One Of The Deepest Conversations You Will Listen To About God | Dr. John Lennox | EP 394

One of the most interesting things is we're told we're made in the image of God, but it was God that told human beings to do biology, name the animals. That's taxonomy; it's the fundamental intellectual discipline. I'm not going to do it for you; you do it for yourself. And so, the capacity of human beings to think in that sense, whatever it really means, seems to me to be a reflection of their creator and possibly an essence, if we extrapolate it, of his existence.

Hello everyone watching and listening. Today, I'm speaking with Dr. John Lenox, mathematician, professor, author of many books, and public intellectual. We discuss the axioms and the dangerous aims of transhumanism, the interplay between ethical faith, reason, and the empirical world that makes up the scientific endeavor, and the line between Luciferian intellectual presumption and wise, courageous exploration.

So, I wanted to start by asking you your opinion on some questions that have gone through my mind recently, and there's one that's very specific I think I'll start with, which is that, you know, I think for a lot of my life and certainly when I was younger, I really bought the doctrine that there was an unbridgeable gap between the scientific way of looking at the world and the Christian way of looking at the world, let's say.

And that this split, the apparent split between science and religion, was a consequence of an incommensurate dichotomy of worldviews, you know, and that the church had been opposed to scientific progress, at least in part, because the scientific viewpoint existed in contradiction to Christian doctrine.

But then, especially in recent years, in the last 10 years, I've started to understand that that was something like a French Enlightenment rationalist propaganda campaign and that there's a different—a different relationship between science and Christianity is much closer than I had imagined.

I caught on to this a little bit by reading Jung, but that just as the universities developed out of the monastic tradition, the notion that the natural world was intelligible to the inquiring logos, that it had an intrinsic logic, that studying it would be beneficial to man, first of all, that it would be comprehensible and beneficial, and that that was actually a kind of moral obligation—all struck me as like axiomatic statements of faith that were predicated on the Christian tradition that were the preconditions for the emergence of science.

And, you know, I've tried to take that idea apart over the last three or four years to see if I can find any flaws in it, but I think the evidence that the universities emerged out of the monastic tradition instead of emerging contrary to that, that's absolutely incontrovertible on every grounds you could possibly imagine.

And the notion that you need to believe in the intelligibility of the world, the capability of the human logos, and the beneficial consequence of acquiring knowledge—you have to believe in all that to even get the scientific enterprise going. I also think that's incontrovertible, and that those are axioms of faith.

And so, I don't know how—I don't know if those views are in accordance with your views or what you think about that. So, I'd like to hear what you think about that.

This is extremely interesting to me because I never saw the tension between Christianity and science, because very early on, as a teenager, I was introduced to the writings of a scientist who was a Christian, who drew my attention to something Alfred North Whitehead wrote.

And it was really put in much simpler language by C.S. Lewis when he wrote, "Men became scientific because they expected law in nature, and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver." So very early on, I was fascinated by the idea that actually modern science is a legacy of the biblical worldview, and therefore it's no accident that the pioneers, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Maxwell, and so on, were believers in God.

And, as you pointed out, it underpins the tradition that lies behind the great universities of the world.