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Responding to the recent spate of the militant atheists’ screeds, John C. Lennox recently wrote God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (Oxford: Lion Hudson plc., c. 2009), a book that originated in lectures delivered at the University of Oxford. Lennox is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and has publicly debated both Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens (two of the celebrated contemporary atheists). There is clearly a “war of the worldviews” being waged, and Lennox seeks to clarify why thoughtful Christians “insist that faith and evidence are inseparable. Indeed, faith is a response to evidence, not a rejoicing in the absence of evidence” (p. 16). Doing so involves, first of all, a proper understanding of science. Today’s atheists claim to rest their case in science, but it’s important to see that they are fundamentally philosophical naturalists (not scientists) adhering to an alluring worldview (a reductionistic scientism that restricts all truth to empirical science) rather than reputable science. “Statements by scientists are not necessarily statements of science” (p. 19).
Indeed, Lennox insists: “At the heart of all science lies the conviction that the universe is orderly” (p. 20). There is a rational dimension to all that is. Historically, this belief developed within Hebraic monotheism, holding that One God rules the world. In Him and according to His will all things cohere. As Werner Jaeger insisted, “‘the Logos in the Hebrew account of creation’” provides “‘a substantialization of an intellectual property or power of God the Creator, who is stationed outside the world and brings the world into existence by his own personal fiat’” (p. 50). Without this religious or metaphysical conviction science simply could not exist. “C.S. Lewis’ succinct formulation of [Alfred North] Whitehead’s view is worth recording: ‘Men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver’” (p. 21).
A “law,” properly defined, presupposes a lawgiver, for it simply describes how things work; a law is not the power (the agent) activating matter. Believing in a supernatural lawgiver has enabled many great scientists to discern “why” things are as they are as well as “how” they function. Consequently, as Keith Ward says: “‘To the majority of those who have reflected deeply and written about the origin and nature of the universe, it has seemed that it points beyond itself to a source which is non-physical and of great intelligence and power. Almost all of the great classical philosophers—certainly Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Locke, Berkeley—saw the origin of the universe as lying in a transcendent reality.’” However much they differed on details, they all agreed “‘that the universe is not self-explanatory, and that it requires some explanation beyond itself’” (p. 58).
Atheists who insist their conclusions come from scientific evidence wrongly portray the very nature of scientific investigation, failing to distinguish between mechanism and agency. To carefully describe a machine says absolutely nothing about who made it. Thinkers like Dawkins make a category mistake, violating an elementary canon of logic. Take a Model T Ford engine, for example. Fully understanding how the engine works cannot tell us anything about Henry Ford. He’s not found within the machine, and it works quite well without his physical presence. But if one “decided that his understanding of the principle of how the engine works made it impossible to believe in the existence of a Mr. Ford who designed the engine in the first place, this would be patently false—in philosophical terminology he would be committing a category mistake. Had there never been a Mr. Ford to design the mechanisms, none would exist for him to understand” (p. 45).
Richard Dawkins’ mechanistic atheism stands rooted in his dogmatic denial of design, though he confesses that biological beings certainly “‘look designed, they look overwhelmingly as though they’re designed’” (p. 79). But, along with Daniel Dennett, he prefers to trust Darwin’s theory rather than his observational skills because Darwin provides “‘scheme for creating Design out of Chaos without the aid of Mind’” (p. 79). Following Darwin’s prescription in an effort to explain the universe, however, betrays the limits (if not falsity) of naturalistic evolution. The deeper physicists and astronomers delve into the cosmos the more they find it remarkably well-designed—indeed, fine-tuned to facilitate life on earth. Lennox cites the evidence proffered by eminent authorities such as Sir Roger Penrose, whose “calculations lead him to the remarkable conclusion that the ‘Creator’s aim’ must have been accurate to 1 part in 10 to the power of 10123 . . . a ‘number which would be impossible to write out in the usual decimal way, because even if you were able to put a zero on every particle in the universe there would not even be enough particles to do the job’” (p. 71).
Consequently, says Sir John Houghton, a physicist: “‘The fact that we understand some of the mechanisms of the working of the universe or of living systems does not preclude the existence of a designer, any more than he possession of insight into the processes by which a watch has been put together, however automatic these processes may appear, implies there can be no watchmaker’” (p. 91). The long derided watch analogy of William Paley has made a sudden comeback! Reason leads us to conclude that Henry Ford designed Ford motor cars; reason leads us to believe there’s a watchmaker somewhere responsible for the existence of watches. “So it is with God,” says Lennox. “At the more abstract level of the explanatory of power of science itself, philosopher Richard Swinburne in his book Is there a God? says: ‘Note that I am not postulating a “god of the gaps”, a god merely to explain the things that science has not yet explained. I am postulating a God to explain why science explains; . . . The very success of science in showing us how deeply ordered the natural world is provides strong grounds for believing that there is an even deeper cause for that order.’ Swinburne is using inference to the best explanation and saying that God is the best explanation for the explanatory power of science” (p. 48). Discerning design in creation leads, rationally, to a Designing Creator!
In addition to the nature of the cosmos, the mystery of life suggests a Rational Creator as the Source of all that is. Having described our finely tuned universe, wherein all seems (from the moment of the Big Bang) minutely orchestrated, Lennox emphasizes the mystery of life, especially on the molecular level. For all the evidence regarding microevolution, “‘the origin of species—Darwin’s problem—remains unsolved’, thus echoing the verdict of geneticist Richard Goldschmidt: ‘the facts of microevolution do not suffice for an understanding of macroevolution’” (p. 109). The fossil record shows little evidence of Darwinian evolution. Niles Eldridge, a distinguished paleontologist, has studied the rocks for decades, looking for “the kind of slow directional change we all thought ought to be there” but finding “instead that once species appear in the fossil record they tend not to change very much at all. Species remain imperturbably, implacably resistant to change as a matter of course—often for millions of years’” (p. 115).
Most puzzling is the origin of life, a truly “formidable challenge to challenge to naturalism” (p. 121). Despite some scientists’ triumphant claims, no one knows how life on earth began. As geneticist Michael Denton said: “Between a living cell and the most highly ordered non-biological systems, such as a crystal or a snowflake, there is a chasm as vast and absolute as it is possible to conceive.’ Even the tiniest bacterial cells, weighing less than a trillionth of a gram, is ‘a veritable microminiaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of 100 thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world’” (p. 122). For even a single protein to emerge from lifeless matter is mathematically most improbable. “Yet life as we know it requires hundreds of thousands of proteins, and it has been calculated that the odds against producing these by chance is more than 1040,000 to 1. Sir Fred Hoyle famously compared these odds against the spontaneous formation of life with the chance of a tornado sweeping through a junkyard and producing a Boeing 747 jet aircraft” (p. 129).
Added to the mystery of life’s origin is the complexity of the genetic code. How does one explain the massive amount of information in a strand of DNA? More importantly, how does one explain the fact that DNA does not “create” life—rather, life seems to spawn DNA. So why does anything live? Whence comes the information basic to living beings? No one makes more sense than St John: God spoke the Word and all that was made reveals Him. Basic to all, the most fundamental reality of all, is the Word.
Gerard Reed is a retired professor of history and philosophy, most recently Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. He is the author of three books--The Liberating Law; C.S. Lewis and the Bright Shadow of Holiness; C.S. Lewis Explores Vice & Virtue--as well as a variety of articles and book reviews.
