John Lennox: Conversations on the Examined Life

January 7, 2025

This excerpt is taken from Conversations on the Examined Life by Eric Metaxas. Metaxas says, “Anyone who has ever attended a Socrates in the City event over now 25 years, will tell you there is simply nothing like it.” With Conversations on the Examined Life Vol. 1, readers can now experience these enlightening discussions, whether revisiting or discovering them anew.

For more, click here.

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John Lennox: GOD AND SCIENCE – Part One

Eric Metaxas: The issue on the table is this false idea that science and faith are at odds. You, to my mind, are the best person to speak on that subject, and I just thought if we could speak about that for a little bit during the time we have, I’d be grateful to you.

John Lennox: Well, we can. Socrates was an amazing man because he made his impact on culture and philosophy by asking questions. I sense that your motivation in all of this is to really get people perhaps to go outside their comfort zone and ask the big questions.

EM: Yes.

JL: I spent my entire life—even before I’d heard of Socrates, I heard of him very young—asking questions, and being curious about the universe. This huge question that you’ve introduced came about in my case because I was fascinated by mathematics from a very young age.

EM: You grew up in Ireland.

JL: I grew up in Northern Ireland, yes, with parents who made me inquisitive because they allowed me space to think. They were Christian, but they were big enough and they loved me enough to let me think and let me explore. They actually encouraged me to study other worldviews, which was very remarkable. My father handed me a copy when I was thirteen of The Communist Manifesto, and I said, “What’s that? Should I read it? Have you read it, Dad?” “No,” he said, “but you ought to because you need to know what other people think.” That set me on a lifelong process of playing Socrates. I actually do that, but that’s in the business school

in Oxford, I play Socrates. I use Plato to ask business executives about the big issues in life. But to your question, the contrast between science and faith … I’m going to say, science and God and not science and faith because faith is involved in science.

Now, I know when you introduced me, you were using faith in a sense of religion and belief in God. I regard that as slightly dangerous because it gives people the impression that you’ve got science here, and you’ve got faith there—and the two don’t meet. Well, faith in English has at least two meanings: one, religion. The Christian faith, the Muslim faith, the Jewish faith, and so on. But it also has a natural meaning: trust, belief, and so on. I shall be saying—if I get the opportunity to remember in my old age to say so—that science has faith at its heart. So it’s not science here and faith over there, and I’m going to be talking about not faith in the sense of religion, but faith in God and science. Now, why that’s important to me? There are several reasons. But firstly because I was curious.

I had a Christian background, but wanted to discover just where my mathematics fitted inside science and then, where my science fitted inside the big picture.

EM: Let me stop you for a moment. That’s a remarkable statement. Most people have very little fascination with math. It’s difficult. So the idea that you were fascinated by math and wanted to pursue math is something. But what was it that made you want to fit math into science? Because I would guess that most mathematicians don’t leap into the world of science. You’ve leapt rather fully into that world, and you’ve not left your math behind. But what was it that pushed you to be inquisitive about science from the position of a mathematician?

JL: Well, I think it involves Christianity in a very profound way, because I hadn’t been studying mathematics long. Now I’m talking about being a teenager now, long before I got to Cambridge. I’m a teenager and I’m reading and I discover statements like Kepler’s statement that God has revealed to us the secrets of the universe— something like that—in the language of mathematics. I discovered this pretty early on through my reading of C. S. Lewis, actually. Because C. S. Lewis was a literary genius, but he understood in a way that some scientists don’t the big issues that arose [with regard to what we are discussing today]. He made a statement in one of his books, and it really stuck with me. I’ve used it all my life, and I’m going to use it now.

He looks back at the origin of modern science. Modern science arose in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with people like Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. Let’s just stick with those three. He makes the point—which many other people have observed and about which many books have been written—that these extraordinary figures were all believers in God. So the question comes up: Is there a connection between belief in God and doing science? The answer is—and it still is today given by most people with nuances—that there’s a very profound connection. Lewis put it, as usual, brilliantly. He said, “Men became scientific. Why? Because they expected law in nature, and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver.” When I discovered that, I thought, “This is wonderful,” because it’s telling me that far from their belief in God hindering their science, it was their belief in God that drove their science. It was the motive that drove it, which is why I found your question, which is right at the heart of particularly our Western culture today, ironic. It’s ironic that today people are saying, “Science and God are incompatible,” when the very people they depended on, the real geniuses of science, all believed in God. They didn’t see any inconsistency.

Now, I learned that pretty young, and what it narrows down to is the very interesting fact that mathematics works.

EM: That idea that math makes sense somehow, that the world of science is related to mathematical equations … Most lay people would never think about that. Even when I have read about this concept in a newspaper article that some mathematician or some scientist is marveling at the idea that the laws of nature can be understood and that they can be described by math, they seem to make it sound stunning, that it’s startling. But to lay people, it’s almost as though we don’t understand why it’s stunning or startling. In other words, maybe we associate math and science in such a way that we think, “Well, of course, it’s got to be that way.”

JL: That’s right. But it took a really great mind to see that it was stunning. Albert Einstein said, “The only incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it’s comprehensible,” and he was clever enough to see there was an issue. In 1961 Eugene Wigner—who also with Einstein won a Nobel Prize for physics—wrote a paper which is much loved by mathematicians. He called it “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics.” Now, that’s very interesting.

EM: Yes.

JL: In other words, you shouldn’t expect mathematics to work. Now, Richard Feynman, the great American Nobel Prize-winning physicist, said the same thing. It’s just stunning that it actually works. For example, here is somebody, and she’s a mathematician. And she’s thinking in here about the universe out there. She comes up with equations, and they describe what’s out there. How does that possibly work in such a way that it gives us power over these things? Newton and his law of gravity, and his laws of motion alone—without even Einstein’s corrections—can help us send a person to the moon. How does that actually work? Now, what interested me, and this is a bit later on at university, I read Wigner’s paper. I’ve read it several times.

EM: Wigner wrote the paper in ’61, you said.

JL: Yes, “the unreasonable effectiveness … ” I said, “What do you mean by unreasonable? What is the worldview that’s driving that verdict?” That opened a whole world to me that wasn’t apparent in terms of its significance until the last ten years or so when I saw how powerful it is. Because one of the things now that I say to people is, “My main reason for not being an atheist as a scientist …it’s not that I’m a Christian. It’s because I can do science. Because the only thing that makes reasonable the effectiveness of mathematics is my faith in God.”

EM: That’s a very radical statement.

JL: It’s a very radical statement.

EM: One almost never hears that statement, even from people speaking on the very subject on which we’re speaking. You’re saying that not only are science and God compatible, you’re saying, no, in a way that’s wrong. They’re not merely compatible. Science drives you to believe in God.

JL: That’s right. Let me make it even more provocative because I could tell that you’re quite a provocative guy, and I like it. You see, let me put it this way. I feel, I think, and I believe there’s evidence for the fact that faith in God and science sit very comfortably as they did in the minds of Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. What doesn’t fit together is science and atheism. I think that atheism undermines science for a reason that is connected with the effectiveness of mathematics.

EM: So, we should properly be challenging atheists far more than they challenge people of faith.

JL: Well, that’s right. I can unpack that a little bit … if you like.

EM: Yes.

JL: Because it is a major argument these days. You see, we have this trust as scientists and as mathematicians in human reason. We rely on our human reason to get to our conclusions. Now, in the 1940s, C. S. Lewis was writing about this, and I think people didn’t really grasp what he was saying. He said, “Any theory of mind that undermines the validity of human reason cannot be true because you reach that theory by reasoning.”

EM: OK …

JL: OK.

EM: Again, this is another heavy one. I want to pause.

JL: Yes, it’s beautiful.

EM: These are big ideas, and they’re very important ideas. He phrased it in such a way, Lewis did, at some point … I can’t remember the exact quote, but he said, “If the universe made no sense, we should never have discovered that. We never would be able to discover that.”

JL: That is part of it. That goes down to the root of it, the reason for it, and he put it brilliantly. But it wasn’t in the center of the big debate, not to the extent it is today. Because what’s hap-

pened in the last four or five years is that a very prominent atheist is beginning to use Lewis’s arguments, and that has changed the balance completely.

EM: Who is that?

JL: It’s Thomas Nagel.

EM: In New York City.

JL: In New York City, that’s right.

EM: At NYU.

JL: That’s right. But if you like, I’ll backtrack a bit so that we can unpack this, so that it makes a kind of sense. Lewis is suggesting that if you undermine the validity of reason, your theory is wrong. Now, I’m suggesting that that’s why Wigner said, “Mathematics is unreasonably effective,” because his worldview, which was atheistic, followed to a logical conclusion, actually destroys rational thought.

EM: Yes.

JL: Now, let me put it in the form of a discussion I frequently have. I tease people, my fellow colleagues. I say to them, “Tell me what you do science with.” Of course, if they’re in the physical sciences, they’ll tell me about some very expensive piece of equipment. They’ve got a billion-dollar something or other. I say, “No, no, no. I don’t mean that I mean …”

“Oh,” they say, “You mean my …” and they’re about to say “mind,” where they remember it’s not politically correct to say mind. So, they say brain …

EM: I had no idea things have gotten to the point where it’s no longer politically correct to say mind.

JL: Oh, yes. You’ve got to say brain. [According to them] the mind is the brain because everything is physical, you see.

EM: OK.

JL: Everything can be reduced to physics.

EM: Let’s make sure that that’s clear to the audience …

JL: Yes.

EM: Because this is an amazing idea. The idea that the mind is not the same as the brain. The idea that if we were only moist robots, as somebody disgustingly put it …

JL: Yes, computing meat …

EM: [Grimacing] Computing meat. If that were the case, then in effect, anything like a computer ought to develop consciousness, but nothing that we ever know of except humans has consciousness. So the mind is separate from our mere brains, but it has gotten to the point—and I just wanted to annotate that or underscore that—that you’re saying that in the world of science at Oxford, people are afraid to use the word mind because it implies that there’s something beyond the physical material brain.

JL: Yes, that’s right. But it’s not all people. If we step back from this, let’s put this in a bigger framework. What we’re up against in the culture is the logical conclusion of a materialistic view of the universe. Let’s go back to Socrates and Plato because that’ll help make things clear. In the world of their time, about 300 BC or so, the Greeks were divided in their view of the big question, “What is the nature of ultimate reality?” Now, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all believed in the gods. They believed there was something more than the physical universe. But Democritus and Leucippus were geniuses because they developed the atomic theory. The atomic theory is one of the most important things ever discovered. Richard Feynman made a very interesting statement. He said, “If all of science was lost, but there was one result that we could preserve to pass to the next generation, just one, it would have to be the atomic theory, that everything is made of atoms.” Now the Greek word atomos means indivisible. We know they’re divisible, but the basic idea is there is stuff, very tiny stuff and everything— but everything—is made of that stuff.

EM: I have to say, as proud as I am to be a Greek, the idea that someone in Greece in the fourth century, Democritus, came up with that idea … How in the world—without going into this too much—but how could they back then have come up with this idea?

JL: Well, by a brilliant piece of reasoning. They could take a piece of wood and they could cut it, and it was smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller, and they reckoned there must be a point at which that process stops by something that couldn’t be cut. This is the basic stuff of reality. But then they made a leap that this would be all of reality. Now, that view barrels up through the centuries and it sits in Oxford. It’s, in fact, the dominant philosophy in Western academia, and we call it materialism. Now, there’s another version, which we call naturalism. They’re both atheistic. They both deny anything beyond, but some give a little bit more weight to the existence of the mind that’s independent of matter. Now, if you are a materialist, then you are going to say that when everything else is said and done, mind reduces to brain. That’s all it is. Brain reduces the physics and chemistry, and all we are is physics and chemistry.

Now, back to my little story. Let’s suppose that’s true for a minute, and I say to my friends, “Tell me what you do science with.” “I do it with my brain,” they say. “Tell me about your brain,” I say. I have great fun with this.

EM: I can see where this might go.

JL: “Tell me about your brain,” I say. “What is the brain? Give me the short story.” “Well,” they say, “the short story is the brain is the end product of a mindless, unguided process.”

I look at them and I smile, and I say this, “And you trust it. You trust it. Now, tell me honestly,” and I let this sink in, “if you knew that the computer you use in your laboratory or any of the instruments was the end product of a mindless, unguided process, would you trust it?” I’ve never had the answer yet to that. No. And I say, “Now, there’s a problem there. Can you not see that you are using something that your theories—that is your philosophy, your worldview of what is ultimate reality—is destroying the very thing you want to trust?”

I regard that as totally inconsistent. Now, from where I sit, atoms aren’t ultimate reality. Ultimate reality is God who is mind.

So I say, “You’ve got it exactly the wrong way around. The fundamental stuff of the universe is not mass energy. It’s spirit. God is spirit. He’s not material. And therefore I believe mathematics is very reasonably effective, because mathematics, being a product of the human mind is a reflection of the God in whose image we are made.” That is why science rocketed up in the sixteenth century, because that’s exactly what Newton and the company believed.

EM: Couldn’t you take this even another step and say that the reason God gave us science—or gave us the kind of minds that would want to know and that would eventually discover that science can be the path to discovering everything else—was so that in the end we would discover Him? In other words—and this would really upset scientific atheists—that the whole point of science is for us to discover the God who created the universe?

That that’s why the Lord gave us a planet where we have a transparent atmosphere and we can see the stars, and we can discover all kinds of things—that God designed the universe and designed is in such a way that we would, by doing science, ultimately discover Him?

JL: That’s right.

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