This transcript is of John Lennox presenting his case for the existence of God at the Oxford Union in 2012.
Copyright © 2012 Oxford Media Associates
The excerpts, below, are a sample of the transcript.
God Exists
And as we look at the rise of science in the 16th and 17th centuries, Alfred North Whitehead and many others commented, that men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver.
So, ladies and gentlemen, I’m not ashamed of being both a scientist and a Christian because, arguably, Christianity gave me my subject.
What I am amazed at is that serious thinkers today continue to ask us to choose between God and science. That’s like asking people to choose between Henry Ford and engineering as an explanation of the motor car.
When Newton discovered his law of gravity he didn’t say I’ve got a law, I don’t need God. No, he wrote the Principia Mathematica, arguably the greatest work in the whole history of science, because he saw that God is not the same kind of explanation as a scientific explanation. God doesn’t Compete. Agency does not compete with mechanism and law.
It reminds me a little bit of GK Chesterton who said, “It is absurd to complain that it is unthinkable for an unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing and then to pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.”
Leading philosopher Alvin Plantinga of Notre Dame says, “If atheists are right that we are the product of mindless, unguided natural processes then they have given a strong reason to doubt the reliability of human cognitive faculties, and therefore inevitably to doubt the validity of any belief that they produce including their atheism.” Their biology and their belief in naturalism would, therefore, appear to be at war with each other in a conflict that has nothing at all to do with God.
As modern science sprang from Judeo-Christian sources, so did the concept of human equality. Listen to atheist Jurgen Habermas, arguably one of Germany’s leading intellectuals. He said that “Universalistic egalitarianism from which sprang the ideals of freedom and collective life and solidarity, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love.”
This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day there is no alternative to it. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk.
