John C. Lennox > Quotes

“Nonsense remains nonsense, even when talked by world-famous scientists.”
― John C. Lennox

“Richard Dawkins regards faith as an evil to be eliminated; he takes all religious faith to be blind faith. (Dawkins says) ‘Scientific belief is based on publicly checkable evidence, religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its joy, shouted from the rooftops.’ However, taking Dawkins own advice we ask: where is the evidence that religious faith is not based on evidence? Mainstream Christianity will insist that faith and evidence are inseparable. Indeed, faith is a response to evidence, not a rejoicing in the absence of evidence. The apostle Paul says what many pioneers of modern science believed, that nature itself is part of the evidence for the existence of God ,‘ Since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities- his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made. So that men are without an excuse.’ Dawkins’ definition of faith turns out to be the direct opposite of the biblical one. Curious that he does not seem to be aware of the discrepancy.”
― John Lennox

“It's much easier, after all, to learn mathematics from someone who's made a few mistakes. It's impossible to learn it from someone who always gets it right.”
― John Lennox

“Faith is not a leap in the dark; it’s the exact opposite. It’s a commitment based on evidence… It is irrational to reduce all faith to blind faith and then subject it to ridicule. That provides a very anti-intellectual and convenient way of avoiding intelligent discussion.”
― John Lennox

“Indeed, faith is a response to evidence, not a rejoicing in the absence of evidence.”
― John Lennox, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?

“The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.”
― John C. Lennox, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?

“God is not an alternative to science as an explanation, he is not to be understood merely as a God of the gaps, he is the ground of all explanation: it is his existence which gives rise to the very possibility of explanation, scientific or otherwise. It is important to stress this because influential authors such as Richard Dawkins will insist on conceiving of God as an explanatory alternative to science – an idea that is nowhere to be found in theological reflection of any depth. Dawkins is therefore tilting at a windmill - dismissing a concept of God that no serious thinker believes in anyway. Such activity is not necessarily to be regarded as a mark of intellectual sophistication.”
― John Lennox, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?

“In China we can criticize Darwin, but not the government; in America you can criticize the government, but not Darwin.”
― John C. Lennox, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?

“God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence – why there is something rather than nothing.”
― John C. Lennox, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?

“What is consciousness?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he replied, after a little hesitation. “Never mind,” I said. “Let’s think of something easier. What is energy?” “Well,” he said, “we can measure it and write down the equations governing its conservation.” “Yes, I know, but that was not my question. My question was: what is it?” “We don’t know,” he said with a grin, “and I think you were aware of that.” “Yes, like you I have read Feynman and he says that no one knows what energy is. That brings me to my main point. Would I be right in thinking that you were about to dismiss me (and my belief in God) if I failed to explain the divine and human nature of Christ?” He grinned again, and said nothing. I went on: “Well, by the same token, would you be happy if I now dismiss you and all your knowledge of physics because you cannot explain to me the nature of energy? After all, energy is surely by definition much less complex than the God who created it?” “Please don’t!” he said. “No, I am not going to do that, but I am going to put another question to you: why do you believe in the concepts of consciousness and energy, even though you do not understand them fully? Is it not because of the explanatory power of those concepts?” “I see what you are driving at,” he replied. “You believe that Jesus Christ is both God and man because that is the only explanation that has the power to make sense of what we know of him?” “Exactly.”
― John C. Lennox, Against the Flow: The inspiration of Daniel in an age of relativism

“It would be a pity if, in a desire (rightly) to treat the Bible as more than a book, we ended up treating it as less than a book by not permitting it the range and use of language, order, and figures of speech that are (or ought to be) familiar to us from our ordinary experience of conversation and reading.”
― John C. Lennox, Seven Days That Divide the World: The Beginning According to Genesis and Science

“To the majority of those who have reflected deeply and written about the origin and nature of the universe, it has seemed that it points beyond itself to a source which is non-physical and of great intelligence and power.”
― John C. Lennox, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?

“this world is not going to be trampled and smashed by brutal, amoral regimes for ever. A day will come when God will bring to an end the state war-machines, the terrorist bombs, the consummate evil of totalitarian oppression, the gas chambers, death camps, killing fields, and countless other infamous instruments of death. There will be a judgment.”
― John C. Lennox, Against the Flow: The inspiration of Daniel in an age of relativism

“The story of Daniel and his friends is a clarion call to our generation to be courageous; not to lose our nerve and allow the expression of our faith to be diluted and squeezed out of the public space and thus rendered spineless and ineffective. Their story will also tell us that this objective is not likely to be achieved without cost.”
― John C. Lennox, Against the Flow: The inspiration of Daniel in an age of relativism

“The world of strict naturalism in which clever mathematical laws all by themselves bring the universe and life into existence, is pure (and, one might add, poor) fiction. To call it science-fiction would besmirch the name of science.”
― John C. Lennox, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?

“And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way towards him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us. (Acts 17:26”
― John C. Lennox, Against the Flow: The inspiration of Daniel in an age of relativism

“Of course, I reject atheism because I believe Christianity to be true. But I also reject it because I am a scientist. How could I be impressed with a worldview that undermines the very rationality we need to do science? Science and God mix very well. It is science and atheism that do not mix.”
― John C. Lennox, Can Science Explain Everything?

“It is crucial that a healthy scepticism be applied when interpreting potentially miraculous events, lest the integrity and rationality of the religious perspective be brought into question. The only thing that will kill the possibility of miracles more quickly than a committed materialism is the claiming of miracle status for everyday events for which natural explanations are readily at hand.4”
― John C. Lennox, Gunning for God: Why the New Atheists are missing the target

“For, the statement that only science can lead to truth is not itself deduced from science. It is not a scientific statement but rather a statement about science, that is, it is a metascientific statement. Therefore, if scientism’s basic principle is true, the statement expressing scientism must be false. Scientism refutes itself. Hence it is incoherent.”
― John C. Lennox, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?

“Whether you believe in Jesus, Buddha, the Beatles, crystals, mother earth, or anything else that takes your interest, all are held to be on the same footing; all have equal validity for the relativist.”
― John C. Lennox, Against the Flow: The inspiration of Daniel in an age of relativism

“But that does not alter the fact that mainstream Christianity will insist that faith and evidence are inseparable. Indeed, faith is a response to evidence, not a rejoicing in the absence of evidence.”
― John C. Lennox, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?

“There is a real conflict, but it is not science versus religion. It is theism versus atheism, and there are scientists on both sides.”
― John C. Lennox, God and Stephen Hawking

“I cannot believe that our existence in this universe is a mere quirk of fate, an accident of history, an incidental blip in the great cosmic drama. Our involvement is too intimate… We are truly meant to be here.”
― John C. Lennox, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?

“Evreni işleten mekanizmalarla onu var eden ya da idame ettiren sebebi birbirine karıştırmamalıyız”
― John C. Lennox, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?

“We can therefore express the major elements in the New Atheists’ agenda as follows: Religion is a dangerous delusion: it leads to violence and war. We must therefore get rid of religion: science will achieve that. We do not need God to be good: atheism can provide a perfectly adequate base for ethics.”
― John C. Lennox, Gunning for God: Why the New Atheists are missing the target

“It is rather ironical that in the sixteenth century some people resisted advances in science because they seemed to threaten belief in God; whereas in the twentieth century scientific ideas of a beginning have been resisted because they threatened to increase the plausibility of belief in God.”
― John C. Lennox, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?

“Judah had failed to grasp that God’s loyalty to his own character, and therefore to his own creatures, has serious implications. Some of Judah’s leaders had fallen into thinking that, because their nation had been chosen to play a special role for God in history, it did not really matter how the leaders or the nation behaved. This was dangerously irresponsible and undermined the moral fibre of the people, because it led to the rationalization of corrupt and immoral behaviour that was incompatible with the law of God, albeit widely practised in the surrounding nations.”
― John C. Lennox, Against the Flow: The inspiration of Daniel in an age of relativism

“When Sir Isaac Newton discovered the universal law of gravitation he did not say, ‘I have discovered a mechanism that accounts for planetary motion, therefore there is no agent God who designed it.’ Quite the opposite: precisely because he understood how it worked, he was moved to increased admiration for the God who had designed it that way.”
― John C. Lennox, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?

“One of Richard Dawkins’s main God Delusion arguments is that, if God created everything, we would have to ask who created God. But the very asking of this question reveals at once that Dawkins has in mind a created God: “Who created God?” Created gods certainly are a delusion.”
― John C. Lennox, Seven Days That Divide the World: The Beginning According to Genesis and Science

“To postulate a trillion-trillion other universes, rather than one God, in order to explain the orderliness of our universe, seems the height of irrationality.”
― John C. Lennox, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?