So we know he’s not evil. He has a tumor in his brain.

And now getting to understand the background that a lot of people have in extreme poverty and drug abuse and physical abuse. These are the sorts of things that lead people to crime, to violence, to lashing out, to suicide. Calling these things evil doesn’t help us at all. It doesn’t explain anything. So we need to get down to the root cause of exactly what it is we’re talking about.

Childhood Deaths and Religious Explanations

Let’s take something like looking at childhood deaths as a cause of what we would call evil, but it’s not. According to UNICEF, about 29,000 children a year under the age of five die every day, 29,000 every day, mainly from preventable diseases. That’s 21 dead children every minute. Before I finish the sentence, another 21 children will have died. That’s over 10 million a year. That’s a Holocaust, more than a Holocaust every year.

The causes of these are diarrhea, malaria, neonatal infection, pneumonia, preterm delivery and lack of oxygen at birth. Science’s response is, well, we need to get them mosquito nets and potable water, vitamins and so on. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is doing just that. So there’s a scientific response to this. It’s bad, but it’s not evil, but we can do something about it.

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Religion’s response to this is to call it evil and to say, it’s part of God’s plan of sorts. You’ve heard versions of that from John. What sort of God would make a plan like this? An all powerful, all good God or a less than powerful, or not so good God, or no God at all, which is my conclusion. There’s just the best explanation is there is no God doing anything about any of these things. These are things that just happen and we can do something about them.

So the moral precept should be the survival and flourishing of sentient beings, which we can do something about. If you want to do something moral, work to the survival and flourishing of these 29,000 children that die every year. The belief that what these children need is salvation from Jesus is somewhere between absurd and obscene. This is not what they need. They need vitamins and water and mosquito nets and things like that.

The Irrefutable God Problem

This gets to the problem of what I call the irrefutable God problem. That is when good things happen, God gets the credit. When bad things happen, God does not get the blame. So either way, it’s an irrefutable statement. It’s a proclamation by definition. What would disconfirm the God hypothesis? Good things happen so God is. Bad things happen so God is. What would have to happen to refute the causal explanation of evil?

In the Christian worldview, nothing can refute it. It’s irrefutable. It’s true by definition. So I ask you, what’s the difference between an invisible God and an irrefutable God? There’s no difference. This is like playing baseball without the bases or the ball.

If your theory of evil is that your neighbor cavorts with the devil at night, flies around on a broom inflicting people, crops and cattle with disease, and that the proper way to cure the problem of evil is to burn her at the stake, then you’re either insane or you lived in Christian Europe 400 years ago. That was the theory – that was the Christian theory of evil then derived from Exodus 22:18, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” Today, no one in their right mind believes this. Why? Because science has debunked the witch theory of evil.

Yet the present religious theory of evil on the offing is in principle no different from the witch theory of evil. Bad things happen because we are told of the fall in the garden and that this is the origin of original sin that we’re born with and we’ve fallen away from God and thus we are free to sin and do evil. And the solution to this evil is to accept the sacrifice of the deity, which exonerates you from anything you did in your life no matter how evil it might have been.

Christianity’s Identity Crisis

In a way, this makes Christianity a cult of sacrifice, human sacrifice or maybe it’s what I call the identity crisis problem. So we’re originally created sinless by the Christian worldview. And because God gave us free will and Adam and Eve chose to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we are all born sinful. We’re sinners.

Now God being omnipotent and benevolent, He could just forgive us the sins that we never committed. But instead He sacrificed His son Jesus who is actually himself because Christianity is a monotheism. There’s only one God. So Jesus and the Holy Spirit and the Father is three and one, one and three. You know that story.

So the only way to avoid eternal punishment for sins we never committed from this all powerful and all loving God is to accept His Son who is actually Himself as our Savior, John 3:16. You’ve seen it in every football game in America. So God sacrificed himself to himself to save us from himself. In some other context, this would be barking mad. But because we’re used to the story, it just sounds like something to accept. It doesn’t explain anything.

Furthermore, if you don’t accept the logic of this proposition, you get to spend forever in hell. Your flesh seared by fire for all eternity. Why? Because God loves you. Again, who in the right mind would accept this on the logic alone of it? But again, we’re just used to the story.

Morality and the Bible

In any case, I dare say that witches aside, most of you, most of us, we don’t get our morality from the Bible. The Bible sanctions a lot of evil, genocide, rape, slavery. Stoning to death people for such frivolous infractions as working on the Sabbath, taking the Lord’s name in vain or more serious sins such as being a woman who loses her virginity before marriage. That’s right, stoning to death for losing your virginity before marriage and also stoning to death for adultery, but only for women. Men wrote these rules by the way, in case you didn’t notice.

And for being homosexual, how many – show of hands – how many here think gays should be stoned to death? Of course. We’re all modern moralists, everyone of us. None of us gets our morality from the Bible and that’s a good thing.

The author of what is supposed to be the greatest moral book ever written, didn’t even get it right on slavery. If it’s that untrustworthy, why isn’t there a simple straightforward commandment? Something like what Abraham Lincoln said, “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. And as I would not be a slave, I would not be a slave holder or slave master.” Something simple and straightforward like that.

Science vs. Religion as Explanation

So we’re left to decide what is it that we’re supposed to do about evil? What is the explanation for it? Again, we need to just break it down and define it in very specific things. What’s the thing we’re talking about that we’re trying to understand?

So my beef with the religious explanation is that it’s a little bit like what we call the God of the gaps argument in terms of like evolution and creationism. There’s a gap. It’s an interesting problem. It’s a hard problem to solve. Science hasn’t got an explanation. So God did it or Satan did it or an evil force did it, something like that. What happens when the gap gets filled by science? Then we have an explanation and the religious explanation falls into disuse.

So the long term trend that we’ve experienced in the last five centuries is science slowly but surely displacing religion as an explanation for various things. One of the last is evil, morality and evil. What is the source of these things? How do we know what’s right and wrong?

So we have a pretty good idea of this now. I’ve written a book on this on the science of good and evil. How do we know what’s right and wrong? We’re a social species. We have to know how other people are going to respond to us, whether we’re cooperative and nice, pro-social, altruistic or whether we’re greedy and nasty and avaricious and cutthroat. We are all of these things. And we’ve evolved immoral emotions to adjust and respond to other people.

So the religious explanation for right and wrong is, well God did that. God gave it to us or something like that. From an outside source, that’s the outside source. Again, whether that’s true or not, it doesn’t explain it. Why do we have emotions like guilt? Distinct guilt. Why do we have guilt? Why is that even there? What’s the purpose of that? And to just say, God gave us guilt. It doesn’t explain it. Why? How did this happen? What’s the reason for it?

So what you’re hearing here is a difference between a religious worldview and a scientific worldview of explaining these really hard problems that we’re trying to work on. The more economical, the more prudent explanation for evil is the scientific one, the breaking it down, the looking at very specific things and asking what’s the cause of that and what can we do about it versus just the gap filling, it just happened and that’s it. And again, that’s true, whether there’s a God or not is sort of irrelevant to that point. We still want an explanation for it. And science is the best tool we have for understanding evil. Thank you.

MODERATOR: Thank you, Dr. Lennox and Dr. Shermer for your insights. I wanted to kick off the discussion here with a question about explanations. That was a featured part of what Dr. Shermer was saying. And so I wanted to give Dr. Lennox a chance to talk a little bit about the theistic explanation.

So the data that we’re talking about is going to be the evil and suffering that we observe and experience, the facts about human nature that we know and are learning. So I would be curious to hear what you would see as perhaps flaws in Dr. Shermer’s explanation and superiority of your own, and then we’ll move on from there.

JOHN LENNOX: Well, the very last point that was made was science is the best tool we have for understanding evil. I disagree with that completely because science doesn’t have moral concepts within it. It was Einstein who pointed out that we could talk about the ethical foundations of science. We cannot talk about the scientific foundations of ethics. And I think that there’s a confusion represented there. But the point is it’s not either/or because Michael has been talking about explanations for evil in terms of genetics, in terms of heredity, in terms of background. And of course, that’s absolutely true.

The Debate on Morality and Responsibility

JOHN LENNOX: But there’s such a thing as moral responsibility and humans being morally responsible. And clearly, if you go the whole way down the genetic route, you end up without morality and you end up with Richard Dawkins’ view. Well, then you might as well abolish the police if you’re going to be logical because you could not hold people morally responsible for the things that they do. What confuses me is it’s like trying to get an eagle that flies on one wing. You need both wings.

You need to be, as a judge faced with a person, sensitive to the fact that this crime might have been committed because the person was absolutely impoverished or was blind drunk and so on. But that doesn’t mean that they’re not morally responsible. So it’s both-and, not either-or. And therefore, I very much disagree with Michael’s point that this is God of the gaps thinking. His kind of thinking can be evolution of the gaps.

Why are we here? Well, we’re just here because of genetics and evolution and so on. But there’s no actual down to earth explanation of it. Now Michael and I, I think, are both sensitive to those gap type explanations, and we try to avoid them. But the whole notion that science will explain everything, that is scientism and is completely false.

If you believe that science explains everything, you better shut down your arts faculty at Pepperdine tomorrow. Because ways to moral truth actually, Sir Peter Medawar, who is a Nobel Prize winner, says it’s very easy to see the limits of science. It cannot answer the simple questions of a child. Where do I come from? What’s the meaning of life?

What is the meaning of morality? He says it’s to religion, literature, philosophy that we must look for these things. So I simply reject this view. I’m a passionate scientist, but I believe with Medawar that we do science no service by saying it’s the best tool to deal with everything. And with morality, I don’t think it’s the best tool. I think it’s a tool that can give us insight, but it can’t deal with the actual moral values at all.

MODERATOR: Dr. Shermer, presumably would disagree with Dawkins about the fact that morality no longer exists on a purely naturalistic worldview. And so if that’s right, say a little more about why, where you think he went wrong and how maybe flesh out your own explanation of right and wrong based on these notions of survival and flourishing.

The Naturalistic Basis of Morality

MICHAEL SHERMER: Right. Okay. So when we talk about something that we typically think of as human evil, like Auschwitz, the Holocaust, why did this happen? We have a pretty good understanding now of how the dynamics of social groups unfold under certain conditions where you can, like Milgram showed, get average college age kids like yourself to go all the way up to 450 volts on the box of delivering electric shocks. You can get people to do this under certain conditions. And the Holocaust is just this writ large with a whole bunch of other half a dozen different psychological conditions. So you can just say, yes, the Holocaust is evil.

Yes, of course it’s evil, it’s bad. But why, why did it happen? We want to know this so we can prevent it from happening again. Okay, so now why do we want to prevent this from happening? Well, because we have a deep belief that killing people for no reason at all or just because we think they’re an inferior race or whatever is not acceptable.

This used to be acceptable. In biblical times, this was quite common. Genocides—well, you’ve read the Bible in a Bible college. Every other chapter is a disaster. It’s an extermination. It’s a holocaust. It just happens over and over. You just pick it up and read it. It’s there. The Bible is really a series of stories about tribal warlords fighting over land and women. It makes perfect sense in the context of then.

We no longer believe or accept that. Why do we no longer accept that? There’s not been any new interpretation of the Bible like, “Oh, we discovered this new commandment that said people should never be treated as a means to an end but are an end in themselves.” This appears nowhere in the Bible. This is Immanuel Kant. Or “people have inherent rights like to privacy.” This is Jefferson and Locke, the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights. You have certain things that are protected.

This has not come out of the Bible. We are all fully modern moralists that we got not from religion. We’ve all sort of shifted along in the moral zeitgeist of becoming ever more moral based on the belief that the survival and flourishing of individuals is the foundation. It’s objective. It’s outside of you and me.

So John, I make the argument that unlike Dawkins and most scientists actually, we can bridge this is-ought barrier—that science can tell us something about what’s right and wrong, really right and wrong. And I think we’ve seen that because what’s happened since the Enlightenment is that we’ve all adopted this belief in expanding the moral sphere to include more and more sentient beings. And I use the term sentient beings, not humans, because we are now all becoming more sensitive to the fact that dolphins and chimps and so on are sentient beings. They feel, they think, they’re conscious, they’re self-aware, they’re like us. And so they deserve to have rights. They should be treated properly and so forth.

So we’ve all adopted those conditions. Nobody here believes in slavery. And so mark my words on this one little point because it’s a current topic, gay marriage. All right, in twenty years, we’re all going to look back at this debate we’re in the middle of right now, like we look back now in the 50s on the black and white drinking fountains or the pre-Voting Rights Act of 1965. We will look back on this like we look back on that now as just ludicrous. What were they thinking? Gays shouldn’t be treated equally under the law? What? And yet, look who resists this more than anybody else. It’s mostly religious groups that resist this expansion of the moral sphere to include gays.

Now my other little prediction, just sort of half tongue-in-cheek, is that in twenty years when we look back, the religious will take credit for it. And they’ll say, “See that Episcopalian minister? That was our guy.” Yes, but just like with slavery and you have the champion of Samuel William Wilberforce, who was he having to fight against? His fellow Anglicans and religionists who all fully believed in slavery. You can read these impassioned treaties and essays and papers and articles and arguments for why blacks are inferior, why blacks are better off in slavery than Northern whites who are poor in factories. And so they had all these arguments. No one would make these arguments today. The moral sphere has expanded, not thanks to religion, but thanks to secular rational reasons.

The Source of Morality

JOHN LENNOX: You in common with Richard Dawkins are constantly saying nobody gets their morality from the Bible. That’s false actually. What you’re talking about is certain aspects of Old Testament. Now the research on slavery is very interesting because slavery in the Old Testament was nothing like slavery in America or slavery in England or slavery in Africa. It was partly a protection of very poor people.

And the scholarly research on it has shown that the thing you’re talking about, the religious Christianized justification of slavery in America is a false deduction from the Bible. And we must make a distinction between what scripture actually says and false deductions from it. Now I did a little test, and I’ve actually written about it, and I’ll send it to you since you’ve been so kind as to give me your book. I did a little test because Richard Dawkins says nobody gets his morality from the Bible, so he lists a new 10 commandments. Every one of them is to be found in the Bible.

You see, the notion of respect for other people, the golden rule, you’ll find it in every religion, no religions, pagan philosophies, and you’ll find it in the Bible. So I just think this pet phrase, nobody gets the morality of the Bible, is totally misleading. It’s that we reject certain false deductions from the Old Testament. But if you think of the morality of Jesus and all this kind of thing, and his generosity, kindness, his loving for your neighbor, you go through Dawkins and love of the truth and you can see I’ve documented the whole thing right through. It’s all in the Bible.

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MICHAEL SHERMER: So it’s a misleading thing, Michael. Let me ask you something. When did Jesus become a conservative? I mean he talks about giving to the poor and taking care of the needy and so on. How come conservatives embrace this? He’s not a free market capitalist Jesus. So my point is that we cherry pick passages in the Bible that fit our modern moral sentiments.

JOHN LENNOX: But that’s exactly what you’ve been doing.

Refutability of Christianity

MODERATOR: I’m going to step in real quick because I do think we want to keep the topic. So a great discussion, but we would like to keep on evil and suffering. So maybe a question for both of you. One of the points Dr. Shermer made was that Christianity or the belief in God is irrefutable and one of the pieces of evidence given against the truth of Christianity is some of the Old Testament genocides and things that are allowed and even commanded. And so presumably that it doesn’t you don’t consider that to be refutation of Christianity. So why not? And would there be anything that you would consider refutation or even just disconfirmation?

JOHN LENNOX: Well, I was intrigued. Maybe I misunderstood you, Michael, when you said what’s the difference between an irrefutable God and an invisible God? And do you think there’s none?

MICHAEL SHERMER: Well, if I say, well, doesn’t good things happen and most believers say, well, that’s evidence of God’s action in the world. Okay, then what about bad things? Well, that’s evidence that God chose not to act. What’s the difference between a being that you can’t tell the difference between somebody who does nothing and somebody who’s just not even in existence?

JOHN LENNOX: I would take your point there. It’s just understand that because what’s the difference between—well, is a centrifuge of gravity and how would we test the hypothesis?

MICHAEL SHERMER: Oh, I think you can test it.

JOHN LENNOX: I believe Christianity is refutable, you see. And I mean that’s as a scientist, I believe it’s refutable, absolutely. If you can prove that Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, if you can deconstruct every conversion that has transformed Christ’s history—

MICHAEL SHERMER: How would you prove Jesus didn’t rise?

JOHN LENNOX: Well, you could find his bones and so on.

MICHAEL SHERMER: Okay. I see.

JOHN LENNOX: Yes. Well, the whole point about Christianity is that it is geared into history. It’s not just a philosophy. It’s geared into history. It makes a certain number of historical claims. And these claims can be tested by historical methods. And therefore, I mean, I’ve lived my whole life on the basis that my faith is refutable, and I’m looking for somebody like you to refute it, so to speak.

MICHAEL SHERMER: How much time do you have? Because that’s quite important.

JOHN LENNOX: I’ll get you there before I—

MICHAEL SHERMER: How do you square the circle of the identity problem I mentioned?

JOHN LENNOX: Which identity problem?

MICHAEL SHERMER: God sacrificed himself to himself to save us from a—

JOHN LENNOX: Well, I think that’s just an absurdly superficial reading of the thing.

MICHAEL SHERMER: You mean it’s not clear?

JOHN LENNOX: No, I think to characterize it like that. You’re lifting it straight out of the God Delusion. Again, I’ve been so concerned about that superficial mockery of the cross that I’ve actually written about it in my recent book, Gunning for God. The notion that God is a fellowship and is very complex goes vastly beyond our ideas, but we can get towards it.

You know about sacrifice. You might be prepared to sacrifice something for your daughter. You might even, under certain circumstances, be prepared to take her place, like Darnley and so on. Now the late Christopher Hitchens and I discussed this because he was very anti this and thought this is barking mad. That’s a Dawkins quote. It’s not a Shermer quote. It’s a Dawkins quote, isn’t it?

And I think it’s all very well to call it barking mad. But what is being taught to us is much more profound than things we don’t begin to understand, like gravity, like the light wave particle duality of light and so on. The claim is that God became human and Christ is both God and man. And the reason the cross works is he’s not simply a man. I agree with Hitchens. No man can forgive another person’s sins. That would be immoral unless that man is simultaneously God. And they saw that in the first century. Who forgives sins but God alone? And they accused Jesus of blasphemy.

But the real issue behind it was if this is really God, then we’re in a different ballgame. And I take it very seriously because, of course, it’s the absolute foundation of my salvation. And that kind of mockery of it that is barking mad actually confirms my faith because it’s such a superficial analysis.

MICHAEL SHERMER: But if you sin, you’ve harmed somebody. Isn’t it the person that you’ve harmed you should be asking forgiveness for and apologizing?

JOHN LENNOX: Of course. It’s not either-or.

MICHAEL SHERMER: What’s God got to do with it?

JOHN LENNOX: But ultimately all sin is against God.

MICHAEL SHERMER: No. See, now you’re just—you’re off the page here.

JOHN LENNOX: Well, you are if I might just point out a theological thing. I hope you didn’t learn it here. That people were going to die for sins they didn’t commit because Paul in Romans 5 makes it very clear that people who did not sin after Adam’s, the fashion of Adam’s sin. So I think your theological analysis is a bit suspect there, actually. Not that we want to have a theological discussion tonight, but I just—my antennae went up at that. But we better let the moderator back into that.

Closing Statements

MICHAEL SHERMER: In partial response to something John said about 9/11 and the hijackers – the problem is not that the world doesn’t have enough morality. The problem is we have too much morality. People moralize constantly, thinking that they know what’s right and wrong and everybody else who believes differently is wrong. This is the problem that we face. Not just religion, but religion especially exacerbates it even more because it’s designed to pass moral judgment.

I’m quite certain that when Mohammad Atta flew the plane into the World Trade Center South Building, his moral module, if we have a moral module, was just fully lit up, absolutely believing he was doing the right thing. And no different than any Christians believe that they’re doing the right thing whenever they do whatever they do.

The reason Islam does what it does and Christianity does what it does has a long explanation going back through history. The problem here is that there’s just too much moralizing.

Let me just reflect here for a second. I was where you are sitting. I was a born again evangelical Christian when I was here. And when I was in the religious bubble, everything makes sense. It’s all internally consistent, logically coherent, often reinforced over and over and over. When you’re out of the bubble and you’re just in the general world with people that believe differently than you, it puts a new perspective on things – that there’s more than one way to think about these issues.

I think I made the case tonight that there’s pretty solid evidence that it’s very unlikely that there’s a God if we’re going to address these problems of evil, and that science and reason is the best way we have of addressing them, breaking them down, defining them carefully.

In any case, if there is a God and he’s acting in some particular way, reaching into the world to stir the particles to do whatever it is he’s doing, there must be some way to measure it. And we’ve tried. And so far, say prayer and healing for example, no effects. There’s no way to measure the effects of God, good or evil, without us knowing something about it and defining it as part of the natural world.

So I think the most we can say is that, if there is a God, it’s just like a super intelligent being smarter than us, but not really qualitatively different from us. And so what the problem of evil leaves us with is a huge gap, a gap that religion can’t fill, not even in principle can it fill it. Because all it says is God did it or God allowed it to happen, but this doesn’t explain it.

What science and reason have done for us is replace the supernatural with the natural, magical thinking with critical thinking, testable hypotheses instead of dogmatic beliefs, and natural laws instead of supernatural laws.

My prediction is that in the long run, these kinds of gap-filling explanations by religion will just fall into disuse as the sphere of science explains more and more of the world that we want to know about – consciousness, morality, good and evil, politics and society.

I guess I would just leave you with this: I don’t think I’m going to convince you to change your mind tonight. But just think for a moment, when you’re out in the world later, years down the line, and you encounter people that are different, different religions, different beliefs or no religious beliefs at all. They believe just as strongly as you do and you did when you’re here. Is it possible? Methinks, it’s possible you might just be wrong. You should think maybe, maybe I don’t have the absolute truth. Maybe I don’t know what’s absolutely right and wrong and I should be tolerant and allow more people into the moral sphere that we had not previously allowed in.

And that’s the basis of moral progress in this world that we’re all in together. Thank you.

JOHN LENNOX: I’m concerned about the 29,000 children. And the point that Dr. Shermer made was that it was obscene to think they need Jesus and salvation. What they need is mosquito nets. I think they need mosquito nets and salvation.

What is very interesting is an article that appeared in the London Times by an atheist, Matthew Paris. He’s been to Africa many times. And he writes as an atheist, he said Africa needs the gospel of Jesus Christ. Because he says as an atheist, it goes totally against the grain to say it. But if we do not bring them the gospel of Jesus Christ, we leave them to the mercy of Nike and the machete. It was a fascinatingly honest article.

So it’s not either/or. And you’ll have noticed this evening, we constantly get presented with either/or. Science and reason or religion, but wait a minute, science and reason are not coextensive. I believe in reason, I believe in science, but they don’t give us the whole truth. Michael is compressing our world into a very narrow world that is too small to live in actually.

And these 29,000 children, of course let’s work to bring the mosquito nets, vaccinations, food and everything else, but 29,000 have died. What about them? And what about the multimillions of people that have ever lived that do not get justice in this life and because there is no life after death will never get justice?

Let me quote you finally a little bit more of Richard Dawkins. “In a universe of blind physical forces in genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it nor any justice.”

And now I want to come to my major point this evening. The reason I reject atheism, one of them, is that there is no hope, first of all, by definition, ultimate hope, nor has it any ultimate justice. The people that died in Auschwitz, the millions of babies that have died as a result of lack of food, as a result of overexploitation or overforestation, we’ll never get justice. We may be able to help those in the future and we ought to work for it.

I believe in a God that’s infinitely bigger than that. Because Jesus died, rose again, what did that prove? That he was going to be the judge, ladies and gentlemen. There is going to be a judgment. And that to me is a magnificent concept because the judge of all this earth is going to rise up and do right. If you deny that, then ultimately the terrorist wins. Your moral sense is a total illusion. And death is the end, and there is absolutely no hope. What a tiny world to live in, and what a tiny world to live for.

So it seems to me that here we are, moral beings and Michael and I agree on that – people that cry out after justice. And yet with that built into our being, we are saying, are we, that there’s no such thing as ultimate justice, there is no hope.

Let me risk saying something. I don’t often say it in public. I believe firmly that if you could see this moment into that other world and see what God has done with children that have been raped and killed, you would have no more questions, ladies and gentlemen. You would have no more questions. What a hope it is to have that there is one day going to be a world in which there will be no pain, no crying, no suffering.

And how big is God? He will personally himself wipe away every tear from our eyes. I’d die for – I hope I would, ladies and gentlemen, die for a God like that. I do not see a shred of hope in what Michael has offered. I see the exact opposite.

And so I’m going to stick with God, thank you.

Q&A Session

MODERATOR: Thank you to both of our speakers. For the past hour or so, two students, Matthew McKay and Justin Beck, have been compiling your questions that you’ve been sending in. And so now we’re going to have Amy read those one at time. We’ll work through as many as we can in our remaining time.

AMY: Okay. The first question, Dr. Shermer, how is it that you deny the existence of evil, but affirm that helping children who are weak is a good thing to do? Can you have good without evil?

MICHAEL SHERMER: So what I’m saying is that the use of the word evil is too bushy, too fuzzy. It’s thrown about. What we scientists do, particularly behavioral scientists, is operationally define it. What exactly are we talking about here?

That’s just why I don’t like using that word. And so if we’re going to talk about cancer, earthquakes, violence, holocaust, genocides, whatever, they all have different causes that we can examine, try to understand the cause of, and therefore the solution. That’s how a scientist thinks about it.

Now in terms of why we would even want to do this, this is the harder problem. And so I’m arguing that first of all we have an evolved deep moral sense of what’s right and wrong. There’s quite a body of literature showing that not only all people around the world, but even most primates, especially the great apes, have a sense of fairness and right and wrong. You do these little behavioral games in which you can test this.

For example, there’s a game called the ultimatum game. So you have two people come into my lab and I give you $10 in $1 bills. You can make her an offer, whatever you want, fifty-fifty split, five each or sixty-forty, seventy-thirty, whatever you want. If she accepts your offer, you both get to keep the money. And if she rejects your offer, neither one of you get any money and the game is over.

So what would you offer her? Fifty-fifty? You’re nice. Women are always nicer than men about these things. Most men try to get away with a little more like, “I’ll give her $4 because she’s not going turn down $4. She had nothing to begin with.”

What if I give you $100 and she offered you $1? Would you take the $1? You didn’t have $1 before. Most people will say, “Hell no.” There’s something wrong about her keeping that $99 even though you didn’t have $1 – you could have got a free $1, okay?

Everywhere in the world, this has been tested. Any offers that are worse than say about seventy-thirty are rejected. So this is called moralistic punishment. Somebody is willing to pay me $30 to punish this person for making an unfair offer. They could have had a free $30, right?

This and 100 other types of variations on that experiment and others show us that everywhere around the world, people have a deep sense of fairness and right and wrong, and they’re willing to punish somebody who doesn’t play fair. So all social groups have developed moral systems based on this deep sense and evolved deep sense.

You could do this with chimpanzees, even capuchin monkeys who have tiny little brains. You teach them to swap grapes or cucumber slices for little stones. The stones are like money. And then you play these games and they do the same thing. If it’s an unfair offer, they throw the rock back at the experimenter. They’re very upset. You can see it. You can see that they have a deep sense of right and wrong.

This is where this comes from. And by the way, you believe in God, why not just say this is how God created right and wrong in social mammals because that’s what happened. Whether it happened poof, which doesn’t explain it, but it happened through an evolutionary process that we can analyze through behavioral game theory models and computers and actual experiments and collect data that explains it.

Last point. Why would we ever want to care about that? Why do we care? Because you can’t survive in a harsh environment by yourself. We need each other. We’re social. So we can say legitimately that we have an objective sense of right and wrong based on fairness.

What is good or evil – I don’t like those words, but you know what I mean – what’s right and wrong in terms of fairness? All of us. It’s not just you and you or Americans and whatever, all of us vouchsafed to the species by dint of that you were born a primate, a social primate. You get it. You don’t need God for that. It is objective and absolute. It’s part of us. It’s part of our nature that is independent. And that I claim is an outside objective morality.

JOHN LENNOX: That the existence of a common morality around the world is wonderful evidence that we are made in the image of God. And for Michael to say we don’t need God for that is a half truth. Because we’re made as moral beings, atheists are as capable of moral behavior as Christians. In fact, sometimes our atheist friends can put us to shame. But it’s evidence that we’re all moral beings made in the image of God. And to say we don’t need God for it begs the question.

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MODERATOR: Does that mean God has an evil streak?

The Debate Continues

JOHN LENNOX: Of course not, Michael, and you should know that because God has created us with the capacity to say yes, which means we have the capacity to say no. He’s given us the possibility to say yes or no. And that involves that evil may occur. But that is not to say God has got an evil streak. That’s nonsense. Would be like saying, I begat children and I’ve got an evil streak because my children have the capacity to do evil. It would be no matter if I begat your children.

MODERATOR: Okay. Let’s come back to this. I do want to leave some time for additional questions.

On Human Value and Dignity

MODERATOR: Question two. Some of the worst examples of evil in our world have come from governments that devalue human life. How do you personally define the value of human life?

MODERATOR: Okay. So I think we’ll let maybe Doctor Lennox answer this one and then touch on that.

JOHN LENNOX: Well, it seems to me that the first chapter of Genesis is the mandate for everything. That’s even recognized by atheists. There’s a sequence of steps that lead to human beings made in the image of God. The universe, if you look outside tonight, Jupiter looks absolutely brilliant beside the moon. Shows God’s glory. Was not made in God’s image. You were. And that is what gives human beings an infinite sense of dignity and value.

And in fact, Jurgen Habermas, who is one of the continent’s leading intellectuals as an atheist, he says, this is the foundation of all our human rights, all our legislation of this kind, all our sense of freedom. And we’ve nothing else. Everything else is postmodern chatter. And it seems to me here that the Bible is giving us an enhanced view, a very high view, and I don’t find it anywhere else. So that’s where I get human dignity from.

MICHAEL SHERMER: So some governments are better than others. In terms of what? In terms of the survival and flourishing of their citizens. So liberal democracies are vastly superior to all other forms of government in measurable statistical demographic ways that we could count the number of people that are killed, the number of people that die and so forth.

Now why do they have these values? Where do these values come from? It can’t come from religion for this reason: because religion has no rational reason why this particular moral principle all people should be treated equal. Why? Why should they be treated? Well, God says so. Yes, well, my God says something different. So too bad. And I’ve got an army and you’ve an army and that’s how we’re going to settle it.

No. What liberal democracies do is they say, you have to give a reason for why you have these principles, why I should be favored over you, why my perspective is more important than your perspective. And if you can’t give us a rational reason for that, then your argument is a bad argument and we’re not going to vote for it.

So the checks and balances that are set up—let me put it this way. The constitutions of nations should be based on the constitution of human nature. And ours is, it’s based on the fact that we know people will cheat if they can get away with it. So we have to have rules. We have to have a rule of law. We have to have property rights. We have to have a police force and a military.

And so you have to have these things. And because people will not just naturally love one another in some Kumbaya way, it doesn’t happen. You have to structure it to encourage people to be moral. And if you don’t, they won’t automatically.

On New Testament Morality

MODERATOR: Okay. Do we have another question? Next question. Doctor Shermer used Old Testament examples compared to today’s ideas of morality. Doctor Shermer, do you have similar objections to the New Testament?

MICHAEL SHERMER: I do, yes, as you might expect. Although I will say it’s an improvement in terms of expanding the moral circle. Women are treated better in the New Testament than the Old Testament. The Old Testament women are basically just sex slaves. They’re barely better than cattle. That’s pretty bad. Now at least the New Testament is better than that. But we’ve come a long way since then. I mean just a century ago, women didn’t even get the right to vote until 1920 in this country.

And again, who resists this? Well, anyway, just read the history. And so and remember, okay, so we have to be careful about cherry picking the passages. Yes, Jesus has many things that he says that are wonderful in terms of the survival and flourishing of more and more people expanding the moral circle, turning the other cheek, forgiving people and so on, instead of smiting and smoting and raping and pillaging of the Old Testament. It’s better than that.

But he did say several times, he did not come to repudiate the Old Testament rules, the laws. He did not. He came to enforce them. He came with a sword. And he didn’t exactly tell us what he intended to do with the sword, but it was clear this was a threat of violence. So for each passage, that’s nice. There’s others that are not so nice. So you have to take it on balance.

JOHN LENNOX: I come from Northern Ireland, sir. The whole question of Jesus and violence is vastly important. The very interesting thing is that he was put on trial by the Roman Empire, accused of stirring up political violence. He was accused of being a terrorist. And what happened? Well, you know that Pilate declared him innocent.

And why? Because Pilate needed to know exactly what his attitude to the use of physical violence was, and Christ told him, my kingdom is not of this world. Otherwise, servants would have been fighting that I should not be delivered to the Jews. And on that point, Pilate saw he was no threat.

So the people like those in my country on both sides of the religious divide who take up weapons to defend Christ and his message are not following him. They’re disobeying him. And I think the whole idea, Michael, it’s very clear. That was the center trial. And therefore, it’s vastly important, particularly when people get the impression that Christianity is responsible for violence. People that follow and use weapons are not Christian by definition because they’re not following Jesus.

And it’s obvious, of course, why that is the case. Because the one thing you cannot do with truth is impose it by force, especially if it’s truth about forgiveness, the love of God, salvation, peace with God and so on. So yes, I do think I have an answer to what you just said, yes.

On Prayer and Divine Healing

MODERATOR: Next question. This is for Doctor Lennox. A just God who is also personal would be just in the way that he answers prayers. Why does God answer the prayers of healing for some people, but then ignore them in nearly identical situations?

JOHN LENNOX: This, again, is one of those deep situations. I can only answer this personally in a way rather than theoretically. Because it’s quite clear even within the space of the Bible that there were occasions when people asked God to heal them, for instance, and he did so.

But one of the most famous writers of the New Testament who wrote more than half of it is the Apostle Paul. And he had a serious eye disease, and he asked God to heal him from it. And God didn’t. He said, my grace is sufficient for you. And I think this matter is much deeper than we think.

And therefore, it’s very dangerous to imply that if people had enough faith in God, he would heal them. What we’ve got to remember and what helps me in this whole thing is to take a global view. When a person becomes a Christian, they receive eternal life and God’s spirit dwells in what? A mortal body. And no matter how much you pray, you’ll die. And it’s very important to get a sense of proportion by realizing that.

And therefore, we need to be very sensitive how we teach people about these things. God’s ways, of course, with individuals—You say identical situations, but there are no identical situations because there are no identical people. And therefore, that’s the way I would answer it in that sense theologically, but it would demand a lot more patient research.

The point is that answers to prayer, which in my life have been extremely real, put them under a bit of psychological analysis and you can explain almost anything away. Of course, you can. But nonetheless, I would think there’s sufficient evidence that it is real. But that’s another story really.

On Fine-Tuning of the Universe

MODERATOR: Do we have another question? This one is for Doctor Shermer. How do you personally account for the extreme fine tuning of the constants in the universe?

MICHAEL SHERMER: Right. I think this is probably the best argument that theists have and yet it still doesn’t get us anywhere because the fact that we don’t have an explanation yet in physics, it’s just another X. This is another gap. Well, if you can’t explain where the fine tuned constants came from, then I’m going to say God did it. And I’m going to say, well, how did God do it? What forces did God use to create this particular universe versus that universe?

Now one answer is the multiverse. There’s multiple universes, all of which have slightly different laws of nature. Any universe that has the laws of nature like ours is going to give rise to atoms and planets and stars and living creatures and so forth and those that don’t, don’t. This is the Anthropic Principle. And so it’s multiverse or God or I don’t know.

So here’s a principle to take home for tonight. It’s okay to just say, I don’t know. Nobody knows. It’s an interesting problem. Let’s work on it. That’s what graduate students are for. Yes, let’s work on it. Let’s see if we can answer it. But again, just saying, well, God did it, doesn’t answer it. It doesn’t give us an explanation. How did God do it?

So I mean if it were true that, say, God answers prayers and heals cancers. This has been tested, by the way. Herbert Benson at Harvard Medical School did the most extensive study on prayer and healing ever done, funded by the Templeton Foundation. It was like eight years of collecting data on subjects that had been professionally prayed for, that had patients in hospitals, real patients that had cardiac patients, that had been prayed for by multiple deeply religious people from several different religions. And it was double blind and so forth and the people didn’t know they were being prayed for and so forth.

And there was no statistical significant difference between the prayed for group and the not prayed for group, although the prayed for group did slightly worse for whatever reason, but not statistically significant. So I thought maybe because they found out that they were being prayed for by professional religious people, they thought, “Oh, I must be really sick.” But in fact, there was no difference. So no one has ever found scientifically a difference between prayer and healing.

But let’s say it happened that you still want to know—us inquiring minds want to know, how does God cure cancer? Does He go into every single cancer cell, tweak the genome to turn the cell from replicating constantly off, turns it off genetically. Is that what he does? We’d like to know if that happened. And if that’s the case, why can’t we do that? And in fact, we are trying to do that. We’re trying to figure out how to turn cancer cells off. God did it. That’s a bumper sticker.

JOHN LENNOX: Can I believe it? The end of the story. I haven’t finished my sentence. You say that’s not an explanation. It’s not a scientific explanation. Suppose we had a Ford Motorcar here, and I asked you to explain it, you give me a very good scientific explanation. If I said Henry Ford did it, that is an explanation, but it’s not a scientific one. It’s an explanation in terms of a personal agent.

And so those explanations of the Ford car are not in conflict or in competition. They’re complementary. So before you dismiss the idea that God did it as being content free, it’s not. Because the idea that God did it is saying it indicates that there’s a personal intelligent agency involved as well as maybe natural laws and principles and mechanisms and so on. So that’s the first point I’d make.

Secondly, I think you’re in danger of offering false alternatives, God or the multiverse. Don Page, who worked with Stephen Hawking, is a Christian believer who believes in the multiverse. God could create as many universes as he likes. It’s not God or the multiverse. I’m very skeptical of it as was my teacher, John Polkinghorne at Cambridge.

And when you say that the fine tuning has no effect, the first thing I thought of was Alan Sandwich, who won the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for Astronomy, the Crawford Prize. He was the discoverer of the quasar. And his response to the fine tuning at the age of about 50 was to become a Christian. In other words, to say that’s a God of the gaps, I think, is very misleading because you see, the fine tuning has been discovered as a result of a lot of science being done, wasn’t known one hundred years ago. And it’s an inference to the best explanation of scientific evidence.

I agree with you, Michael, by the way. It is one of the best arguments for theism. And many of your atheist colleagues say that. And I agree, it is one of the best arguments for theism. But it’s not a God of the gaps argument. It’s an inference to a best explanation. And quite frankly, as a scientist, I would much prefer an explanation that goes towards explaining it rather than one doesn’t explain it at all.

MICHAEL SHERMER: But just remember, it’s always okay to just say, I don’t know. We don’t know yet. We do not have a unified theory between the quantum world and the macro cosmological world.

The Problem of Fine-Tuning and Agency

JOHN LENNOX: So until that, once we have that, the fine-tuned mysteries may just go away. We just don’t know. It’s too early in the game. But Michael, there are two questions here. There’s one making an inference from fine tuning to a personal agency.

There is the other scientific question, which is fascinating: how does it work? And I think along the line, it just focuses my mind the fact you may be confusing two completely different questions. There’s a sort of scientific question, how does it work, what are the principles and why does it exist and what’s behind it. That’s where the God question comes in. Because I think I’d agree with you, God is not the same kind of explanation as science is.

My colleague at Oxford, Richard Swinburne, once said, “Science explains. I postulate a God to explain why science explains.” And it seems to me the how and the why question are very important. You can give a scientific explanation in terms of the contraction of muscles and so on as I raise this bottle to my lips. It’s a scientific explanation, but there’s an agent explanation.

I raise it to my lips because I need a drink. Those two explanations are necessary for a full description. And what I think is happening with Michael is he’s wanting just a single description to eliminate another possible description. He’s using mechanism and law to eliminate agency when I think there are evidence of agency actually in certain parts and certain situations. That’s all.

MICHAEL SHERMER: Agents, immeasurable agents.

JOHN LENNOX: Yes, but gravity is invisible, Michael. You believe in gravity, but it’s invisible.

MODERATOR: But you could wait. Let’s do one more question.

Final Question on the Problem of Evil

MODERATOR: We’ll do one more question, then we’ll have a special announcement. So let’s have the question.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: In closing, can both Dr. Lennox and Dr. Shermer give a two to three sentence summary on why they consider their position on the problem of evil to be preferable over the other position?

MODERATOR: Tough one. Two or three sentences on the spot. A tweet. We should tweet it. Go ahead.

After Lennox, Julie, what would you say?

JOHN LENNOX: Gosh, I thought it was obvious. My Christian faith in God gives me hope beyond the grave. Atheism has no solution to that. It gives me a rationale behind morality and behind the hope of ultimate justice. Atheism doesn’t give me that. That’s two sentences.

MODERATOR: Dr. Shermer?

MICHAEL SHERMER: I had a good sentence here. Of course, the promise of an afterlife and justice will be served and everything will come out right. Of course, that feels good. But shouldn’t we be working to do that now? Of course. So why are we not doing it?

Don’t worry about the next world when there’s plenty to do in this world. The promise that it will all be settled is probably a chimera. It’s probably just a product of the way we would like things to be. The promised land, the land of milk and honey, the best possible world that we could ever have and so on. Of course we all want that, but now is the time to do that.

Justice should be served now, not in the next world. The people have sinned against you and that you sinned against, that’s who you should be dealing with, not it being settled later. Justice in this world. If it’s just us then now is the time and we are the people to do it.

Transcript: The Nature of Evil and Suffering – John Lennox and Michael Shermer