Professor John Lennox considers the question and explains the pressures he has been put under as a Christian
Surely you can’t be a scientist and believe in God these days?’
It’s a viewpoint I have heard expressed by many people over the years.
In reply, I like to ask a very scientific question: ‘Why not?’ ‘Well,’ the answer comes back, ‘science has given us such marvellous explanations of the universe and demonstrates that God is just not necessary. Belief in God is old fashioned. It belongs to the days when people didn’t really understand the universe, and just took the lazy way out and said that ‘God did it’. That sort of ‘God of the gaps thinking’ simply won’t do any more.’
I sigh inwardly, and prepare myself for a long conversation in which I try to untangle the many misunderstandings and half-truths absorbed uncritically from the cultural soup we swim in.
A common viewpoint
It’s a viewpoint supported by some powerful voices. Stephen Weinberg, for example, a Physics Nobel Prize winner said: The world needs to wake up from the long nightmare of religion. Anything we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done, and may in fact be our greatest contribution to civilisation.1
I hope you didn’t miss the rather sinister-sounding totalitarian element in this statement: ‘Anything we scientists can do…’
This attitude is not new. I first met it 50 years ago while studying at Cambridge University. I found myself at a formal college dinner sitting beside another Nobel Prize winner. I had never met a scientist of such distinction. I tried to ask him some questions. For instance, how did his science shape his worldview—his big picture of the meaning of the universe? In particular, had his wide-ranging studies led him to reflect on the existence of God.
‘Give up this childish faith’
It was clear that he was not comfortable with that question. However, at the end of the meal, he invited me to come to his study. He had also invited two or three other senior academics but no other students. I was invited to sit, and, so far as I recall, they remained standing.
He said: ‘Lennox, do you want a career in science?’ ‘Yes, sir,’ I replied.
‘Then,’ he said, ‘in front of witnesses, tonight, you must give up this childish faith in God. If you do not, then it will cripple you intellectually and you will suffer by comparison with your peers. You simply will not make it.’
Talk about pressure! I had never experienced anything like it before.
I sat in the chair paralysed and shocked by the effrontery and unexpectedness of the onslaught. I didn’t really know what to say, but eventually I managed to blurt out: ‘Sir, what have you got to offer me that is better than what I have got?’ In response, he offered me the concept of ‘Creative Evolution’ put forward in 1907 by French philosopher Henri Bergson.
In fact, thanks to C.S. Lewis, I knew a little about Bergson and replied that I could not see how Bergson’s philosophy was enough to base an entire worldview upon and provide a foundation for meaning, morality and life. With a shaking voice, and as respectfully as I could, I told the group standing around me that I found the biblical worldview vastly more enriching and the evidence for its truth compelling, and so, with all due respect, I would take the risk and stick with it.2
It was a remarkable situation. Here was a brilliant scientist trying to bully me into giving up Christianity. I have thought many times since that, if it had been the other way around and I had been an atheist in the chair surrounded by Christian academics pressuring me to give up my atheism, it would have caused reverberations around the university, and probably have ended with disciplinary proceedings against the professors involved.
But that rather scary incident put steel into my heart and mind. I resolved to do my best to be as good a scientist as I could and, if ever I had the opportunity, to encourage people to think about the big questions of God and science and make up their own minds without being bullied or pressured.
The dark side of academia
I learned another valuable lesson that day: about the existence of a dark side to academia. There are some scientists who set out with preconceived ideas, do not really wish to discuss evidence, and appear to be fixated not on the pursuit of truth but on propagating the notions that science and God do not mix and that those who believe in God are simply ignorant. This is simply not true.
What’s more, you don’t need to have a great deal of insight to see that it is false. Think of the Nobel Prize in Physics, for example. It was won in 2013 by Peter Higgs, a Scotsman who is an atheist, for his ground-breaking work on subatomic particles, and his prediction, later proved, of the existence of the Higgs boson. Some years before that it was won by William Phillips, an American who is a Christian.
Nobel Prize winners
If science and God do not mix, there would be no Christian Nobel Prize winners. In fact, between 1901 and 2000 over 60% of Nobel Laureates were Christians.3
According to 100 Years of Nobel Prizes (2005) by Baruch Aba Shalev, a review of Nobel Prizes awarded between 1901 and 2000, 65.4% of Nobel Prize Laureates, have identified Christianity in its various forms as their religious preference (423 prizes). Overall, Christians have won a total of 78.3% of all the Nobel Prizes in Peace, 72.5% in Chemistry, 65.3% in Physics, 62% in Medicine, 54% in Economics and 49.5% of all Literature awards.
I want to suggest that what divides Professors Higgs and Phillips is not their physics or their standing as scientists – they’ve both won the Nobel Prize. What divides them is their worldview. Higgs is an atheist and Phillips is a Christian. It follows that the claim of those academics who tried to intimidate me in Cambridge so many years ago – that if you wish to be scientifically respectable you have to be an atheist – is obviously false. There cannot be an essential conflict between being a scientist and having faith in God.
However, there is a very real conflict between the worldviews held by these two brilliant men: atheism and theism.
What Exactly Is Atheism?
Strictly speaking, atheism simply means lack of belief in God. However, that does not mean that atheists do not have a worldview. You cannot deny the existence of God without asserting a whole raft of beliefs about the nature of the world. That is why Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion is not just a one-page tract stating that he doesn’t believe in God. It is a lengthy volume dedicated to his atheistic worldview, naturalism, which holds that this universe/multiverse is all that exists, that what scientists call ‘mass energy’ is the fundamental stuff of the universe, and that there is nothing else.
Physicist Sean Carroll, in his best-selling book The Big Picture, explains how naturalism views humans: ‘We humans are blobs of organised mud, which through the impersonal workings of nature’s patterns have developed the capacity to contemplate and cherish and engage with the intimidating complexity of the world around us ... The meaning we find in life is not transcendent…’4
This is the worldview in which many atheists put their faith. My worldview is Christian theism. I believe that there is an intelligent God who created, ordered and upholds the universe. He made human beings in his image, meaning that they have been endowed with the capacity not only to understand the universe around them but also to get to know and to enjoy fellowship with God himself. For Christians, life has a gloriously transcendent meaning. I believe that science, far from undermining this view, strongly supports it.
This article is an edited extract from Can Science Explain Everything? by John Lennox, recently published by The Good Book Company and is used with permission.
John Lennox is a Northern Irish mathematician specialising in group theory, a philosopher of science and a Christian apologist. He is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and an Emeritus Fellow in Mathematics and Philosophy of Science at Green Templeton College, Oxford University.
