What do you think is the main thing that the new atheists got wrong about God? John Lennox sat down with Alex O'Connor for another fantastic conversation, and they get into the subject of faith. That's what I want to get into in this video. In this conversation, there is so much overlap between the two of them. They both think that faith is inescapable in certain senses, and they also recognize that faith can be impossible for some people at some times. So how do we wrestle with this? Faith is inescapable, faith is impossible. First, let's hear John Lennox.
SPEAKER_02Einstein was right when he spoke about faith, and it wasn't faith in God. I cannot conceive, he once wrote, of a genuine scientist without that faith. He meant every scientist must believe that science can be done, or to put it in his way, every scientist must believe in the rational intelligibility of the universe. You can't do science without that. And Polkinghorn, John Polkinghorn, taught me quantum mechanics at Cambridge. And in his books he kept emphasizing this, that physics is powerless to explain its faith. And he used the word faith unashamedly, it said so, in the mathematical intelligibility of the universe, because you've got to trust that, believe that, have faith in that before you can do any uh science at all. And so that was a huge mistake. And I think uh people have um begun to realize that.
SPEAKER_00Alex can totally agree to this. Here's what he says. I think for me the the moment of reckoning was as an undergraduate being introduced to the problem of induction from David Hume. And I remember at the time nearly making a provocative video about it that was going to be called something like, you know, yes, I'm a person of faith. Because I I wanted to I'd suddenly realized that, although it's quite an obvious point to me now, there are all kinds of things which we believe that we don't have any evidence for.
SPEAKER_01So the problem of induction for David Hume is that you might play a game of pool with your friend and you knock the cue ball into the black and you expect the black to go into the pocket, but why should it go into the pocket as opposed to turn into a bunch of flowers? Like, why do we believe that A will lead to B? But that is not deductive reasoning in terms of two plus two equals four. There are no premises that lead to that particular conclusion. And if you just throw up your hands and say, well, actually, every other time the cue ball has gone into the black, the black has bounced off it, you're just saying that induction works because induction works, and that's just circular reasoning. And yet every minute of our lives we depend on a causing B. So we don't navigate the world according to mathematical proofs or reason. And therefore says, Alex, are we living into a kind of faith? Don't we actually have trust in all kinds of things? Here are the things that Alex lists.
SPEAKER_00And you can list them off easily, things like the existence of the external world or of other minds or whatnot. But the problem of induction in particular was so like empirical, and it came from such an empiricist, just sort of scientist, atheist, you know, heroic figure of philosophy, just throwing up his hands and saying we we have no like justification for this, and yet I believe it, that made me realize, oh, okay, so so we do that all the time. The the question then is like, what becomes a legitimate kind of faith and what becomes an illegitimate kind of faith? And the problem with the new atheists, I think, is that they were a bit careless in setting their uh criteria. A bit like you remember like logical positivism was a huge movement in the 20th century that said for a statement to be meaningful, it must either be empirically verifiable or like analytically, mathematically true by definition. And it was really popular for a while. And ultimately it fools because it fails by its own standard. Because the statement that statements must be empirically verifiable or mathematically true is not empirically verifiable nor mathematically true. And in hindsight, you look at it and you go, you just set the bar too high for yourself. And I think what the new atheists did was they said, we won't believe anything without sufficient scientific evidence. And they just set the bar too high and left themselves open to attacks from people who said, well, go on then prove the existence of the external world, prove induction, prove the existence of other minds, prove that maths will work in five minutes from now, you know. And you just can't do these things.
SPEAKER_02Yes, that's right. Uh I would encourage you, by the way, to make that video. I think it could be real fun.
SPEAKER_01I think I might do that actually, still. I too would like to see that video. That'd be fantastic because it presses into the inescapable nature of faith. Faith is inescapable, and John Lennox will say the same.
SPEAKER_02This logical incoherence of uh statements that sound very plausible has come back in full force, and it's still around with us in the form of scientism.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, sure.
SPEAKER_02Science is the only way to truth. But that's not a statement of science. It's a metascientific statement about science. So if it's true, it's false.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_02It goes too far.
SPEAKER_01Scientism is the claim that everything in the scientific domain is all there is, and there cannot be anything outside that. Well, you have to know what the totality of reality is outside of science to make that statement. It's not a scientific statement to say that science is all there is. It's a meta-scientific statement, it's a metaphysical statement. And this again gets to the inescapability of faith. Alex has a great analogy for this. Check it out.
SPEAKER_00The analogy I've I've used, which was sort of inspired by something C.S. Lewis said, although it's a different point, is that I kind of imagine people-I maybe I've told you about this, but I imagine people discovering a book of Shakespearean sonnets and trying to sort of be and they don't know what it is, and they're like, all right, let's investigate this weird book that we found. And they start looking at it and they start noticing things. They're like, well, I've noticed that there's a big version of a letter and a small version of a letter, and that at the beginning of each line it uses the big letter, and that's the law of capitalization. And then they discover the law of punctuation and grammar. And if they're really clever, they might discover like iambic pentameter, they discover the rhythm of the and that they're that what they're coming up with are the laws of literacy, right? And they're they're and they're able to predict when I turn the page, I bet it's going to follow these laws. And and it does, and they've discovered the laws of literacy. And then someone comes along and says, So where did the book come from? Like, what is this book? And they say, well, we don't know yet. But look at all the progress we're making, discovering the laws of literacy. I'm sure one day they'll explain the origin of the book. It would be more than just optimism. It would be an actual category error to think that the laws of literacy will one day describe even describe, let alone explain, the origin of the book. But I think that's kind of what people do when they expect that the laws of science, which are descriptions of events in the universe, will one day explain the cause of the universe which gives rise to those phenomena.
SPEAKER_02I think your illustration is excellent. I hadn't heard it before, and it works very well because it's perfectly intelligible.
SPEAKER_01So there's a lot of agreement on faith being inescapable and science having real limits to it. But Alex still has a problem with faith. Faith is inescapable, but faith is also impossible for at least some people, right?
SPEAKER_00Alex puts it like this. One of the most powerful arguments for atheism, I suppose, is a sort of broad encompassing of this, which you might call divine hiddenness, which is to say that God seems to hide. And that that means that while there may be evidence of his existence, some people for some reason are insensitive to it. And maybe they're resistant, maybe they don't want it to be true or whatever. But it seems to me that there is at least one person in the world who genuinely wants to know God and just can't believe it. Just doesn't and and maybe it's because they've been listening to too much Richard Dawkins and Hitchens, but again, that's kind of not their fault, if that's just the culture they grew up in and that's what they were convinced by. You don't choose what to be convinced by, you just are or you're not. And so there's this problem of of of why some people seem not to want to meet God at all, and they get, you know, blinding flashes of revelation, they get burning bushes and appearances and dreams and all this kind of stuff. And then there are those who spend their lives crying out for a sign. Yes. And they don't seem to get one. It seems arbitrary, and if God exists, maybe a little bit cruel.
SPEAKER_01Alex speaks about the problem of divine hiddenness. Of course, very few people within the Bible get a burning bush. Moses got a burning bush, most people got nothing. There's a great inequality of religious experience. And if religious experience is meant to be some great good, if knowing God is the sum and bonum of life, if that's what life is all about, and some people seem to have intimate experiences of the living God, and other people seem to be denied that, that is a little bit cruel, isn't it? And for those who don't get the burning bush, to expect them to have faith, is that a little bit cruel? Is that unjust? Is that not what you would expect if there is a loving God after all? John Lennox is actually going to resonate with what Alex is saying here and agree with so much of what Alex is talking about.
SPEAKER_02I think there is a real mystery there. I I'm very sympathetic to that because it is a question that I ask myself a lot because it was asked of me a lot.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Here I am coming from Northern Ireland, and I arrive in Cambridge, and almost the first thing I was asked when people heard me speak with the Northern Irish accent was, Do you believe in God? Do you go to church? And then they remember the first one, and it happened very soon, early on. He said, Oh, sorry, sorry, you're Irish, you Irish all believe in God and you fight about it. In other words, it's a cultural phenomenon. If you were born somewhere else in another culture, you you wouldn't have these beliefs. And I think to a certain extent, that of course is true. We are all influenced by our culture and the worldview of our upbringing. But what has helped me enormously in that it hasn't solved the problem. There is a residual problem here, Alex. I'm with you on that. Is that it's possible for people to change their worldview. And I've seen that happen quite often.
SPEAKER_01So John Lennox agrees that there is an unevenness, and where you grow up has a massive bearing on what it is that you believe about metaphysical reality, about God. John Lennox resonates with Alex on that, but he actually says people can change their mind, which is a really interesting thing to bring into the conversation. Because if on Christianity it seems unlikely that God would allow people to be ignorant of him, on atheism, is it likely that people would transcend their cultural moment and the beliefs of their society and their family? Is it likely that there would be a supranational, supracultural movement of people who transcend culture and locality and the social influences on them and start to believe in something that is far beyond just our ethnicity, far beyond our kith and kin? Christianity does seem to have this remarkably international flavor to it. It's the most diverse sociological phenomenon the world has ever seen. And this does not answer the hiddenness problem. John Lennox is not attempting to answer the hiddenness problem, but he is saying, look, there's difficult things for both sides to have to account for. So there's difficulties for the Christian and there's difficulties for the atheist when we think about what we might expect. But I love that John Lennox is not trying to solve the problem of divine hiddenness. He's actually trying to establish the problem and make sure it's a genuine problem. If there is no God, then our experiences of godlessness are natural and to be expected and nothing to be concerned about. But John Lennox is inviting everybody to have a problem with divine hiddenness. He's inviting everybody to feel the godforsakenness of life in this world. And I think that's a human experience, whether you're a Christian or not. I as a Christian do not feel like I know God the way that I want to know God. A friend just sent me this passage about prayer and about how this great saint would retreat into his own heart as this place of solitude and peace and tranquility. And this incredible saint describes this prayer life that is just so on fire for Jesus and so at peace with God and the world. And that makes me feel like, oh gosh, I don't have the kind of belief. I don't have the same experience of God and prayer as this incredible saint has. There is an inequality of religious experience that is out there. And if the problem of divine hiddenness is the problem of non-resistant non-belief, I think everybody is resistant. And I think everybody struggles with belief. Believers struggle to believe. And even those who say that they are non-resistant are to some degree resistant. I'm resistant, you're resistant. I struggle with faith, you struggle with faith. This is a human problem, and John Lennox does not try to dissolve away this human problem of divine hiddenness. Notice his language of sympathy here.
SPEAKER_02I sympathize with that. I don't trivialize that because I think that's the hard objection. It is really hard. But I don't think atheism answers it. I think Christianity doesn't solve it like a question to be solved, but gives us a way in to cope with it, as I said in our last interview.
SPEAKER_01So all credit to John Lennox, he's not trying to dissolve away the problem of divine hiddenness, he's trying to have a problem with divine hiddenness, and all credit to Alex, he here is not trying to say it's impossible for God to exist, but he is stating the problem, I think, in a very fair way, a very impassioned way, and a way that really needs to be wrestled with.
SPEAKER_00Alex says this. I find it difficult to believe that there isn't at least one person who sincerely just cannot be convinced that God exists. And there's no there's no boiling rage, there's no hatred, there's no resistance, they just can't believe it. And I also believe that there's at least one person who has suffered arbitrary, gratuitous suffering that could have easily been avoided had it been in accordance with the will of the sustainer of the universe. I find those two very difficult to disbelieve, and I also find it very difficult to square with the existence of a God who loves us all and wants to come to know us all.
SPEAKER_02And therefore we have to find some kind of way in. I share that question with you.
SPEAKER_01I love that. I share that question with you. Let's hear that again.
SPEAKER_02I share that question with you. I'd be totally open. The level of one's own personal experience then becomes important.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I think that's vital. Can we trust God with our questions? The way to get to know God is not to have all our questions answered, and then we come into an unquestioning faith. The question is, does Christianity actually have superior resources that allow you to experience that question and to ground that question and to explore that question, even if you don't have answers right now? Atheism leaves you with a whole bunch of questions that you don't have answers for. Christianity leaves you with some really existential issues you have to grapple with. Really? A good God with all the suffering in the world? Really a God who wants to know us and to be known by us, and yet there is a problem of divine hiddenness? Really, really? There are unanswered questions on either side, but can you trust God with these questions? And I would say that actually Christianity allows you to truly have a problem with suffering and truly have a problem with divine hiddenness. And I think it does give you some fruitful ways forward. Let me give you two fruitful ways forward with this issue of divine hiddenness. The inescapability and yet the impossibility of faith is well accounted for by Alex's analogy. If Shakespeare has written, let's say, a play, then Hamlet in the play asking, where is Shakespeare? is a bit like you and me asking, where is God? Shakespeare is inescapable for Hamlet and impossible to see. And if there is an author to creation, then our experience as characters within this play, within this drama called reality, is exactly what you would expect to feel if you were a character in a play that has an author. That there is an inescapability to faith in this world and an impossibility to actually see the outline of the maker alongside a felt absence of that author. If Alex is correct about the author-to-play dynamic of God and his creation, then I think you would expect to have a problem with divine hiddenness. It's not that you would not expect to have a problem with divine hiddenness. I think you would in fact expect to have a problem with divine hiddenness if God is like an author and we are like characters. But the second help I want to give you on divine hiddenness, it's part of our 321 course. Have you gone to 321course.com to check out our Christianity 101? It's eight different episodes. All of them begin with a story. And episode one, it's completely free, you can go and do it now. But episode one begins with the story of imagine you wake up on a space station. You have no idea how you got there, you have no idea of your own identity, your name, your memory logs have been wiped. And we imagine this woman called Sasha, there she is on the space station. She doesn't know why she's here, the meaning of it all, and if there's anything beyond the spaceship. Okay, you see why the analogy is relevant, right? And then she meets a couple of people. She meets Hope. And Hope seems to be a very spiritual kind of a person, and Hope looks out at the stars and she feels wonder and she she just in her bones she knows that somebody out there is looking after them. She can't tell you why, but she's hopeful. Some people are like hope. Other people are like Doc. Imagine another character on the space station. He's this scientist, and he starts to do all these calculations about the ship, and it's really well designed, and he figures, you know, if there's architecture, there must be an architect, right? If there's experience of design, then there must be a designer to the space station. And he seems to know that there is life beyond the space station, and he has has some belief in a higher intelligence. And there's there are docs in the world, aren't there? There are hopes in the world who are just spiritual, there are docs in the world who are just scientific. But in the story, Sasha, the original woman, she is just skeptical. She's not spiritual, she's not scientific, she's just skeptical. And in the end, in the story, she just says to Hope and Doc, shut up about what's beyond the space station. Who cares about what's beyond the space station? We just can't know. Let's just try and make our experience with the one life we have a fruitful, flourishing experience. And in the 3-2-1 course, I ask you, who are you most like? Are you like Hope? Are you like Doc? Are you like Sasha? Are you spiritual? Are you scientific? Or are you like Sasha? Are you skeptical? Now, cards on the table, temperamentally, I'm like Sasha. I don't warm to the idea of spirituality, okay? And the science can go one way or another, can't it? And so I'm skeptical. I don't really know. But in the story, I'll tell you what happens. A fourth figure shows up. He claims to be from beyond, and he's here to rescue them. And my big question in episode one is three, two, one, is does the man's entrance into the spaceship change the conversation in that spaceship? It has to, right? It has to totally change the conversation. And you might temperamentally be a kind of a hope and spiritual, or you might temperamentally be a doc and scientific, or you might temperamentally be very skeptical, cosmically skeptical. You could be like Sasha, right? But when you encounter this man, all your other questions about can I trust this reality, they find a focal point in this man. And if this man holds out his hand to you, you might have been spiritual before, but you really need to focus your trust on this guy. You might have been scientific before, but you really need to focus your trust on this guy. You might have been skeptical before, but really you need to focus your questions and your skepticism on this guy. And is this guy worthy of your trust? Does our experience of faith in the world that is inescapable, is that best focused on a person and on the person of Jesus? And I would say as a Christian that yes, when you look at Jesus, he is exactly the sort of person who I trust more than I trust a table to keep up the laptop on top of it. More than I trust the experience of induction, the A equals B, more than I trust external minds and all the rest of it. That these experiences of trust best and most naturally, most aptly coalesce around Jesus. The Christian looks at Jesus and thinks, ah, I think you might be the author who has become a character so that I can get to know him. Is that something you might do? Why don't you go to 321Course.com and check out 321 all by yourself? I'd love to hear. If you go to 321, I'd love to hear here in comments what you have made of episode one. That'll do us for this video. If you've got this far, it's definitely worth a like, I'm sure. And why don't you share it around the place and hit subscribe so that we can catch you on the next video? God bless.