John C. Lennox - God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?

Copyright 2009 John C. Lennox

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A Lion Book
an imprint of
Lion Hudson plc
Wilkinson House, Jordan Hill Road,
Oxford OX2 8DR, England
www.lionhudson.com
UK ISBN 978 0 7459 5371 7 (print)
US ISBN 978 0 8254 7912 0 (print)
ISBN 978 0 7459 5911 5 (e-pub)
ISBN 978 0 7459 5910 8 (Kindle)
ISBN 978 0 7459 5927 6 (pdf)

First edition 2007
This edition 2009
10 9 8 7 6 5 4
First electronic format 2011

All rights reserved

Acknowledgments

Chapters 1. War of the worldviews, 3. Reduction, reduction, reduction, 11. The origin of information and Epilogue: Beyond science but not beyond reason Scripture quotations taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version, copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan and Hodder & Stoughton Limited. All rights reserved. The NIV and New International Version trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by International Bible Society. Use of either trademark requires the permission of International Bible Society. UK trademark number 1448790.

This book originated in lectures given at a course entitled Faith, Reason and Science at the University of Oxford, Department for Continuing Education and at the Institute for the Philosophy of Science at Salzburg University, Austria. It represents an attempt to evaluate the evidence of modern science in relation to the debate between the atheistic and theistic interpretations of the universe and to provide a basis for discussion.

Cover: Danwer Productions/Alamy

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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To Sally
without whose love,
encouragement and support
this book and much else
would never have been completed.

Why is there something rather than nothing? Why, in particular, does the universe exist? Where did it come from and where, if anywhere, is it heading? Is it itself the ultimate reality behind which there is nothing or is there something beyond it? Can we ask with Richard Feynman: What is the meaning of it all? Or was Bertrand Russell right when he said that The universe is just there, and thats all?

These questions have lost nothing of their power to fire human imagination. Spurred on by the desire to climb Everest peaks of knowledge, scientists have already given us spectacular insights into the nature of the universe we inhabit. On the scale of the unimaginably large, the Hubble telescope transmits stunning images of the heavens from its orbit high above the atmosphere. On the scale of the unimaginably small, the scanning tunnelling microscope uncovers the incredibly complex molecular biology of the living world with its information-rich macromolecules and its micro-miniature protein factories whose complexity and precision make even advanced human technologies look crude by comparison.

Are we and the universe with its profusion of galactic beauty and subtle biological complexity nothing but the products of irrational forces acting on mindless matter and energy in an unguided way, as the so-called New Atheists, led by Richard Dawkins, suggest? Is human life ultimately only one, admittedly improbable, but nevertheless fortuitous, arrangement of atoms among many? In any case, how could we be in any sense special since we now know that we inhabit a tiny planet orbiting a fairly undistinguished star far out in an arm of a spiral galaxy containing billions of similar stars, a galaxy that is only one of billions distributed throughout the vastness of space?

What is more, say some, since certain basic properties of our universe, like the strength of the fundamental forces of nature and the number of observable space and time dimensions, are the result of random effects operating at the origin of the universe, then, surely, there could well be other universes with very different structures. May it not be that our universe is only one in a vast array of parallel universes forever separated from each other? Is it not therefore absurd to suggest that human beings have any ultimate significance? Their measure in a multiverse would seem effectively reduced to zero.

Thus it surely would be an intellectually stultifying exercise in nostalgia to hark back to the early days of modern science when scientists such as Bacon, Galileo, Kepler, Newton and Clerk Maxwell, for example, believed in an intelligent Creator God whose brain-child the cosmos was. Science has moved on from such primitive thinking, we are told, squeezed God into a corner, killed and then buried him by its all-embracing explanations. God has turned out to be no more substantial than the smile on a cosmic Cheshire cat. Unlike Schrdingers cat, God is no ghostly superposition of dead and alive he is certainly dead. Furthermore, the whole process of his demise shows that any attempt to reintroduce God is likely to impede the progress of science. We can now see more clearly than ever before that naturalism the view that nature is all that there is, that there is no transcendence reigns supreme.