What do you think?
Rate this book
Miracles: Is Belief in the Supernatural Irrational?
VeriTalks Volume 2, Miracles, is adapted from The Veritas Forum at Harvard University in 2012. Using crisp logic to cut through common confusions about faith and science, Oxford mathematician John Lennox argues for the existence of God, the possibility of miracles, and the actuality of one extraordinary the resurrection of Christ. Each volume in the VeriTalks series is a transcription of a live Veritas Forum talk and audience Q&A interspersed with discussion questions to deepen your engagement with the material, ideally in the company of friends.
62 pages, Paperback
First published September 2, 2013
42 people are currently reading
253 people want to read
About the author
John C. Lennox
71 books924 followersJohn Carson Lennox is Professor of Mathematics in the University of Oxford, Fellow in Mathematics and the Philosophy of Science, and Pastoral Advisor at Green Templeton College, Oxford. He is also an Adjunct Lecturer at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford University and at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics and is a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum. In addition, he teaches for the Oxford Strategic Leadership Programme at the Executive Education Centre, Said Business School, Oxford University.
He studied at the Royal School Armagh, Northern Ireland and was Exhibitioner and Senior Scholar at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University from which he took his MA, MMath and PhD. He worked for many years in the Mathematics Institute at the University of Wales in Cardiff which awarded him a DSc for his research. He also holds an MA and DPhil from Oxford University and an MA in Bioethics from the University of Surrey. He was a Senior Alexander Von Humboldt Fellow at the Universities of Würzburg and Freiburg in Germany. He has lectured extensively in North America, Eastern and Western Europe and Australasia on mathematics, the philosophy of science and the intellectual defence of Christianity.
He has written a number of books on the interface between science, philosophy and theology. These include God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (2009), God and Stephen Hawking, a response to The Grand Design (2011), Gunning for God, on the new atheism (2011), and Seven Days that Divide the World, on the early chapters of Genesis (2011). Furthermore, in addition to over seventy published mathematical papers, he is the co-author of two research level texts in algebra in the Oxford Mathematical Monographs series.
He studied at the Royal School Armagh, Northern Ireland and was Exhibitioner and Senior Scholar at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University from which he took his MA, MMath and PhD. He worked for many years in the Mathematics Institute at the University of Wales in Cardiff which awarded him a DSc for his research. He also holds an MA and DPhil from Oxford University and an MA in Bioethics from the University of Surrey. He was a Senior Alexander Von Humboldt Fellow at the Universities of Würzburg and Freiburg in Germany. He has lectured extensively in North America, Eastern and Western Europe and Australasia on mathematics, the philosophy of science and the intellectual defence of Christianity.
He has written a number of books on the interface between science, philosophy and theology. These include God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (2009), God and Stephen Hawking, a response to The Grand Design (2011), Gunning for God, on the new atheism (2011), and Seven Days that Divide the World, on the early chapters of Genesis (2011). Furthermore, in addition to over seventy published mathematical papers, he is the co-author of two research level texts in algebra in the Oxford Mathematical Monographs series.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
October 18, 2018
Convincing defense that Christian faith is based on facts and that pursuing the truth is possible and rewarding.
I like the honest way Dr. Lennox answers questions about truth. His friendships and conversations with people who hold opposite viewpoints make his arguments authentic and more convincing.
I recommend this book to everyone who doubts whether the Christian faith is based on facts or who is convinced it is not. Be challenged by this clear-thinking mathematician who convincingly shows that believing the truth of Jesus is not contrary to logical thinking.
I like the honest way Dr. Lennox answers questions about truth. His friendships and conversations with people who hold opposite viewpoints make his arguments authentic and more convincing.
I recommend this book to everyone who doubts whether the Christian faith is based on facts or who is convinced it is not. Be challenged by this clear-thinking mathematician who convincingly shows that believing the truth of Jesus is not contrary to logical thinking.
June 19, 2020
This talk: "Miracles: Is Belief in the Supernatural Irrational?" is a written version of John Lennox's talk at The Veritas [Truth] Forum at Harvard University in 2013. Whaaat?!!?!? Harvard has stuff like that??? Well, ACTUALLY [My niece Rosie's voice], Harvard’s motto IS Veritas. But that is not what it used to be. The original motto still adorns one of their main buildings: Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae. Truth for Christ and the Church. The time has come for EVERYONE to revisit that original meaning.
Origins
The Oxford English Dictionary describes a miracle as: “a marvellous event occurring within human experience which cannot have been brought about by human power or by the operation of any natural agency and must therefore be ascribed to the special intervention of the deity or some supernatural being.” (2-3)
Of course, not all atheists are as extreme as Richard Dawkins. Jurgen Habermas, a leading German intellectual who’s an atheist, regards religion as an important source for creating meaning. Indeed, he warns Europe that our educational system, our legal system, our human rights are all derivative from the Judeo-Christian tradition. And interestingly he, one of the leading intellectual atheists on the Continent, adds: “To this day, we have no other source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.” That’s a fascinating statement for an intellectual atheist.
The Real Conflict: Worldviews
How can science and belief in God be essentially incompatible when, for instance, so many leading scientists at my own University of Oxford believe in God? I can name the heads of several scientific departments, world-famous in their fields—nanotechnology, electrical engineering and so on—who are believers in God. And in this country, just to name one, William Phillips, Nobel Prize winner for physics is a believer in God. (5)
The First Confusion: Nature of Faith
When I debated Princeton professor Peter Singer in Australia recently, he started by saying that his chief objection to religious belief was that people remained in the faith in which they’d been brought up with the implication that I, with my Christian parents, was a prime example.
So, just to redress the balance, I asked him publicly about his parents. I said, “Peter, were your parents atheists?” And he said, “Yes, they were.” So, I said, “You remained in the faith in which you were brought up then.” “Oh, but,” he said, “it isn’t a faith.” “Really,” I said, “I was under the impression you believed it.”
Myth: Faith is a religious concept.
…the attitude of the new atheists who regard faith as a religious word which, by definition, means believing where there is no evidence. In their view, atheism isn’t a faith.
It is very important to see, however, that atheism is just as much a belief system as theism. The first believes that this universe is the ultimate reality. The latter believes that God is the ultimate reality. So, the burning question is: What evidence is there for the veritas of either of them, the truth of either of them? In particular, what way does science point?
Myth: Faith is not evidence-based.
…the kind of faith that the new atheists are describing is what most of us would call blind faith, which we all admit is dangerous. But faith in its ordinary dictionary sense derives from the word fides—it means “trust”—and all of us know that we don’t usually trust people unless there’s evidence to do so. (We (7) don’t trust the banks either, unless there’s evidence to do so, but that’s another story!) The banking crisis has at least taught all of us the difference between evidence-based faith and non-evidenced-based faith.
I cannot, of course, speak for other religions. They must rightly speak for themselves. But I’d like to make it very clear that Christianity is an evidence-based faith. One of the central statements of the Gospel of John is: “These things are written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing, you might have life in his name” (John 20:31). In other words, “Here’s the evidence. I’ve selected it in order for it to provide a basis for your trust, for your confidence, for your faith.”
What way does science point? I claim that science points towards God. The atheists claim it points in the opposite direction. I want to call as a witness, first of all, the history of science.
Myth: Faith and science are historical enemies.
It is no accident that when Harvard was founded, belief in God was written into its motto and onto its philosophical building. Because historians of science like my [John Lennox] former colleague at Oxford, John Hedley Brooke, usually will agree with some version of what is often called Merton’s Thesis. The best formulation of it, I think, is due to C.S. Lewis who said, “Men became scientific because they expected law in nature, and they expected law in nature because they believed in a law giver.” The great pioneers of science—Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Clerk Maxwell, Babbage and so on—were all believers in God.
Some years ago I had the opportunity to give the very first lecture on the topic of God and science in The University of Novosibirsk in Siberia. I was invited by the Provost of the (8) University to give a lecture on why a mathematician believes in God. It was the very first lecture on that topic in the university in 75 years.
When I mentioned the fact that Newton and Galileo were believers, I noticed anger rising in the front row of heavyweight professors. So, I stopped and I said, “What’s the matter?” And they said, “Why were we never told this?” And I said, “Can’t you guess?” They’d never been told. It was totally new to them that the founders of modern science were believers in God.
So, what has happened? Why is it that I’m even having to give a lecture on this topic at Harvard? Why isn’t it that we do still believe that there’s something more than the natural world if there is such a deep-seated harmony between science and belief in God?
Myth: Science is the only way to truth.
Alex Rosenberg in his book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality says: “The mistake is to think that there is any more to reality than the laws of nature that science discovers.” Rosenberg espouses scientism: the notion that science is the only way to truth.
Bertrand Russell summarized this viewpoint by saying, “What science cannot tell us, mankind cannot know.” Now, Russell was quite a brilliant logician but his logic failed him badly when he made that statement.
Is it a statement of science? No. (9)
Far more sensible is the view of Nobel Prize winner Sir Peter Medawar who said, “It’s so easy to see the limits of science. It cannot answer the questions of a child: Where am I coming from? What is the meaning of life? Where am I going to?” We need to go outside of science for answers to such questions.
…science does not define the limit of rationality. Rationality is bigger than science. Einstein, of course, saw it clearly. He said, “You can speak of the ethical foundation of science but you cannot speak of the scientific foundations of ethics.” He saw that there were realms into which science cannot go.
Of course, that’s obvious at Harvard, isn’t it? I do believe you still have some humanities departments left, don’t you? Because if science was the only way to truth, you’d have to shut those departments tomorrow.
The very existence of the humanities shows that scientism is false. (10)
Myth: God of the gaps.
In Novosibirsk, I (John Lennox) was criticized by one of the professors. He came up to the blackboard, drew a stroke of lightning and said, "This is absurd, what we're listening to. You see, the ancients used to believe that the gods were behind thunder and lightning. And then we learned to do some atmospheric physics and we found it wasn't the gods. Exit space for God." That's the concept of the God of the gaps: "I can't explain it, therefore, God did it." A bit more science, a bit less space for God.
Now, if you believe in a God like that, it's clear that you've got to make a choice between God and science because of the way in which you have defined God: as science increases, by definition, God decreases. But what if you don't believe in a God like that? I certainly don't. My God is not a God of the gaps. He's the God of the whole show, both of the bits we don't understand and the bits we do.
When Isaac Newton discovered his law of gravitation, he didn't say, "Wonderful. I've now got a law and a mathematical description of how it works; I don't need God." He didn't do that. What he did was write the most brilliant book in the history of science, The Principia Mathematica, expressing the hope that it would persuade the thinking person to believe in God.
In other words, the more he understood of science, the more he admired the genius of the God who did it that way. His God was not a God of the gaps.
Myth: Mechanisms exclude agents.
Steven Hawking in a (12) recent book (to which I've responded in my little book, God and Steven Hawking) says we've got to choose between God and gravity. But this is nonsense as a simple illustration will show.
If I were to have a Ford Galaxy motorcar here and said to you, "Look, I want to offer you two explanations for this car. The one is the law of internal combustion and mechanical engineering: a law-mechanism explanation. The other is Henry Ford. Please choose." You'd say, "That is absurd… You need both explanations."
Now, this is extremely important. To realize that explanation comes in different kinds. If you want a complete explanation of the Ford Galaxy, you have to have a law-mechanism explanation--the scientific one--and you have to have an agent explanation, in terms of Henry Ford.
Please notice these different kinds of explanation do not contradict each other. Yet the idea is going around, spread virulently by one of the Dawkins 'memes,' I suppose, that you must choose between them. In philosophical terms that is to commit a very elementary category mistake.
The existence--and I'm wording this very carefully--the existence of a mechanism that does something is not, in itself, an argument for the non-existence of an agent who designed that mechanism.
There is, therefore, no necessary conflict between scientific explanations of how the universe works and belief in God who created and sustains that universe. We must not assume that there's only one level of explanation. (13)
The Role of Faith in Science
...it is a widespread myth that faith: A) is a purely religious concept and B) means believing where there's no evidence. Both of those definitions are wrong. I've discussed the second, now let's come to the first.
What about the role of faith in science? It is vastly important, of course. Einstein saw that every scientist has as a fundamental belief that the universe is rationally intelligible. He could not imagine a scientist without, as he put it, "that faith."
Let's think about it this way. Nobel Prizewinner Eugene Wigner wrote a wonderful paper in 1961 that is much loved of mathematicians. It is entitled, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics.
The issue is this: How is it that a bright Harvard mathematician, thinking in her mind in here, comes up with equations that describe the universe out there? How does that work? Reflection on it led Einstein to say, "The only incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it's comprehensible." [Which I think comes from: “Science and Religion” in The Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion © Jewish Theological Seminary, 1941, when he said, “Though religion may be that which determines the goal, it has, nevertheless, learned from science, in the broadest sense, what means will contribute to the attainment of the goals it has set up. But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”]
Naturalism undermines the search for truth.
Einstein’s comment leads me to claim that one of the greatest evidences that naturalism is false is the very fact that we can do science.
It starts with something Darwin wrote. Let me read it to you: “With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions in such a mind?”
That statement is at the moment receiving considerable attention for the following reason. Many people hold that the driving force of the natural processes that eventually produced (15) our human cognitive faculties were not primarily concerned with truth at all but with survival. And we all know what has generally happened and still happens to truth when individuals or commercial enterprises or nations motivated by what Dawkins calls their “selfish genes” feel themselves threatened in the struggle for survival. They are essentially obliged to regard thought as some kind of neurophysiological phenomenon. And from the evolutionary perspective, the neurophysiology might, of course, be adaptive.
But why, for one moment, would one think that beliefs caused by the neurophysiology should be mostly true? After all, as the chemist J.B.S. Haldane pointed out long ago: “If the thoughts in my mind are just motions of atoms in my brain, a mechanism has arisen by mindless, unguided processes, why should I believe anything it tells me, including the fact that it’s made of atoms?”
One of America’s leading philosophers, Alvin Plantinga, draws out the implication this way: “If Dawkins is right and we are the product of mindless, unguided natural processes, then he has given us strong reason to doubt the reliability of human cognitive faculties and therefore, inevitably to doubt the validity of any belief that they produce including Dawkins’ own science and his atheism. His biology and his belief in naturalism would therefore appear to be at war with each other in a conflict that has nothing to do with God.”
I suggest to you, therefore, ladies and gentlemen, that it’s not irrational to believe in supernature. What is irrational is to believe in naturalism. The boot is entirely on the other foot.
Atheistic reductionism undermines the foundations of the very rationality needed to construct any argument of any kind, whatsoever. The new atheists have signally failed to appreciate the catastrophic implications of their view for science. (16)
God's intervention in his life:
https://www.ebaumsworld.com/videos/ch...
Origins
The Oxford English Dictionary describes a miracle as: “a marvellous event occurring within human experience which cannot have been brought about by human power or by the operation of any natural agency and must therefore be ascribed to the special intervention of the deity or some supernatural being.” (2-3)
Of course, not all atheists are as extreme as Richard Dawkins. Jurgen Habermas, a leading German intellectual who’s an atheist, regards religion as an important source for creating meaning. Indeed, he warns Europe that our educational system, our legal system, our human rights are all derivative from the Judeo-Christian tradition. And interestingly he, one of the leading intellectual atheists on the Continent, adds: “To this day, we have no other source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.” That’s a fascinating statement for an intellectual atheist.
The Real Conflict: Worldviews
How can science and belief in God be essentially incompatible when, for instance, so many leading scientists at my own University of Oxford believe in God? I can name the heads of several scientific departments, world-famous in their fields—nanotechnology, electrical engineering and so on—who are believers in God. And in this country, just to name one, William Phillips, Nobel Prize winner for physics is a believer in God. (5)
The First Confusion: Nature of Faith
When I debated Princeton professor Peter Singer in Australia recently, he started by saying that his chief objection to religious belief was that people remained in the faith in which they’d been brought up with the implication that I, with my Christian parents, was a prime example.
So, just to redress the balance, I asked him publicly about his parents. I said, “Peter, were your parents atheists?” And he said, “Yes, they were.” So, I said, “You remained in the faith in which you were brought up then.” “Oh, but,” he said, “it isn’t a faith.” “Really,” I said, “I was under the impression you believed it.”
Myth: Faith is a religious concept.
…the attitude of the new atheists who regard faith as a religious word which, by definition, means believing where there is no evidence. In their view, atheism isn’t a faith.
It is very important to see, however, that atheism is just as much a belief system as theism. The first believes that this universe is the ultimate reality. The latter believes that God is the ultimate reality. So, the burning question is: What evidence is there for the veritas of either of them, the truth of either of them? In particular, what way does science point?
Myth: Faith is not evidence-based.
…the kind of faith that the new atheists are describing is what most of us would call blind faith, which we all admit is dangerous. But faith in its ordinary dictionary sense derives from the word fides—it means “trust”—and all of us know that we don’t usually trust people unless there’s evidence to do so. (We (7) don’t trust the banks either, unless there’s evidence to do so, but that’s another story!) The banking crisis has at least taught all of us the difference between evidence-based faith and non-evidenced-based faith.
I cannot, of course, speak for other religions. They must rightly speak for themselves. But I’d like to make it very clear that Christianity is an evidence-based faith. One of the central statements of the Gospel of John is: “These things are written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing, you might have life in his name” (John 20:31). In other words, “Here’s the evidence. I’ve selected it in order for it to provide a basis for your trust, for your confidence, for your faith.”
What way does science point? I claim that science points towards God. The atheists claim it points in the opposite direction. I want to call as a witness, first of all, the history of science.
Myth: Faith and science are historical enemies.
It is no accident that when Harvard was founded, belief in God was written into its motto and onto its philosophical building. Because historians of science like my [John Lennox] former colleague at Oxford, John Hedley Brooke, usually will agree with some version of what is often called Merton’s Thesis. The best formulation of it, I think, is due to C.S. Lewis who said, “Men became scientific because they expected law in nature, and they expected law in nature because they believed in a law giver.” The great pioneers of science—Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Clerk Maxwell, Babbage and so on—were all believers in God.
Some years ago I had the opportunity to give the very first lecture on the topic of God and science in The University of Novosibirsk in Siberia. I was invited by the Provost of the (8) University to give a lecture on why a mathematician believes in God. It was the very first lecture on that topic in the university in 75 years.
When I mentioned the fact that Newton and Galileo were believers, I noticed anger rising in the front row of heavyweight professors. So, I stopped and I said, “What’s the matter?” And they said, “Why were we never told this?” And I said, “Can’t you guess?” They’d never been told. It was totally new to them that the founders of modern science were believers in God.
So, what has happened? Why is it that I’m even having to give a lecture on this topic at Harvard? Why isn’t it that we do still believe that there’s something more than the natural world if there is such a deep-seated harmony between science and belief in God?
Myth: Science is the only way to truth.
Alex Rosenberg in his book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality says: “The mistake is to think that there is any more to reality than the laws of nature that science discovers.” Rosenberg espouses scientism: the notion that science is the only way to truth.
Bertrand Russell summarized this viewpoint by saying, “What science cannot tell us, mankind cannot know.” Now, Russell was quite a brilliant logician but his logic failed him badly when he made that statement.
Is it a statement of science? No. (9)
Far more sensible is the view of Nobel Prize winner Sir Peter Medawar who said, “It’s so easy to see the limits of science. It cannot answer the questions of a child: Where am I coming from? What is the meaning of life? Where am I going to?” We need to go outside of science for answers to such questions.
…science does not define the limit of rationality. Rationality is bigger than science. Einstein, of course, saw it clearly. He said, “You can speak of the ethical foundation of science but you cannot speak of the scientific foundations of ethics.” He saw that there were realms into which science cannot go.
Of course, that’s obvious at Harvard, isn’t it? I do believe you still have some humanities departments left, don’t you? Because if science was the only way to truth, you’d have to shut those departments tomorrow.
The very existence of the humanities shows that scientism is false. (10)
Myth: God of the gaps.
In Novosibirsk, I (John Lennox) was criticized by one of the professors. He came up to the blackboard, drew a stroke of lightning and said, "This is absurd, what we're listening to. You see, the ancients used to believe that the gods were behind thunder and lightning. And then we learned to do some atmospheric physics and we found it wasn't the gods. Exit space for God." That's the concept of the God of the gaps: "I can't explain it, therefore, God did it." A bit more science, a bit less space for God.
Now, if you believe in a God like that, it's clear that you've got to make a choice between God and science because of the way in which you have defined God: as science increases, by definition, God decreases. But what if you don't believe in a God like that? I certainly don't. My God is not a God of the gaps. He's the God of the whole show, both of the bits we don't understand and the bits we do.
When Isaac Newton discovered his law of gravitation, he didn't say, "Wonderful. I've now got a law and a mathematical description of how it works; I don't need God." He didn't do that. What he did was write the most brilliant book in the history of science, The Principia Mathematica, expressing the hope that it would persuade the thinking person to believe in God.
In other words, the more he understood of science, the more he admired the genius of the God who did it that way. His God was not a God of the gaps.
Myth: Mechanisms exclude agents.
Steven Hawking in a (12) recent book (to which I've responded in my little book, God and Steven Hawking) says we've got to choose between God and gravity. But this is nonsense as a simple illustration will show.
If I were to have a Ford Galaxy motorcar here and said to you, "Look, I want to offer you two explanations for this car. The one is the law of internal combustion and mechanical engineering: a law-mechanism explanation. The other is Henry Ford. Please choose." You'd say, "That is absurd… You need both explanations."
Now, this is extremely important. To realize that explanation comes in different kinds. If you want a complete explanation of the Ford Galaxy, you have to have a law-mechanism explanation--the scientific one--and you have to have an agent explanation, in terms of Henry Ford.
Please notice these different kinds of explanation do not contradict each other. Yet the idea is going around, spread virulently by one of the Dawkins 'memes,' I suppose, that you must choose between them. In philosophical terms that is to commit a very elementary category mistake.
The existence--and I'm wording this very carefully--the existence of a mechanism that does something is not, in itself, an argument for the non-existence of an agent who designed that mechanism.
There is, therefore, no necessary conflict between scientific explanations of how the universe works and belief in God who created and sustains that universe. We must not assume that there's only one level of explanation. (13)
The Role of Faith in Science
...it is a widespread myth that faith: A) is a purely religious concept and B) means believing where there's no evidence. Both of those definitions are wrong. I've discussed the second, now let's come to the first.
What about the role of faith in science? It is vastly important, of course. Einstein saw that every scientist has as a fundamental belief that the universe is rationally intelligible. He could not imagine a scientist without, as he put it, "that faith."
Let's think about it this way. Nobel Prizewinner Eugene Wigner wrote a wonderful paper in 1961 that is much loved of mathematicians. It is entitled, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics.
The issue is this: How is it that a bright Harvard mathematician, thinking in her mind in here, comes up with equations that describe the universe out there? How does that work? Reflection on it led Einstein to say, "The only incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it's comprehensible." [Which I think comes from: “Science and Religion” in The Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion © Jewish Theological Seminary, 1941, when he said, “Though religion may be that which determines the goal, it has, nevertheless, learned from science, in the broadest sense, what means will contribute to the attainment of the goals it has set up. But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”]
Naturalism undermines the search for truth.
Einstein’s comment leads me to claim that one of the greatest evidences that naturalism is false is the very fact that we can do science.
It starts with something Darwin wrote. Let me read it to you: “With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions in such a mind?”
That statement is at the moment receiving considerable attention for the following reason. Many people hold that the driving force of the natural processes that eventually produced (15) our human cognitive faculties were not primarily concerned with truth at all but with survival. And we all know what has generally happened and still happens to truth when individuals or commercial enterprises or nations motivated by what Dawkins calls their “selfish genes” feel themselves threatened in the struggle for survival. They are essentially obliged to regard thought as some kind of neurophysiological phenomenon. And from the evolutionary perspective, the neurophysiology might, of course, be adaptive.
But why, for one moment, would one think that beliefs caused by the neurophysiology should be mostly true? After all, as the chemist J.B.S. Haldane pointed out long ago: “If the thoughts in my mind are just motions of atoms in my brain, a mechanism has arisen by mindless, unguided processes, why should I believe anything it tells me, including the fact that it’s made of atoms?”
One of America’s leading philosophers, Alvin Plantinga, draws out the implication this way: “If Dawkins is right and we are the product of mindless, unguided natural processes, then he has given us strong reason to doubt the reliability of human cognitive faculties and therefore, inevitably to doubt the validity of any belief that they produce including Dawkins’ own science and his atheism. His biology and his belief in naturalism would therefore appear to be at war with each other in a conflict that has nothing to do with God.”
I suggest to you, therefore, ladies and gentlemen, that it’s not irrational to believe in supernature. What is irrational is to believe in naturalism. The boot is entirely on the other foot.
Atheistic reductionism undermines the foundations of the very rationality needed to construct any argument of any kind, whatsoever. The new atheists have signally failed to appreciate the catastrophic implications of their view for science. (16)
God's intervention in his life:
https://www.ebaumsworld.com/videos/ch...
April 29, 2018
9/10 (Excellent): This short booklet is a word-for-word transcript of John Lennox’s lecture at Harvard University on the subject of miracles. As you’d expect from Lennox, it’s an expertly crafted speech, but the Q&A that follows is just as valuable. On its own, I doubt this booklet will change any minds. Nonetheless, it could be useful in beginning to help people understand the uniqueness and rationality of biblical Christianity.
December 16, 2025
John Lennox a renown mathematician and a Christian explains how both the Bible and scientific discoveries have revealed the truth of God’s existence. He writes in an easy to understand English. Recommended.
August 18, 2019
A short but very worthwhile read!
October 9, 2024
A short lecture on the rationality of miracles.
August 6, 2016
Thought-provoking, but easy to read.
April 14, 2014
A short talk on the relationship between the supernatural and science. (Yes, the two are compatible.) Presented on a layperson' s level.
August 28, 2016
Interesting reproduction of a Dr. Lennox speech.
I enjoyed reading how Dr. Lennox derives his arguments. His analogies to great ideas are valuable. Quick read, deep stuff.
I enjoyed reading how Dr. Lennox derives his arguments. His analogies to great ideas are valuable. Quick read, deep stuff.
January 31, 2016
This is the written form of a talk given by Prof. Lennox in Oxford. As usual, Lennox is brilliant.
April 17, 2017
This is a good introduction to the topic and gives some good, thoughtful input. Several times, I really wished for a more thorough answer, but I know that, as a transcript of a presentation/speech, his time and scope were limited. I am looking forward to reading Gunning for God for some expansion on some of the ideas presented here.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews