Earlier in the year, John Benton interviewed Professor John Lennox, especially with his recent book Can Science Explain Everything? in mind. Here is the second part of that conversation...
John Benton: In the book you go in the direction of the Big Bang when it comes to origins. Most people’s view of the Big Bang sees matter and space itself suddenly emerging and expanding. But what happens to time? Is there an expansion somehow of time?
John Lennox: I have no idea what time is. I think one of the huge difficulties here is the lack of honesty about our ignorance. We don’t know what time is. Actually we don’t know what energy is either. I mentioned in the book that in science we use concepts, even concepts we cannot explain completely. The classic example is gravity. Newton’s equations describe how gravity works, but they do not explain what it is.
But when you say that I go in the direction of the Big Bang, all that I’m saying is that I go in the direction of believing that there’s scientific evidence for a beginning to space-time – which Scripture has been telling us for thousands of years. And, you know, the physicist of a previous generation, Fred Hoyle, coined the phrase ‘Big Bang’ as a joke because he didn’t believe in it.
John Benton: But what about the question about time?
John Lennox: All I know is that from a biblical point of view, God’s relationship to time is not the same as ours. ‘Before Abraham was, I AM.’
And Scripture gives hints that it is far more complicated than we think. Some Christians get their notion of time from an old Sunday School jingle which says: ‘and the trumpet of the Lord shall sound and time shall be no more.’ But that is based on a misreading of Revelation 10.6. The original actually refers to there being ‘no more delays’ (ESV). It is not a comment about time at all.
But the idea of time being abolished strikes me as very curious in the light of Scripture that talks about after the ages of the ages.
We need to be careful here of the influence of Greek philosophy, which talked about time and material as belonging to the more degenerative world from which we need to escape – like Narcissus. I don’t think we do at all. There is a resurrection of the physical body. And my simple logic tells me there must be a time dimension in eternity, because when we get to heaven Christ’s death will be in the past. So there will be a looking back. Now, how all that is going to sort out I just don’t know.
John Benton: What do you say about those of us who feel we have to ultimately leave room for mystery in our theology, including that of creation? Is that just a cop-out?
John Lennox: I think it has a place – a humble understanding that we are limited. Scripture uses the word mystery in several senses. One of them concerns things which we didn’t know, but are now made clear. There are lots of things that God revealed to Paul that were not known before. That’s one thing. We don’t know everything. It is just part of the human condition.
Where I get leery is when we stray into the ‘apathetic’ tradition. This is particularly found among Russian and Greek Orthodox churches. God is defined in terms of what he is not. ‘God is not this… God is not that.’ It leads to not really being able to know anything about God. It sounds very humble, but it leads in the wrong direction. ‘Well, you cannot say Jesus is God because we know about Jesus and God is not…’ And you end up with a kind of mystery that actually destroys the gospel and does not take on board that God has actually revealed stuff to us.
So mystery – yes. There’s masses of things we cannot penetrate. I’ve given you a few. We don’t know what time is. We know very little about the world to come. And yes, it’s a huge mystery. And we bow in the fact of this mystery. We cannot ultimately understand the incarnation. But we believe it to be so because it’s the only explanation for what we have in the Gospels (and indeed in experience). So as long as you are not going the line of ‘Well, it’s a mystery before which I bow and we can know about it’, there is a place for it. Anything that contradicts the facts that God has revealed is risky territory.
John Benton: In your book you espouse a gap between Genesis 1:1-2 and Genesis 1:3. Can you explain?
John Lennox: What I raise is the question that Hebrew experts like Jack Collins – who chaired the translation of the NIV and ESV – raises. I make the point that as far as the text goes you have one past in the Hebrew of Genesis 1:1-2 and from verse 3 onwards you then have the sequence of days in a different past tense.
These Hebrew scholars tell me that the difference in the tenses is to describe something that comes before something else at an indefinite time. So it just appears to me that Scripture says nothing about the actual age of the earth. Okay, I wouldn’t die for that, but nor would I fight for the opposite. In my book Seven Days that Divide the World I go into it in some detail.
That’s crucial to understand where I’m coming from on this thing. In the recent book Can Science Explain Everything? I explain that we’ve been here before with Galileo. There are places in Scripture which say that the earth doesn’t move and I’ve met about one out of a million evangelicals who still literally think that. In the book, I raised the question of how we have come to ‘contradict’ Scripture. We are not always meant to take Scripture with wooden literalism.
John Benton: You are very clear that scientific laws are descriptions of reality, but do not create reality. But it seems that scientists like the late Stephen Hawking and others try to defend the idea that the laws can create reality. What do you make of their arguments?
John Lennox: I once asked the Oxford chemist, Professor Peter Atkins, what created the universe. His answer was ‘Mathematics.’ I laughed and he was quite cross. ‘Why are you laughing?’ he said. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘that’s the silliest thing I’ve heard for a long time. Did one plus one equals two ever put £2 in your pocket?’ It’s sheer confusion.
Someone like the physicist Paul Davies, professor at Arizona State University, talks about clever laws making the universe. But it is just ludicrous. And it should be obvious that Newton’s laws of motion never moved anything.
I think the problem, John, is very simple. Einstein was dead right when he said that the scientist is a poor philosopher. Lord Rees said that Stephen Hawking knew little philosophy and no theology so we shouldn’t listen to him on either of those topics. Philosophically they often haven’t a clue. Yet they make these wild statements and they’re accepted because of their authority as scientists.
John Benton: We live in a celebrity culture.
John Lennox: Oh we do. And I keep hammering to people, almost as a mantra: ‘Not everything that a scientist says is science.’
To be continued…
