Earlier in the year John Benton interviewed Professor John Lennox, especially with his recent book Can Science Explain Everything? in mind. Here is the first part of that conversation...
John Benton: In theological terms the quest to solve the question of origins for secular sci-ence is to seek to explain Creation in terms of Providence. It desires to explain God’s one-off activity of creation by the way he upholds the world now. Is that actually a viable quest?
John Lennox: Well, my own view – and I don’t claim to be an expert theologian – is that Creation and Providence are not the same thing. Seeking to explain Creation and the sense of inauguration in terms of Providence is, to my mind, not justified by Scripture, because I believe that Creation has got a dimension of inauguration, not simply causing to exist.
John Benton: Can you unpack that?
John Lennox: The idea of trying to explain the past solely in terms of the present has revolved around a notion of creation that goes back I think to Augustine – that creation means causing to exist or holding in existence as distinct from inaugurating – and it seems to me that the NT predicates both things of Christ. He created all things and in him all things consist. He holds everything together by the word of his power. And therefore I do not expect, either theologically or scientifically, that the past can be completely explained in terms of the present.
Indeed, I think Genesis says that as clearly as it could be said. According to Genesis 1, God’s creation activity was not all at once – and that’s quite irrespective of what you believe about the days, unless you think they are somehow unpacking what happened, so to speak, in a split second. But I think the time element is clear and there is sequence with a start and a finish.
‘And God said… And God said…’ So the answer to your question as far as I’m concerned is that the present doesn’t explain the past. And that’s one of the reasons people get a little tied up when they talk about biological evolution and so on.
John Benton: Secular science has an outlook of uniformitarianism – that everything continues as it was from Creation (2 Peter 3), but Scripture indicates singularities in the unfolding of our history, with God ceasing his creation work, the Fall which has brought frustration to Creation, and the Flood. With these different assumptions, do believers and non-believers simply argue past each other concerning origins?
John Lennox: There is a danger that they do. And I think this requires quite some considerable unpacking as to what we actually believe as Christians. I believe in a God who created and who sustains the universe and has invested that with regularities. Scientists describe those regularities as ‘laws of nature’. But here comes the problem. The problem is that Christianity, as CS Lewis put it, is ‘a thoroughgoing supernatural belief system’.
From the days of David Hume, you have this notion that many of my scientific colleagues espouse (often rather unthinkingly), that miracles violate laws of nature. They say that therefore you can either have science and a description of nature which is based on uniformity of what’s happened in the past will happen in the future, or you can believe in miracles and be an intellectual idiot. But I think that is not the case at all.
Even Hume recognised the problem of induction, that no amount of experience of the past can guarantee that tomorrow is going to be the same.
Bertrand Russell tells a lovely story of the ‘inductivist turkey’. The turkey was fed for 364 days a year and expected to be fed on the 365th. He wasn’t. Instead he was used to feed a lot of people: Christmas had arrived. So Hume had a problem and recognised it.
Let me borrow an analogy from CS Lewis, but use my own words. If I stay in a hotel tonight and put £100 in a drawer and do the same tomorrow night I’ve got £200. But if I wake on the third morning and find £50 I don’t say ‘the laws of arithmetic have been broken’. Rather I say ‘the laws of England have been broken’.
Think about the NT miracles. Let’s take the central ones of the incarnation and the resurrection. They don’t break the laws of nature in any sense whatsoever because, as a Christian, I’m not claiming that Christ rose by natural processes. What I’m claiming is that God raised him from the dead. There is input from outside the system. The naturalistic world view, which is espoused by many (but thankfully not all) scientists, claims that the universe is a closed system of cause and effect. But going back to my hotel room, you see the drawer I thought was a closed system of cause and effect wasn’t. It was an open system into which a thief could put his or her hand. Likewise the universe is an open system. There is cause and effect certainly, laws certainly, regularities. But God can intervene.
Indeed I would go further than that. If we don’t see the regularities in advance we would never recognise a miracle. So recognition of genuine miracle actually depends on belief in the almost uniformity of nature.
So, to use your word, there is a sequence of singularities in Scripture – the origin of the universe, the origin of life, the origin of humans, the incarnation, etc. There aren’t many of them, but they are vastly important and science and the laws of nature cannot forbid that.
You see, the word ‘law’ can be a problem. We tend to think of it in a forensic sense. ‘You must not park there’. So if you break the law you’re in trouble. And we push that on to the laws of nature. ‘God can’t break his own laws.’ That’s nonsense, because they are not moral laws. They’re not. They are simply descriptions of what normally happens.
John Benton: Some scientists try to explain the apparently fine-tuned nature of the universe suited to human life (the anthropic principle) by the fact that we could not observe the universe if it were not so. They postulate an infinite number of ‘universes’ and say that we just happen to be in the right one. How do you respond to that idea?
John Lennox: I don’t think I mentioned the multiverse idea in Can Science Explain Everything? You are ranging a bit here. But with John Polkinghorne I believe the idea is extremely speculative. In the multiverse solution there is no access to other universes and we cannot prove they exist.
The book to refer to if you want my views on the multiverse is my book God and Stephen Hawking. But to answer your question, Stephen Hawking had a collaborator who works in Canada at the moment, who is a believer and wrote nine or ten papers with Hawking. He’s a Christian who believes in the multiverse and he makes the point that God could create as many universes as he likes. There is no philosophical way of deducing the absence of God from a multiverse whatsoever.
And then there is the book by Collins, I think. He points out that this idea just pushes the fine-tuning one stage backwards because the multiverse has to be fine-tuned as well.
My view is that it is a red herring almost entirely. So it comes down to this. What would you rather have – a multitude of universes that we can’t detect or a single universe created by a single Creator?
To be continued…
