Transcription
In a world with thousands of religions, how can anyone be certain they have the truth? A skeptic challenged Oxford mathematician John Lennox, pointing out that most professors today aren't certain of anything. Listen to how Lennox defends his faith.
"When I listen to you, you seem so certain. And yet we live in a world in which there are many theories. Uh there's nearly a billion people who follow Buddhism. And I just And I wonder, um you know, as we look at the evidence that exists. You know, when I listen to you, you sound like a mathematician talking about religion. And if we went to, um places like Harvard Divinity School and the people who teach religion at Oxford, and we did a survey about how certain they are about their own religious beliefs, I think they would be very uncertain."
"Well, especially in Oxford, yes."
"Well,"
"[laughter]"
"here, too. On what grounds are you so certain when things seem so fuzzy?"
"On what grounds am I certain that my wife loves me? After 46 years married, I would say I was certain she loves me. I think this may seem very strange to some people. I think God wants us to be certain. Indeed, that's explicit in the New Testament. These things are written that you might know that you have eternal life, writing to people that have trusted Christ. And you see, I think part of the problem with the question is people sometimes get the impression that I exude a certain amount of certainty because I like a mathematician, I've absorbed all kinds of high-powered arguments and they're totally conclusive and so on. That is not the case at all. The arguments to me are very important, but think of my wife again. I cannot prove to you by mathematics that my wife loves me. No, I can't. And that certainty that we get in mathematics, that intellectual certainty, occurs in no other scientific discipline, apart from mathematics. Now, mathematics had its problems at the the level, but leaving those aside, you don't get that certainty in the physical science. You don't get it in medicine and so on and so forth. You don't get it anywhere else. But you can talk about, and of course this is the pet phrase these days, evidence-based medicine, don't you? That's very much the buzzword. What's your evidence? Now, I'm an evidence-based Christian. I don't see any difference here, except that the stakes are higher. But my faith is based on evidence, just as your faith in a particular cure or course of medicine will, I hope, be based on evidence. And that's what he's studying, doing systematic studies to see where the evidence leads, and therefore what can we do about it? So, there's a great deal of commonality between my science and my response to God. But my response to God is not response to a theory merely, but to a person. Now, where does the certainty come from? It comes from this that I do believe that God, as Roger Bacon put it, the father founding father of modern science, that God has two books. The book of nature, of which we can read something about God, his fingerprints all over it. But secondly, the book of his word. And you see, if the arguments at the beginning of this discussion were correct, and my response is simply a Freudian social socially constructed God who is a projection of my wish fulfillment, I would join the crowd to say, "Don't you be so arrogant, don't you. You cannot be certain at all." But something else might be true, you see. The Christian claim is it's not so much us looking for God, but God looking for us. And the central claim is that God became human in Jesus Christ and has revealed God to us. Now, if I want to get to know you, I could submit you to a PET scan, couldn't I? And I could attach all kinds of horrible things to your brain and so on and so forth, and never get to know you. But, the way I can get to know you, and be confident, is if you reveal yourself to me as a person. You talk to me. And, you can achieve a wonderful degree of confidence. And, that's what a lifelong partnership between me and my wife is. But, I have many other friends who have that degree of confidence. And, what gives me the confidence? They do. They do. Do you see what I mean? It's It's not It lies in me I have to work up all this confidence. But, if I get to know you as a person of character, of integrity, reliability, and so on, you are actually giving me the confidence. You see? Now, that's exactly the way I respond to Christ. That God gives me the confidence the more I get to know him. And, you're quite right. I do seem to be confident. I am confident. But, my confidence is not based in myself. Wo betide me if it were. Because, the whole essence of the Christian message is it is not like the religions you mentioned. Much good in them, of course, in their in their analysis of morality, and what suffering means, and so on. I'm not decrying that. But, all of them, including some versions of Christianity, are merit systems. Where I have to try and keep the rules, keep the path, keep the book, keep the way in the hope that one day I will be accepted by God. And, so therefore, your question has a deeper sting, actually, to it. How could you possibly be so confident of God? After all, who are you? You're a wretch like all the rest of us. I admit it, absolutely. I'm in a mess like everybody else. But, the secret of my relationship with God is precisely that. That Christianity is not like a Harvard Medical School exam system. You're in this medical school. How do you know you're going to get a degree? Well, you can't. If you said, "I'm absolutely confident." to your professors, well, they'd say, "Well, we'll see." Wouldn't they? day? We'll see. And you can't be confident. Not only that, the professors cannot tell you you're going to get a degree. Why? It's a merit system. And so many people, this is the mistake they make and I'm so glad you asked the question because it reflects on it. They think it's the same with God. That you try your best in the hope that one day God will forgive you and therefore it would be utterly arrogant to say that you had assurance. But now let me illustrate this just for 1 second from my marriage. I met my wife on day one at university and she was 16. Well, there we are.
"
"[snorts]"
"And she was a beautiful vision. So, what I decided to do was to propose marriage. So, I I I brought her a cookbook. And I gave it to her, you see, and I said, "Look at page 123, there's a law uh for making apple cake. Thou shalt take 100 g of flour and thou shalt take 200 g of meal and you shall take so much sugar and water mix them together and thou shalt heat it up to such and such to make an apple cake. Very good. You see that? Yeah, wonderful." Now I said, "I of course I wouldn't dream of accepting you. No. Now, if you keep the rules in this cookbook for the next 30 or 40 years, I'll think about accepting you. Will you marry me? But ladies and gentlemen, why are you laughing? That's how millions of people think about God. You wouldn't insult your fellow human being by suggesting your relationship with them was based on their merit, would you? And yet millions upon millions of people either think of God in that way and equally millions and millions of people have rejected God because they think it's that way. What's the secret of my marriage such as it is? It's that well goodness knows why she accepted me at the start. I know why I accepted her, of course. And the point is she will cook brilliantly because she knows that my acceptance of her doesn't depend on her merit. And you see it's the same with me and God. I don't go around giving talks like this and talking to students about my faith in God in the hope that God will say, "What a good boy you are." And I will maybe accept you. No, ladies and gentlemen, let me be absolutely clear. I do it because I've got the acceptance, not in order to get it. And therefore, if God gives me the confidence, I would be arrogant to refuse it. For instance, if Christ tells me that if I trust him, I already have eternal life, I shall not come into judgment, and my sins are forgiven, and he's the moral governor of the universe, and I say, "No. Oh, no, I I couldn't accept that." It's me who's being arrogant, not the other way around. And the proof of the pudding is in the eating. It actually works. It actually works. So, that's how I'd respond to that."