Ruth Institute Blog

by William West

No, far from it, an Oxford professor insists.

While “new atheists” Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have been grabbing headlines with their bold claims that modern science has killed off God, an Oxford professor has been quietly chipping away at the ground they stand on. John C Lennox, Professor of Mathematics and Fellow in the Philosophy of Science at Oxford’s Green Templeton College, has been popping up at debates around the globe to take issue with the most prominent new atheists.

Lennox’s arguments are outlined in his book, God’s Undertaker – Has Science Buried God? As The Spectator’s Melanie Phillips has written, Lennox’s book provides an “excoriating demolition of Dawkins’s overreach from biology into religion”.

The brilliance of Lennox’s approach is that it does not just concentrate on one academic discipline, like biology. It spans all of the most relevant fields, including cosmology, physics, philosophy, theology and mathematics, offering a compelling case for the view that scientific knowledge, rather than killing God off, actually makes a divine creator necessary.

Drawing on his own discipline, mathematics, Lennox calculates the odds of life arising by chance and concludes that anyone who would bet on those odds must be either deluded or just plain mad. Of course, in the best academic traditions, he refrains from using such colourful language, but the force of his arguments leaves no room for any other conclusion.

Unlike biblical creationists, Lennox is not hampered by the need to take the Bible, or any other religious text, literally. He simply shows that the most recent advances in science make it plain that there must be a mind behind the genesis of life.

The big picture

Beginning with the big picture of the universe and planet earth’s place in it, he notes that the ruling view in science is that the universe is not eternal but began with the “big bang” – a view that had not always been accepted by the scientific community.

“The remarkable picture that is gradually emerging from modern physics and cosmology is one of a universe whose fundamental forces are amazingly, intricately, and delicately balanced or ‘fine tuned’ in order for the universe to be able to sustain life,” he writes. “Recent research has shown that many of the fundamental constants of nature, from the energy levels in the carbon atom to the rate at which the universe is expanding, have just the right values for life to exist. Change any of them just a little, and the universe would become hostile to life and incapable of supporting it.”

For a start, an abundant supply of carbon is needed on earth to support life and, as eminent mathematician and astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle discovered, “the nuclear ground state energy levels have to be fine-tuned with respect to each other… if the variation were more than 1 per cent either way, the universe could not sustain life.”

Lennox comments: “Hoyle later confessed that nothing had shaken his atheism as much as this discovery. Even this degree of fine-tuning was enough to persuade him that it looked as if ‘a super intellect has monkeyed with physics as well as with chemistry and biology’.”

Precision tuning

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