Science, Logic & God: Why This Oxford Professor Is Convinced | John Lennox

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]sense that when I was at school, I started reading CS Lewis. My [clears throat] father gave me some of his books and it was very interesting reading those books because his take on the history of science which was based on Alfred North Whitehead actually was to quote more or less men became scientific because they expected law and nature and they expected law and nature because they believed in a lawgiver.

[00:00:32]That fascinated me and a little bit more research showed me that if you take modern science, I'm not talking about medieval science, modern science, and you start with people like Galileo and then you move on to Kepler, Newton and so on. These people were all believers in God with slight variations on it. And it seemed to me there was a a pretty close connection between their theism and their approach to science and in general historians of science. And when I came to Oxford after a while, I worked for a time with John Hedley Brookke who was the first professor of science and religion here and a wonderful historian.

[00:01:17]>> Yeah.

[00:01:18]>> And he was very cautious. But he said there certainly does seem to be a connection between the biblical worldview and the rise of modern science. So sometimes I say to people who ask me that question that I'm not remotely ashamed of being a scientist if you count mathematicians and scientists and a Christian because arguably it was the Judeo-Christian worldview that gave me my subject. So I I think there's a deep resonance there and I do think there is a conflict though just to explain a little bit further but it's it's not between science and faith in God and I often illustrate this by thinking of the Nobel Prize in physics because take for example HGs Peter HS who won Scotsman atheist brilliant physicist and then there's Another person I know, uh, Bill Phillips, an American Nobel Prize winner for physics and a Christian. And what that tells me, Alex, really, is this, that their difference isn't in the realm of physics at all. Her science, it's in worldview.

[00:02:35]And I see a real conflict between the theistic worldview and the atheistic worldview. And there are scientists on both sides. And so I feel that if we take that on board, we can make a more sensible exploration of this whole well I think it's a myth and a lot of historians do as well that science and religion are necessarily in conflict.

[00:03:01]>> I think as a final condos I would say it depends what religion you're talking about. I'm talking about you hill Christian worldview because science conflicts with a lot of religions.

[00:03:13]>> I think this question of the history of science.

[00:03:18]>> Yes. and it being tied up with the with the Christian worldview is an interesting one because to me it's slightly different to asking whether the the findings of science after the scientific method gets off the ground conflict with the sort of uh tenets of religious belief. And so I think what a lot of people will think is okay the the founders of the scientific method were Christian but of course they were because everyone was Christian and if science does somehow undermine Christianity then of course they would be Christians because they hadn't invented the scientific method yet to undermine it. And so people will point to the findings of science and say that the explanatory power that these Christian men who wanted to understand the universe found in the scientific method removes the space needed for the explanatory power of God. Now I know you disagree with that too of course but I was hoping you could tell us why.

[00:04:18]>> Well I I think it is an argument that's pretty fair if you apply it to a limited proportion of the earth. Yeah.

[00:04:27]>> But the interesting thing to me about that and I've thought about it a fair bit because it's the obvious point to make and it's a good point to make is that modern science did not develop among the Chinese and a lot of study was done on that particular topic by um a very famousologist who actually did he found the Academy of Sciences in China and um wrestling for his name. You probably know it.

[00:05:00]>> I'm not sure I do.

[00:05:01]>> But he did a lot of research and he was principally a Marxist in his viewpoint >> and that is what makes his conclusion very interesting. He certainly was the author of massive dictionary of scientific science and all that. [gasps] He tried to explain within a Marxist framework why modern science of the type you described, right, didn't arise in China.

[00:05:29]And the conclusion he came to was it was a difference in a fundamental presupposition of the idea that there was a a unification in the sense that there was one creator who had created the universe and created the human mind to study it and the Chinese didn't have that. That was his view. So it seems to me that that is an interesting response to this. If you take the whole world, modern science arose in a particular place in a particular time where in a sense the general background was Christian but in the other hand it didn't arise where the general background was very different. So I think that's how I would respond to it.

[00:06:19]>> So two questions come to mind for me.

[00:06:23]One is the question of the so-called golden age of the Islamic world with particular reference to mathematics.

[00:06:30]>> Yes.

[00:06:30]>> Which will make people think >> okay science arises in the Christian west but we also have this rich tradition of science and discovery within Islam as well.

[00:06:40]>> And the extent to which you said it depends which religion you're talking about. I wondered if you had a view on whether Islam can be similarly credited with scientific knowledge. I'm not an expert at Islam, but I used to be very interested in what went on in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, where a lot of work was done and some of it by Christians, by the way, working away at translating some of the more ancient classical documents into languages that were available to people around. And [clears throat] at the very least in the Islamic tradition you have a very strong transmission of more ancient texts that of course helped with the advance of modern science. But as far as I know, not a great deal of innovation. But I'd put again >> I would say my field is algebra and the word algebra comes from al jabar which is an Arabic word and in the Islamic world you had tremendous understanding of observational astronomy and their ways of solving equations and so on. and back into the Babylonian world. So we had certainly a great deal of stuff that was transmitted forward and helped I would say helped enormously but in the sort of innovation and experimentation and all this kind of thing and the vast steps forward taken by people like Galileo, Kepler, Newton they didn't get that far but we must credit them. M the other question that came to mind then is one concerning the difference between say belief in God as motivating your your scientific enterprise >> and Christianity as a world religion because when I think about someone like Galileo an important uh founder of the scientific method and I think about the way that he's treated by the reigning Catholic authorities for presenting an alternate view of the world, although not proving it, arguably at the time, uh, running into a bit of trouble and and ending up finishing his life in house arrest in in Tuscany.

[00:09:05]>> Rather luxurious house.

[00:09:06]>> Yeah, it's quite he got it quite well. I think um this idea that he was tortured for his beliefs is a mistaken one.

[00:09:13]Although allegedly some people believe that he was shown the instruments of torture as if to say >> that that that could be >> keep quiet. Here again, I I think that using Galileo as an example >> Mhm.

[00:09:28]>> doesn't work because if you look at what actually happened.

[00:09:36]The first people to criticize Galileo was not the Catholic Church. It was the philosophers >> who were building on Aristotle and believed in a fixed earth and the church got involved rather foolishly because it had climbed on the Aristotilian bandwagon.

[00:10:00]>> Yes.

[00:10:01]>> So you could argue that this is not really science versus Christianity because Galileo was a Christian. He believed in God before he started all this and when he finished. So I think I would agree with the historians of science that say that the Galileo incident is not really one to be used >> uh to show that there's a huge conflict between science and and and religion.

[00:10:31]Yes, >> I think uh the book Galileo's Daughter is well worth reading on on this story.

[00:10:37]And and Galileo was a bit silly, you know, and unwise and what he did. He [laughter] he insisted first of all on writing in Italian and that argued the that irritated the experts who thought everything should be done in Latin. Mhm.

[00:10:55]>> And secondly, he uh wrote a text and put the views of the then pope who had been his friend into the mouth of a character he named Simpitial the Fool. And as for PR, I think he comes fairly near a zero.

[00:11:16]>> Yeah. actually and he'd been told by the Catholic Church not to write about helioentrism, >> but there was some dispute over what he was allowed to do. And so he writes this philosophical dialogue where he's like, well, I'm not writing an essay in favor of helioentrism. I'm writing a dialogue.

[00:11:36]It's just that the character that disagrees with me is called the fool.

[00:11:40]And that's what finally did it, it seems, for the for the church. For me, I I think you're right to say that this isn't a good indication of the conflict between science and religious belief.

[00:11:52]For me, at best, with the most sort of uncharitable view of the Catholic practice here, it might show a conflict between say the scientific method of Galileo and the Catholic Church. But I want to very carefully tease apart the historical question of like world religions and their potential suppression of scient of the scientific method with the more specific point I think you're making which is about the personal belief in an ordered universe as being necessary to engage in science.

[00:12:24]>> I I I think that's fair enough. And if you look at various times in church history, I would say that to their shame >> and as of the Galileo case, it was only in my lifetime that the Catholic Church rehabilitated Galileo. Yes. And that's pretty shameful.

[00:12:45]>> Finally said he was correct.

[00:12:47]>> Yes. And the same is true I suppose of the so-called conflict between Huxley and Wilburforce you know after Darwin >> but again that's represented as a >> this is a debate that happens just down the road at the natural history museum >> here in the natural history >> in Oxford and it's between Thomas Huxley who is a sort of protege of Charles Darwin >> yes >> and so the the newly uh the newly discovered idea of natural selection is being defended by Huxley and then you've got the bishop Wilberforce who is arguing against it and this is again seen as archetypal science evolution undeniable fact versus the >> yeah that's right it's very interesting I've read the whole debate >> and I find that many people haven't and [gasps] Wilbur Force was the kind of cleric who was an amateur scientist Mhm.

[00:13:47]>> And he seemed to have a lot of leisure for doing that, which might tell us something about the church in those days.

[00:13:54]>> Right.

[00:13:55]>> And Huxley was dead against this. He wanted a professional class of scientists. That's the first. There was a strong bias against it. But when it came to the argument, I was fascinated to discover that very early on in his speech, Wilbur for said, I am not going to use religious arguments.

[00:14:18]>> I am only going to discuss the science.

[00:14:22]That's often left completely out of the discussion.

[00:14:25]>> And again, it was what was his name? The professor of the history of science at the open university said that this event should not be used to drive a wedge between science and Christianity. It was a much more complex thing. It was a sociological thing as well. The push to have professional scientists get rid of the clerics, turn the churches into temples to Sophia, the goddess of wisdom and all this kind of stuff. There was much more going on than simply dealing with science. But poor old Wilberforce, I think he gets the rough end of the stick and it's not always very accurate. I mean, instinctively I I think of people who are motivated by their religious beliefs.

[00:15:17]>> Yes. But so as to convince the non religious, yes, will abandon that as a strategy of argumentation and say, "Well, look, I I'm not going to rely on my religious views here to convince you." And yet that is still their motivation to presenting these arguments. And I really don't know when I say like, >> "Well, >> I don't know what you suspect Will Force's motivation was or if there's anything else that indicates that he really was a science." I take from what you're saying that it's always difficult to second guessess motivation and to understand what it is and we can only see that what I find actually interesting is that Wilbur Force it actually occurred to him to say what kind of argument he was using. I thought that was pretty insightful of Wilbur Force in spite of the fact that generations afterwards nobody took any notice of it. He was actually and certainly as one person has said at least one that Darwinism proved to be an engine of atheism.

[00:16:26]>> Yes. Well, I think this is the the most important example here is probably evolution.

[00:16:30]>> It is.

[00:16:30]>> Yeah. uh quantum mechanics actually to take your other example for some people opened up yeah the possibility of freedom and all the business of giving to put it this way which I don't really like space for God so to speak >> and not confining the universe to be a deterministic entity I think that it is a very interesting case in point that a lot of people jumped on the Darwinist bandwagon until relatively recently. It was often used as a reason to get rid of God in some way or other. My thinking of it is [clears throat] well, it's quite complicated actually.

[00:17:24]First of all, the idea that there is a creator God is not going to be refuted by a biological theorem. I'm not even convinced they're in the same kind of category.

[00:17:41]>> Mhm. that in other words evolution whatever it does and I'm saying that quite deliberately whatever it does is not an argument against the involvement [clears throat] of a creator I spoke to one very leading well-known biologist who [clears throat] is a strong believer in evolution and is a Christian and I said to him in the end if I'm pushed to God can do it any way he liked.

[00:18:15]So that if it happens to be that way, that is not an argument against the existence of God any more than the existence of an automatic self- winding watch which uses random motions of your arm to wind itself up is an argument against the existence of an intelligent watch maker.

[00:18:38]>> Mhm.

[00:18:39]that that calling in of randomness doesn't get rid of God at all. But of course, if you're going to use evolution as an argument against God, first of all, you've got to know that evolution is true and you've got to define what it does.

[00:19:01]>> That's the first thing. And here you run into very many more difficulties. now than you would have done 20 years ago.

[00:19:11]>> Right? And I just make two points and they're quite important points and that is we need to dis distinguish between evolution and the origin of life.

[00:19:27]>> Now Richard Dawkins as you know who's a frigid writer I must say u I remember reading his book the blind watchmaker.

[00:19:37]Yes.

[00:19:38]>> And what arrested me uh in reading it and I can almost quote it verbatim.

[00:19:44]That's a compliment to Richard. Um that evolution the blind automatic mechanism that dark that Darwin discovered is the explanation for the existence and the development of all of life.

[00:20:01]>> He said that.

[00:20:02]>> Yes. It's in the book.

[00:20:03]>> Yeah.

[00:20:05]And it took a very long time for him to realize that the first part of that statement is false.

[00:20:11]>> Yes.

[00:20:12]>> For a very simple reason because evolution again whatever does or doesn't do depends on the existence of life to do anything. So it cannot be the explanation for life. Now, of course, people these days get round that by talking about chemical evolution and so on. That's nothing to do with mutation and natural selection. And we could go into that, but as a mathematician, it's the former interests me more that is the origin of life itself because it's almost equivalent though not quite to the origin of information. I see there a huge problem. But staying with now the second part of Dawkins's assertion, it explains all the development of life.

[00:21:02]Now here's where I think one has to be nuanced. And to be fair, because Darwin was brilliant. He observed things that people had not observed. He observed changes. For example, the famous study of the Finch Peaks >> in um the Galapicos Islands. And I have a 1,000page book at home, a famous book of that and I've read most of it. And [gasps] that was hailed as evidence, but of what? It certainly was evidence of cyclic change. What not so many people were aware of is that once the drought conditions disappeared, the proportion of long beaks to short beaks actually moved back to what it was before. But nevertheless, he could see that something was happening that filled niches and enabled existing creatures to adapt to new niches. Now, that seems to me to be uncontroversial because we can observe it. But when it goes beyond that to the creation, if I might use that word, of new life forms or all this kind of thing, I think that's a very different matter. Now, I'm very aware that I'm not a biologist.

[00:22:24]>> And secondly, I believe in Richard Fineman's wonderful dictim. He says the scientist outside his own field is as dumb as anybody else. And I've got to remember that. But I have tried to read my biology especially in recent in recent years and I I comfort myself that everybody from Darwin to Dawkins wrote for the intelligent public. They expect us to understand what they write.

[00:22:52]>> And I have a huge difficulty with that kind of what we may call macroevolution.

[00:23:01]But much more interestingly is what has happened in the last few years with so-called systems biology where the Darwinian mechanism well natural selection was his uh mutation was later but if we put both together and we have the neodyarwinian hypothesis that has been called into very deep question as being totally inadequate >> here in Oxford Dennis Noble one of the most fascinating characters, fellow of the Royal Society and he's debated Richard on a number of ga of occasions and his argument is really in the end that natural selection that neodyarwinian thesis doesn't need to be modified it needs to be replaced because it's completely inadequate because now and here I'm just say what I read the problem is and it's a chicken the big problem that most simply perhaps can be realized here is DNA. You can't get DNA without a cell.

[00:24:10]You can't get a living cell without DNA.

[00:24:13]So, uh how does that work? And what seems to me to be happening and I've actually written quite a lot about this in my rec in a recent book cosmic chemistry do god and science mix that There appears to be a topdown causation and it leads to a huge problem because it was enough level of complexity to discover that the DNA molecule was not simply complex. It was linguistically complex. That is it gave us a 3.4 four billion letter long word in a chemical alphabet and all those letters had to be in the right order. That is a stupendous level of complexity which is no chance of being generated by random processes and Richard Dawkins agrees with that. He right >> he brings in something that that natural selection actually has a different kind of operation but we're not going to that at the moment but the point is now with the more recent discoveries of the nature of the living cell and all the chemical factories in it. There are levels upon levels of complexity beyond the genome.

[00:25:42]>> And that just beggars into >> [clears throat] >> uh unbelief the possibility that any known mechanism can produce that without the input of intelligence. Mhm. Now, I'm in your boat, but [laughter] but at an even sort of lower level below the deck in that it's not just so much outside of my scientific expertise, biology, but I'm I'm not even a scientist. And so, I'm also aware of my limitations in being able to engage with this material.

[00:26:15]Um, I do understand that on on the popular level, I think like Steven Meyer has been um talking about this kind of thing quite publicly and I understand that a lot of people are beginning to question at least our winning evolution.

[00:26:28]But to understand you correctly, would that entail doubting for example that say myself and a chimpanzee share a common ancestor? because I understand that the the mechanism of of getting DNA off the ground and this kind of thing is this unimaginable mystery. But once we've sort of granted that intelligently produced or not, does that suspicion go to that depth of evolution? I mean like do do you think that there is reason to doubt that I share a common ancestor with the chimpanzeee?

[00:27:00]>> Well, it can do. People are divided on that and I I understand the point very well. You know from a mathematical point of view if you take a set of things you can often order them in a hierarchy and that's clearly true in the animal kingdom. You can use various criteria for organizing them.

[00:27:21]>> But the the whole question of common ancestry assumes that you've got a mechanism that drives the one to the other. Mhm.

[00:27:32]>> And I often use, well, I sometimes use an argument that I think Darwin was aware of in some way. I have a vague memory that I got it from one of his letters, >> but it's something like this. You and I are biologists and there's desperate need in the world for some kind of grain that resists let's say floods and and so on so forth and we sit in the laboratory and we genetically engineer a new type of wheat that's very successful a thousand years hence People are investigating the archaeology of this and they're trying to determine what is related to what. Now they know nothing about us or what we did and their research if it's done on the basis of a dominant naturalism will completely miss the fact that there was an intelligent input at one point creating this new level >> and that'll be due to their methodological assumption.

[00:28:47]>> Yes, that's that's right. And you can't blame them in a way if if that's the way they're working. So it seems to me we've got to be extremely careful that the ability to organize things into various hierarchies is an indicator certainly an argument for development without input of intelligence but it's not conclusive and it seems to be in other words my faith in God doesn't depend on whether there's a common ancestor or not. Certainly God could do it that way, but I'm not convinced that he has because >> the analogy I gave you has got more to it than you may first realize because it's saying that at a certain point there was an input from outside the system. Yeah.

[00:29:39]>> An intelligent input from you and me >> as the scientists involved. Now from the biblical point of view and this has always interested me the biblical description of creation is very minimal.

[00:29:57]there's a 100 words I think Genesis 1 in Hebrew something like that but what is emphasized in that description has always fascinated me because several times over you read and God said and God said. So these various stages, the days of Genesis, whatever you make of them, these stages are each introduced by God speaking. Now again, the New Testament says very little about the how of creation.

[00:30:35]>> Mhm.

[00:30:36]>> But it does say something >> and it says something very profound to my mind and that is in the beginning was the word.

[00:30:46]That is the word already was and this is an existence statement because it then goes on to say through the word all things came to be is actually what the Greek said.

[00:30:59]>> Yes. Okay.

[00:31:00]>> It's fascinating.

[00:31:02]>> So the word already was the word never came to be. The world came to be. You and I came to be. And then of course there comes the huge statement which shows John's fascination by existence and the word came to be human or came to be flesh.

[00:31:22]>> God became human which is the central Christian claim. But sticking at the creation level my reaction to that is this is a wordbased creation. Now do we see any evidence of that? I believe we do first of all in the fact that lots of things in our universe are mathematically describable. That is we can use the language of mathematics to describe them. And that is so amazing.

[00:31:55]>> Mhm. [clears throat] >> That really clever people like Einstein saw that there was a problem. And you remember the famous thing he said the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it's comprehensible. He could see that there was something absolutely amazing that someone thinking here could come up with equations that described what's going on out there. So a word-based universe at that level. But then much later than Einstein we discover that in biology life is a word-based phenomenon as well.

[00:32:31]An information bearing macroolelecule DNA. So at the heart of the two sides physics and biology it's word word-based and that resonates very much with me in the beginning was the word >> and I remember this will amuse you years ago I I was working in Cardiff and next to me or almost next to me was professor Chandra Wikramma Singh I don't know whether you've heard of him he was an astro who is an astrophysicist and worked a great deal with Fred Hy.

[00:33:10]>> Mhm. And we were talking about this one day and he he he'd been in America and he got into one of these so-called creation trials and he said it's such a pity. He said the people in America, the Christians were very nice, but they're so hopelessly naive they believe the Bible. And I felt I had to defend my Christian brothers and sisters in spite of how extreme their views might be. And I said, "Well, actually, I believe the Bible in the sense that I take it very seriously because of course it's full of metaphor and all this kind of thing."

[00:33:50]And he said, "Prove it to me." So I walked over to the board. I'll never forget this. He threw me a piece of chalk and I had to prove it to him. So I wrote, "And God said, "Let there be light."

[00:34:03]>> So Chandra roared his head off and he said, "There you go. You're as naive as the rest of them. Do you think God is a voice box and lungs like they have?" And I said, "Chandra, now you're being naive. This is very simple language, but if you don't mind, let me put it in different language." So underneath this, I wrote, "In the beginning was the word."

[00:34:28]And he said, 'What does that mean? And he went on, "And all things came to be through the word."

[00:34:36]Well, I said, "Word, speech, information." And he stopped me at that point. He said, "What did you say?" I said, I said, "Information. You heard me." He said, "Are you meaning to imply that this biblical text somehow refers to the concept of information?" I said, "It looks like." Then he said, "Does Fred Hy know about this?"

[00:35:00]>> I said, "I don't know." So he told him, he arranged a meeting where we had a long discussion with Fred Hy before he died. And I remember that so very well.

[00:35:09]So it seems to me that summing this up, sorry it's been a bit long. The This has been one of the big things in my own understanding that God started biology according to the Bible. Mhm.

[00:35:26]>> He that is he told human beings to name the animals and tax taxonomy yes is the basic intellectual discipline naming things and all disciplines we use taxonomy and God wasn't going to do it for them he said you go and do it so God is for biology you see and that is a mandate to my mind >> that we are left to have the interest fascination and enjoyment of finding out a great deal about the world ourselves.

[00:35:59]But the Bible does make this steering comment >> that says it's a wordbased universe. And what I say is that science has come up for the evidence for that.

[00:36:16]And that's my big problem with the naturalistic worldview. There's no uh believable generator of word like information that any of us know about. It always is associated in our experience at least with a human intelligence.

[00:36:35]>> Well, what jumps out at me from what you're saying just at the end there you say word like information and I think that this this let's say this term word.

[00:36:47]>> Yes. I want to be careful not to use it too promiscuously because >> there's the words that I'm using to speak in the language that I'm using and then there's the so-called language of DNA which as far as I understand is is something of an analogy. I mean we're not talking about words in the sense that I would use words to construct a linguistic sentence. But it might sort of work in a similar way. Information being put together in such a way as to produce something larger than the sum of its parts. You've also then got the the word that God speaks in Genesis, which is when he, you know, he says, "Let there be light." Which reads to me like a pronouncement of the divine.

[00:37:30]>> And then, of course, you've got Jesus being the logos, which is usually translated as the word.

[00:37:35]>> Yes. But if I were to equivocate the logos of John's prologue with Genesis chapter 1, then I'm thinking how that would read to me. You know, when God says, "Let there be light."

[00:37:50]He sort of does it through Jesus, which is in keeping with the vision of creation in John 1. M >> but I'm wondering exactly how you I don't want to say equivocate but how exactly you um >> I think you mean equate >> equate equalize whatever you like this logos of John 1 with Genesis 1. I I mean literally speaking >> well I used the word resonate >> and I certainly didn't use the word literal [laughter] >> which is a very dangerous word in my view. That's one that's used promiscuously if ever there was one.

[00:38:26]>> [sighs] >> within computer science and biology.

[00:38:32]Nowadays, people use the that kind of terminology. They use computer language in biology and they use ordinary language about words in computer science because there's a very intimate relationship >> in that.

[00:38:49]I think what many biologists say to me and in reading their their material that it's word like in the sense that the DNA letters code for the amino acids which code for >> Yes. Yeah.