God's Undertaker |
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Crank it up, John - 28 June 2009
Having arrived, a little exhausted, at the end of chapter 7 of John C. Lennox’s God’s Undertaker, you might be forgiven for expecting a gentle drift to the conclusion. Not a bit of it.
Chapters 8 to 12 crank up the pace about 3 gears, as Lennox moves from DNA and genetics to the science uniquely equipped to analyse it – a science for which he, as a mathematician, is admirably equipped as a guide – the science of information.
For a living cell is not merely matter. It is matter replete with information. (p. 126).
Or again, Bernd-Olaf Küppers (yup – his real name):
The problem of the origin of life is clearly basically equivalent to the problem of the origin of biological information. (p. 139).
And that information, says Lennox, must have come from somewhere.
Particularly striking is Lennox’s potent demonstration of the question-begging so rampant in many contemporary analogies for evolution (pp. 156ff.). Richard Dawkins, for example, in his book The Blind Watchmaker, attempts to demonstrate how evolution can produce incredibly improbably biological structures by drawing an analogy with a team of monkeys typing at random to produce a ‘target phrase’, in this case Shakespear’s ‘Methinks it is like a weasel’. Dawkins succeeds, at a first glance, in showing how the probability of producing this phrase can be reduced from 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (yup – 40 zeroes) to around 1 in 43. Neat, huh? Suddenly writing plays for a living looks like a workable career option.
Well, not quite – don’t give up your day job. Listen to Lennox:
What … does he mean by introducing a target phrase? A target phrase is a precise goal which, according to Dawkins himself, is a profoundly un-Dawinian concept … the very information that the mechanisms are supposed to produce is apparently already contained somewhere within the organism, whose genesis he claims to be simulating. The argument is entirely circular. … For their plausibility, then, Dawkins’ analogies depend on introducing to his model the very features whose existence in the real world he denies. (pp. 158-159).
Oops.
Resuscitating Paley - 26 June 2009
About 10 years ago I had the privilege of meeting Bruce Winter, the former warden of Tyndale house in Cambridge.
You know how it is when someone says something that sticks with you?
Well, we were talking about science and Christianity, and Bruce said something like this: ‘I think William Paley’s work on design in nature would be worth another look. I have a feeling there’s more to it than some people think.’
William Paley was an 18th-century theologian and naturalist, who argued that the appearance of design in nature implied the existence of a Designer, just as the intricate engineering of a watch implies the existence of a watchmaker. He has been criticised – ridiculed even – by many modern scientists, who have argued that evolution can account for the apparent ‘designed-ness’ of the natural world.
Well, finally someone has brought Paley back to life. And would you believe it, the caricatures painted by unbelieving scientists are, well, caricatures. Paley’s argument from design is just a little more sophisticated than you might think. A lot more sophisticated, actually.
God’s Undertaker, pp. 78-84.
No rational explanation…? - 24 June 2009
The rational intelligibility of the universe implies that a rational Mind lies behind it (John C. Lennox, God’s Undertaker, pp. 58-62).
Accordingly, many unbelieving scientists who spend time thinking about such matters cannot explain why the universe should be intelligible at all. Here’s Eugene Wigner (yes, that’s right, that Wigner – let the reader understand), for example:
The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious, and there is no rational explanation for it … it is an article of faith. (God’s Undertaker, p. 60, italics added)
Nobody knows - 23 June 2009
The first 4 chapters of John C. Lennox’s God’s Undertaker cover some fairly well-trodden methodological and philosophical ground, though with glittering clarity and fresh insights on almost every page.
Chapters 5 to 7 focus more specifically on evolutionary biology – conceding ground where appropriate while simultaneously asking some probing questions – on the fossil record, irreducible complexity, and especially the origin of life (as opposed to its subsequent development). Here’s Stuart Kaufmann, for example:
Anyone who tells you that he or she knows how life started on the earth 3.45 billion years ago is a fool or a knave. Nobody knows. (p. 126)
Mind-broadening - 18 June 2009
Some highlights from the first 4 chapters of of John C. Lennox’s God’s Undertaker.
- the roots of science in Christian theism (pp. 19-22).
- crystal clarity about the distinctions between naturalism and materialism (pp. 27-28)
- scientific method (pp. 31-34)
- materialism’s talent for begging the question (pp. 34-37)
- Laplace (pp. 44-45)
- against the ‘God of the gaps’ (pp. 46-47)
- God as Creator, and primary and secondary causation (pp. 47-51)
- the utterly mind-boggling improbability of our universe coming into being by chance (p. 70)
Keep your nose out - 17 June 2009
John C. Lennox’s God’s Undertaker recalls the well-known encounter between Napoleon and the French mathematician Laplace, which is ‘constantly misused to buttress atheism’ (p. 44):
On being asked by Napoleon where God fitted into his mathematical work, Laplace, quite correctly, replied: ‘Sir, I have no need of that hypothesis.’ Of course God did not appear in Laplace’s mathematical description of how things work, just as Mr Ford would not appear in a scientific description of the laws of internal combustion. But what does that prove? That Henry Ford did not exist? Clearly not. (pp. 44-45)
Austin Farrer puts it wonderfully:
Laplace and his colleagues had not learned to do without theology; they had merely learned to mind their own business. (p. 45)
God’s undertaker - 15 June 2009
Too many reviews describe books as ‘vital reading’ – obviously an overstatement, because we get along perfectly fine without almost all of them.
But just occasionally a truly remarkable book appears. To my mind, John C. Lennox’s God’s Undertaker falls into that category.
A long time ago I used to be a scientist. Yeah, a long time ago. But, still, I quite often get asked to speak on ‘Science and Christianity’ and similar subjects, so I’ve read a fair bit on the subject. This one is something really special. Every chapter manages to say something new, and existing arguments are re-stated with greater clarity and cogency than I’ve ever seen before. With this book, John Lennox stomps into the heavyweight division of this rather tired old debate and flattens the opposition.
Any scientifically-minder Christian who doesn’t read this book is missing out. Any unbelieving scientist who hasn’t read it can safely be ignored.