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May 30, 2022 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
37:44
John Lennox
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Welcome to the Denny Paul with me, James Denny Paul.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I really, really am.
It's Professor John Lennox.
And I originally had you booked, I think, last year and you couldn't do it.
I think you were ill and I was terrified because I've had a few podcast guests who I really wanted who died on me and I thought maybe, you know, you'd caught COVID or something or whatever and it would never be.
So I'm really happy you're here.
Well, I'm very happy to be with you because I didn't catch COVID, and I'm very glad I haven't had it at all.
And in fact, I feel in better health than I've been in for quite a long time.
Lockdown has been an extremely productive time for me, actually.
So thank you for inviting me on.
No, absolute pleasure.
For those who haven't seen you, I mean, I've been I've been doing a bit of homework, which is very unlike me.
Regular listeners will know I don't do my homework normally, but a man of your eminence.
And also, I think possibly you don't suffer fools gladly because I've seen you in debate with people that I really would not like to debate.
Richard Dawkins, sort of further down the scale, but Christopher Hitchens.
I really wouldn't want to argue, wouldn't want to have debated Christopher Hitchens in a debate about whether or not God exists, whether he's real or not.
And it's not so much because I watched some of those debates, and it wasn't so much that I felt that Christopher Hitchens had access to the killer arguments for atheism, but rather his slightly on bar style, his drawling approach.
He makes the other person, unless he's very well prepared, look kind of passé and foolish.
Did you find that when you were debating him?
Was it a joke?
That's a studied tactic of his.
Well, I'm very fortunate because someone in your profession who's very well known, the journalist, I met in my college at Oxford before I did that debate.
And I said, have you got any advice to give me?
And he said, I have, actually.
He said, firstly, don't try to outwit Christopher.
And secondly, he said, make sure that you don't get steamrolled into simply responding to his agenda.
Make sure You get across, if you can, what you have to say, no matter what he says.
And that was actually very helpful.
And I just found, because although he had this style, I actually got on with him outside the debating arena extremely well, because I resisted it.
And I got the impression he quite respected this resistance.
I just wouldn't take it lying down, so to speak, as many people did.
But certainly in public at the Edinburgh Festival, he tried to make a mock of what I believe, but that's not a very good intellectual tactic.
No, but it's a good debating tactic.
I mean, if your aim is purely to crush the opposition and be perceived as the victor, then actually it's a really excellent technique, actually better than... But that's never been my motivation, you see.
And that's a very important point.
The first time I debated Dawkins, when we were about to step into this vast Covenants building full of people.
He said, you know, I don't debate, which was partly true.
He didn't debate people like me.
Well, I said, I don't either.
I'd never done a debate like it before.
But I said, What I want to do is to try to communicate to the audience that there is a credible alternative to your atheism.
And he said, I'll buy that.
So I've never tried to score points cheaply, because I think that's hopeless.
I've tried to simply present argument in a friendly fashion, and even to befriend pretty hostile people, so to speak, on stage.
In the hope that the argument will get across.
And I've usually found that to be pretty successful.
But there is an innate temptation, of course, to go for the jugular.
But I've not tried to do that.
No.
And I think in a lot of ways, that is why you were, even though you didn't set out to do it, in my mind, the ultimate winner of those debates.
Because you came across as very reasonable, And you weren't distracted from your main points, which I think was really good.
Tell me, what was the perception at the end of those various debates?
Because I imagine that initially your audiences were hostile to your position, the majority of them, because Christianity... Not necessarily.
The first debate with Dawkins was in Alabama.
And what the organizers were a bit afraid of was that Dokun's side wouldn't be very well represented.
But it was.
We're in the deep south, you see, the kind of Bible belt.
And audience perception of that particular one that got even written up in the New York Times, apparently, which was amazing.
They called it a civil debate.
The question of winning or losing first came up with Christopher Hitchens because James Naughty was the moderator of the Edinburgh debate.
And he said at the beginning, do we want to vote?
And I said, I'm actually not interested in the vote because I'm not out to score on points.
But Hitchens wanted to vote.
And so he, Nochte, asked at the beginning how many people are for the proposition and how many against.
It was a very foolish proposition from an atheist perspective.
Does the new Europe need the new atheism?
Something like that, which was a gift to me, I felt, in the title.
And when he took the vote at the end, it was quite amusing because it was pretty obvious that the move had been very much in my direction.
And Naughty was slightly nonplussed and he said to Christopher, shall we have a recount?
But Christopher was man enough to say no, Lennox has won.
And when I shook his hand publicly on the way out, he whispered to me, we're going to have another debate, but no voting.
Which we did!
Did you?
Yeah, we did in Alabama again, which is interesting.
So I had two debates with Christopher.
The Edinburgh Festival and then one in Alabama.
There was a rematch.
And you won again?
You don't know?
You didn't count?
You need to ask the audience.
I just don't like thinking in those categories.
Actually, confrontational debates, I think, have passed their high watermark in the sense that the new atheist people represented by Dawkins, who are no longer new, They like them.
But in fact, these days, I find even my atheist friends, and I have many of those, they don't like them.
And they much prefer a moderated conversation.
With or without a moderator, but it's better with one if people are on different sides of the argument.
And I much prefer the conversational style that we're having now, and I was delighted to see that you prefer it.
And I've had atheists write me letters and say, thank you very much that you didn't Push for a confrontational debate.
Also, the final point on confrontational debates is they're very expensive in terms of time preparation.
You know, this idea of 15 minutes, 15 minutes, 10 minutes, 10 minutes, and thinking out all the possible scenarios.
And you can't relax and you spend hundreds of hours, at least I did, in preparing it.
So, I would much prefer to have a relaxed discussion, even with someone who's initially hostile.
I hope to actually drill into the hostility a little bit, reverse it, which often happens.
Yeah, for all the reasons you give, this is why my podcast, The Delling Pod, always tries to avoid confrontation.
Because I don't think it generates, you know, cliche, but it's true, it generates more heat than light.
It shows both parties at their worst, I think.
But also, there's another thing.
I'm interested in finding out the truth.
And I have a belief, one of the things that informs my Christian faith is that God is truth.
That truth is not a relative thing.
God is truth and God is beauty.
And we instinctively tend towards these things.
It's one of the things that has informed my religious faith.
I think that the more you cleave to those things, the closer you get to God.
And this is a good thing.
Am I right?
This is a very good thing.
And it's a hugely important thing, actually, because it's not only Christians who believe in truth.
All scientists do.
At least, let me put it this way, a friend of mine who's a very able German ancient historian has said people are only postmodern relativists in areas they consider unimportant.
But when it comes to truth, Obviously, if you're a scientist, you wouldn't do science if you didn't believe there was truth out there to be discovered.
You may, of course, be humble enough to be a critical realist and say, we don't always get to the absolute truth, but at least we feel we're making steps towards it.
For me, ever since I was a child, really, I became convinced that Christianity was true, not simply that it was helpful.
And the rest of my life I've devoted, in that sense, to exploring How people approach the whole question of truth and writing about it and lecturing about it and so on.
So for me, that is the central issue.
Is it true or not?
Does it make me feel good or not?
And so on.
And I challenge people who tell me everything's relative, because when they say that, they're expecting me to believe it's true.
So at least they believe in one truth.
It's self-contradictory.
Yeah, I wanted to talk to you actually a bit about what you said about science there, because you're also a professor of philosophy of science.
Well, I'm a professor of mathematics with a deep interest in philosophy of science, but anyway, I'm emeritus, which simply means I'm old.
Okay, but you can talk to me about science as well, because I want to move on a bit later on to, I know we haven't got much time, but to things like post-normal science.
I don't know whether you're familiar with that concept, you know, it's like, Well, I listen to your definition of it.
Yeah, anyway, before we go, I just want to, now I've got you, I want the greatest hits, which is essentially, look, I'm a Christian, I mean, I was always a cultural Christian, I was C of E, I got confirmed and all that, but I only became a proper believing, you know, Bible-bashing Christian in the last couple of years.
Oh really?
As recently as that?
Yeah, yeah.
Fascinating.
And I suppose my route to, like, I enjoyed the church.
I enjoyed, you know, the The stained glass windows and that kind of the piece you get, the sort of gentle boredom and the hymns and the language of the Psalms and so on.
But I didn't really get the key ingredient, which is that God is absolutely real.
And, you know, I believe in angels and I believe in devil, the devil.
Yes, right.
Stuff like that.
That makes a supernatural dimension.
Yep.
Yeah.
Which I think is largely missing from from I think a lot.
Oh, it is.
And which is missing the whole point of the religion, it seems to me, because all the others do.
That's exactly right.
And C.S.
Lewis was a great exception in my experience.
He was once described as a thoroughgoing supernaturalist, and he helped me enormously.
I'm actually old enough to have heard him lecture, but his books had a huge influence on me in that particular direction, that it's intellectually Not only credible, but sensible to believe that this is not the only world, that there's a supernatural dimension.
And that was tremendously helpful to me.
I never knew what it was like to be an adult and an atheist, so to speak.
So I needed a mentor.
And he was, through his books, a real mentor for me.
It's very exciting, isn't it?
Where you realise that this stuff isn't just a fantasy that man has developed to justify his fear of death and to comfort himself.
That it's way more than that.
Well, that's absolutely right.
That Freudian argument, it used to slightly bother me because I met it a lot, of course, in the sense in which you just put it in the other sense, in which, you know, you are a believer because you come from Ireland and your parents were believers.
Fairly soon came across the fact, and saw through that, that exactly the same thing can be talked about atheism.
It's a wish fulfillment of not wishing there to be a God, and not wishing to be accountable, and so on.
So the Freudian argument doesn't answer the basic question whether there's a God or not, and therefore it can be left aside as of any use whatsoever.
But not everybody sees that.
A lot of my viewers are either not Christians or they have other religions, you know, their new age or whatever.
And I wonder how this podcast is going to speak to them.
I mean, what are your killer arguments that we are not fools, that we've not just been duped by centuries of scripture and religious ceremony, which was invented by crazies?
I don't like the concept of a killer argument.
I understand what you're saying.
From the perspective of my scientific background, I think that the question of evidence is absolutely crucial.
You'd be foolish not to have an evidence-based commitment.
To whatever you believe in.
And one of the things I have standing arguments with many of my colleagues in Oxford about is that they've been so influenced by the redefinition of faith by Dawkins and Co.
They think that faith's a religious word and it means believing where there's no evidence.
I want to say it's an ordinary word and it only makes sense.
If you believe on the basis of evidence.
And speaking as a scientist, you see, I feel that history helps us straight away because there is a very strong opinion in the world of the philosophy and history of science that There's a deep link between modern science and the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Lewis, again, sums it up perfectly when he said, men became scientific because they expected law in nature, and they expected law in nature because they believed in the law giver.
So I often say to people, you know, I'm not remotely ashamed to be both a scientist and a Christian, because arguably it was Christianity gave me my subject.
And it's that kind of argument that I find is very strong.
But you asked me, what's the killer argument?
Well, one of the strongest arguments to my mind is perhaps the most unexpected one from the perspective of a layperson.
And it's the fact that science can be done In other words, to twist that round a bit, you don't do science unless you believe it can be done.
And you don't believe it can be done unless you believe the universe is mathematically intelligible.
And Albert Einstein, who was extremely bright, as you know, he saw that this was a huge issue.
And he said, I cannot imagine A genuine scientist without that faith.
And he didn't mean faith in God.
He meant the fundamental faith of every scientist that the universe is intelligible.
But I want to go a bit further than that and raise the question, why do people believe it's intelligible?
And here, it seems to me, atheism is catastrophic as, and this has fascinated me, One of the top philosophers of science is Thomas Nagel in New York.
And he has written very clearly that there's something very wrong with the naturalistic understanding of the world.
Because, and I don't think he realized that C.S.
Lewis saw this in 1940, because any explanation that invalidates thought A course invalidates itself, and I often have fun with people, and I mean fun.
I ask them what they do science with, and they tend to mention some very expensive machine, and then I tap my head.
Oh, they said you mean, and they almost say the mind when they remember it's not politically correct.
To use the word my they say the brain i said ok i'll go along with that you do science with your brain tell me a brief history of the brain well the brain is the end product of a mindless unguided process and i smile and say to them and you trust it.
Tell me, if you knew that the computer that you use every day for your scientific work was the end product of an unguided mindless process, would you trust it?
And I've always pushed for the answer and it's always been no.
So I say, I see you have a problem.
In other words, as Lewis saw a long time ago, the naturalistic The train of reasoning taken to a logical conclusion undermines the rationality you need to do any argument whatsoever.
And that, to my mind, is very strong.
Why?
Because from a Christian perspective, let me put it this way, I believe this is a word-based universe.
In the beginning was the Word.
Now, mathematics is evidence of that.
We can describe the universe in terms of the specialized language of mathematics.
What Einstein said is evidence of that.
And coming to the results of science, as distinct from the philosophy of science, you could bring in, and I do, the existence of the longest word we've ever discovered, which is the human genome.
It's a chemical word in four letters, and it's 3.4 billion letters long.
And all our intuition and perception is the moment you see words that carry meaning, Whether it's meaning in terms of biology or meanings in terms of mathematics, or even the sight of the word EXIT on a door, we say that mind is involved at some level.
And that, for me, is a confirmation that the idea in the beginning was the Word and the Word was God makes phenomenal sense.
As I look at the world outside.
So, summing that up, it's more the nature and philosophy of science and its history, if you like, that would point me straight towards God before you even get to the results of science.
I know you've read everything that C.S.
S. Lewis wrote.
So you're more than familiar with a book I read recently, That Hideous Strength, his sci-fi trilogy.
And I mean, I think it describes what's happening now, at least as well as 1984 does, and as Brave New World does.
Because I think, and I wonder whether you agree with me, that what is going on now is that, not science necessarily, but scientism, a sort of corrupted version of science, is being used to create a kind of a new Tower of Babel, or maybe to create this To create heaven on earth and supplant, displace God, which is the process I think described by hideous strength.
Well, I love these metaphors because I think they're immensely important.
First of all, that hideous strength has played an enormous role in my intellectual development.
And recently I've written a book called 2084, which Cog straight into what you said about 1984 and Orwell.
Brave new world.
And the interesting thing is, I think we're in a very curious state where we've got a mixture of both dystopias happening simultaneously.
Big Brother is watching you, is part of it.
And the idea there is we will in the end be enslaved by what we hate.
Whereas the opposite view in the other dystopia is we'll fall in love With the things, the technology that will, in the end, enslave us.
And I was so concerned about the point you've just made that I've written this book about it.
And I've cited Lewis at considerable length with a view to try to bring him back, this particular book, back into public focus.
And by the Judging from the response to the book, I'm immensely encouraged.
It is very important, and this notion of Babel, I find fascinating because one of my other interests is ancient Babylonian philosophy and history.
And in that connection, I wrote a book some years ago about the prophet Daniel and his experience in Babylon and his witness for God against the background of that.
Now, summing it up, it seems to me you're absolutely right.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
That is the initial statement in the first half of the book of Genesis.
And its climax is, let us make human beings in our own image, which gives human beings their unique dignity and value.
The second half of the book of Genesis, which starts in chapter 11 or 10, background to the story of Abraham, is let us make a city and a tower that it might reach to heaven.
So the book begins With an intelligent god creating a world and creating human beings in his own image, the second half of the book begins with those same human beings trying to make their own god, essentially, and climb up to heaven.
And that's exactly what we're saying.
If you go to Yuval Noah Harari and his book Homo Deus, its title means precisely that.
He is terrifying.
I mean, he is a creature of the World Economic Forum.
You've just made me realize why we're going to need to do more than one podcast, because you told me that 40 minutes is your ideal.
I'd be very happy to do another one on that subject in my book.
Very happy.
Well, definitely.
Because apart from this, you've just mentioned Babylon.
Now, you're the first person I think I've ever had on the podcast.
Lots of people who are where I am in terms of their Weltanschauung.
Have come to the conclusion that actually what is happening right now is an attempt to to revive the Babylonian Empire to to to re you know that or other that we are the elites who are trying to destroy the world now or trying to enslave us are essentially the inheritors of the Babylonian tradition.
Is there any truth in that?
And your comment, if I might interrupt there, your comment on scientism is very much to the point.
Because scientism is the idea, defective idea, that science is the only way to truth.
And it's self-refuting when you think about it.
Because it itself, the statement, science is the only way to truth, is not a statement of science.
So if it's true, it's false.
But when I wrote my book, and this was one reason for writing it, on the prophet Daniel in Babylon going to what I called King's College Babylon and encountering the worldview of the Babylonians, people think, well, that's ancient idolatry.
It's not relevant to us.
And I say, wait a moment.
A contemporary physicist who's an atheist What are the gods of modern physics?
Well, they're the fundamental forces of nature because they determine everything.
Now, the Babylonians deified those forces and called them gods.
We don't call them gods anymore, but it's the same effect.
And I make the point that there's scarcely a hair's breadth between what some contemporary physicists believe—Paul Davis is one of them, and I know Paul, I regard him as a friend—but Essentially, they had something quite unusual.
Not only a cosmogony, the Babylonians had a theogony, and their gods were created out of primeval matter, which is fascinating.
Because, of course, contemporary naturalistic belief is exactly that, that we are all created out of primeval matter, and then they take the extrapolation one backwards, and the physicists and cosmologists now, many of them are happy to say that we were created by nothing!
Now, I'm very interested in that statement, which is a very tendentious view.
But there's such a link between that ancient view in Babylon and the contemporary world that I think you're onto something there.
And it is dangerous.
Of course it is.
I definitely got a flavour of that with from Richard Dawkins, that he really does believe that science has the answers to everything.
And we have to, I mean, you're familiar with that phrase, we've got to trust the science as though science is this fixed knowledge.
And I mean, apart from the tremendous arrogance behind that, I'm not sure that what many scientists are talking about as the science even qualifies as science.
I look in the field of environmentalism, for example.
I've studied that in some detail.
And I know that actually it's anti-science.
It is about promotion of a narrative.
And using something called post-normal science, which is the science version of post-modernism, where what counts is not the quest for truth, and it's not about objectivity, and it's not about study, observing, and then forming conclusions.
It's not about hypothesis.
It's about deciding what conclusion you want, and then torturing the evidence until it screams and gives you the result you want.
Sure, but that's not new.
People have been doing that for a long time.
The difference nowadays is that they're baptizing it in the sense that they're trying to make that normative when it is, as you rightly say, post-normal.
And it's very dangerous.
And the idea that science can explain everything, which is another title of one of my books, a recent one, written exactly into that, When it's totally obvious that science, in the sense of the natural sciences, and there's confusion here, as you probably know, you used the word Weltanschauung a moment or two ago.
Well, the German word for science, Wissenschaft, Is much more general than ours, and there's great confusion when I when we in the Anglo-Saxon world talk about use the word science.
We're talking about the natural sciences.
We're not talking about the humanities.
And so the idea that the natural sciences are coextensive with rationality is simply absurd.
That's the first huge mistake, that rationality starts and ends with the natural sciences.
And the second very dangerous move is that they can deal with everything.
And again, the really great scientists have seen through that.
One of my intellectual heroes in science is Sir Peter Medawar, who worked in Oxford.
And won the Nobel Prize.
And he made the point in a lovely book that science is limited and it's very easy to see it because it cannot answer, I quote, the simple questions of a child.
Where do I come from?
Where am I going to?
And so on.
These are the so-called Karl Popper's simple questions.
And you have to move outside the natural scientist to other rational disciplines.
Like history, literature, and so on, and theology, to answer those questions.
And I think there's a huge task to be done to push back against this scientism at the same time as being passionate about good science.
But moving away to this postmodern nonsense that any narrative works, Well, it's utterly ridiculous, and I've made quite a study of the ludicrous things that can happen.
I'm sure you've read Alain Sokal's book Imposture Intellectuelle, which is absolutely hilarious.
He put together all this stuff that sounded like physics advancing a postmodern agenda, and it got published in one of the Trendy journals and then he revealed a couple of weeks later there was absolute nonsense and that delivered a shock right through the the world at least a french intellectuals but.
It's having an influence as you say and a deep influence and that's your story kind of view it doesn't work for a genuine scientist not for a minute.
We've only got like four minutes left, and I think we should consider this a taster episode for future podcasts.
That's fine by me.
I would like that.
But there you are.
I'm presuming you're broadcasting from Oxford, which is a godless place, if ever there was one.
I mean, it's part of the problem, not the solution, I would say, on the whole.
What hope can you offer those of us Christians who are, you know, buoyed up with our faith, but at the same time are looking at the world and thinking, these look like end times.
Is there any really, how do we, I mean, is this world finished?
Or is there hope?
Well, I'm not a prophet, but what I can say, first of all, that Oxford is not completely godless.
And even in the scientific world, you'd be quite amazed at the number of leading Fellows of the Royal Society, that kind of thing, heads of departments in Oxford itself who are Christian believers.
And there's quite a large group of us.
It's called the Professors Forum that meet probably once a term to discuss issues like this.
The second thing that encourages me is the growing interest among young people.
Now, during lockdown, I have done something around 400 to 500 major Zoom conferences.
Around the world, and one or two of them, only one or two, have had 100,000 people watching them simultaneously.
Now, That kind of thing encourages me.
I find huge interest.
That is not to say that we're not in very difficult times, because I'm sure you're as concerned as I am about the political correctness that is destroying public discourse, the notion of tolerance, which has changed so that we cannot say anything in case it might upset someone.
And it ends, it is in danger of destroying the very concept of a university, having safe spaces and all of this.
All of this does worry me.
And certainly, from a biblical perspective, We must expect at some stage that things will get pretty bad and will get worse.
The artificial intelligence people predict that without any biblical reference whatsoever.
And I've tried to steer a very careful course without getting too speculative in my book 2084.
And that would be a good topic to discuss.
That looking at the Bible does actually talk about the future, but on the other hand, I often think the world into which Christianity exploded 20 centuries ago was a very dangerous world.
It was pluralistic, it was multicultural, it was dangerous, and yet A small bunch of people managed to, because they had a message that not only was the truth, it referred to a person who is the truth, and they had strong reasons for believing that behind it was someone who'd risen from the dead, that there is hope for the world.
So I just feel that whatever the situation, and it looks very grim, We press on and we do what little we can, but we mustn't be blind to the fact that certain obvious aspects of life are getting very much worse and will be a challenge and raise huge questions.
Professor John Lennox, till next time.
I've really enjoyed this, but we've got a lot more to talk about.
Thank you very much for appearing on The Delling Pod.
It's my pleasure.
I've enjoyed it enormously.
Good.
See you again soon!
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