Transcription
For not being an atheist as a scientist, it's not that I'm a Christian; it's because I can do science. The only thing that makes reasonable the effectiveness of mathematics is my faith in God. I think that atheism undermines science for a reason that is connected with the effectiveness of mathematics.
I love the way that Russell Brand makes his intros. Welcome back, my 300,000 Awakening wonders! I want to say something like that because I'm just so happy for the people who have joined this journey of this channel. Whether you're a seeker, a skeptic, or a believer, you're welcome here. Let's reason together.
This particular video is very interesting. It's John Lennox in the south of France. He gets into some really, really big questions. I'm going to rattle off a few here as a way of teasing you guys: What is the difference between the mind and the brain? What is human consciousness? Is it reasonable to trust reason if the universe in reality itself is purely material? And much more! It's an amazing clip, and then I'll give you guys some of my thoughts, as well as a very poignant C.S. Lewis quote that kind of ties all this together on the back end.
That being said, let's do it! What it narrows down to is the very interesting fact that mathematics works. That idea that math makes sense somehow — that the world is under mathematical equations — most laypeople would never think about that. Even when I have read about this concept in a newspaper article, some mathematician or some scientist is marveling at the idea that the laws of nature can be understood and that they can be described by math. They seem to make it sound stunning. It's startling, but to people, it’s almost as though we don’t understand why it’s stunning.
In other words, maybe we associate math and science in such a way that we think, “Well, of course it’s got to be that way.” That's right. But it took a really great mind to see it was stunning. Albert Einstein said, "The only incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it’s comprehensible." He was clever enough to see there was an issue.
Owen Vidi, who also with Einstein won a Nobel Prize for physics, wrote a paper which is much loved by mathematicians in 1961, and he called it "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics." The unreasonable effect — now, that’s very interesting! In other words, you shouldn’t expect mathematics to work. Richard Feynman, the great American Nobel Prize-winning physicist, said the same thing: it’s just stunning that it actually works.
Here is somebody — and she’s a deity, and she’s thinking in here about the universe out there, and she comes up with equations that describe what’s out there. I mean, how does that possibly work in such a way that it gives us power over these things? Newton’s law of gravity and his Laws of Motion alone, without even Einstein’s corrections, can help us send a person to the Moon. How does that actually work?
Now, what interested me — and this is a bit later on — at university I read Vigner’s paper; I’ve read it several times. So, Vigner wrote the paper as late as '61, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness." I said, “What do you mean unreasonable? What is the worldview that’s driving that verdict?” And that opened a whole world to me that wasn’t apparent in terms of its significance until the last 10 years or so when I saw how powerful it is.
Because one of the things now that I say to people is: my main reason for not being an atheist as a scientist is not that I’m a Christian; it’s because I can do science. The only thing that makes reasonable the effectiveness of mathematics is my faith in God. That’s a very radical statement. It’s a very radical statement one almost never hears, even from people speaking on the very subject on which we’re speaking. You’re saying that not only are science and God compatible; you’re saying, “No, in a way that’s wrong. They’re not merely compatible; science drives you to believe in God.”
That’s right. Let me make it even more provocative because I can tell that you’re quite a provocative guy; I like it. You see, let me put it this way: I feel, I think, and I believe there’s evidence for the fact that faith in God and science sit very comfortably, as they did in the minds of Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. What doesn’t fit together is science and atheism. I think that atheism undermines science for a reason that is connected with the effectiveness of mathematics.
So we should properly be challenging atheists far more than they challenge people of faith. Well, that’s right, and I can unpack that a little bit if you like because it is a major argument these days. You see, we have this trust as scientists, as mathematicians, in human reason. We rely on our human reason to get to our conclusions.
Now, in the 1940s, C.S. Lewis was writing about this, and I think people didn’t really grasp what he was saying. What he was saying is this: any theory of mind that undermines the validity of human reason cannot be true because you reach that theory by reasoning. Okay, again, this is another heavy one. I want to pause. These are big ideas, but they’re very, very important ideas.
He phrased it in such a way; Lewis did, at some point, I can’t remember the exact quote, but he says, “If the universe made no sense, or if the universe were absurd, if the universe made no sense, we should never have discovered that. We never would be able to discover that.” That is part of it. That goes down to the root of it, and he put it brilliantly.
But it wasn’t in the center of the big debate, not to the extent it is today. Because what’s happened in the last four or five years is that a very prominent atheist has been beginning to use Lewis’s arguments, and that has changed the balance completely. And who is that? It’s Thomas Nagel in New York City.
That’s right, that’s right! But if you like, I’ll backtrack a bit so that we can unpack this so that it makes kind of sense. Yes, Lewis is suggesting that if you undermine the validity of reason, your theory is wrong. Now I’m suggesting that that’s why Vigner said mathematics is unreasonably effective because his worldview, which was atheistic, followed to its logical conclusion actually destroys rational thought.
Now let me put the form of a discussion I frequently have. I tease people, my fellow colleagues; they like being teased, you see. And I say to them, “Tell me, what do you do science with?” Of course, if they’re in the physical sciences, they’ll tell me about some very expensive piece of equipment; they’ve got a billion dollars they’ve been—. I said, “No, no, I don’t mean that.”
I mean — oh, they say, “You mean my—” and they’re about to say mind. When they remember, it’s not politically correct to say mind, so they say, “I had no idea.” Things have gotten to the point where it’s no longer politically correct to say mind.
Oh yes, you’ve got to say brain. The mind is the brain because everything is physical. Okay? Everything can be reduced to physics. I was going to say let’s make sure that that’s clear to the audience because this is an amazing idea: the idea that the mind is not the same as the brain. The idea that if we were only moist robots, as somebody disgustingly put it — computing meat. If that were the case, then in effect, anything like a computer ought to develop consciousness.
But nothing that we ever know of, except humans, has consciousness. So the mind is separate from our mere brains. But it has gotten to the point, and I just wanted to annotate that or underscore that — that you’re saying that in the world of science at Oxford, people are afraid to use the word mind because it implies that there’s something beyond the physical material brain.
Well, yes, that’s right! But it’s not all people. If we step back from this, let’s put this in a bigger framework. What we’re up against in the culture is the logical conclusion of a materialistic view of the universe. See, let’s go back to Socrates and Plato because that’ll help make things clear.
In the world of their time, about 300 BC or so, the Greeks were divided in their view of the big question: what is the nature of ultimate reality? Now, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all believed in the gods. They believed there was something more than the physical universe. But Democritus and Leucippus, who were Greeks because they developed the atomic theory, and the atomic theory is one of the most important things ever discovered.
Richard Feynman actually made a very interesting statement: he said if all of science was lost, but there was one result that we could preserve to pass to the next generation — just one — it would have to be the atomic theory that everything is made of atoms. Now, "atomos" means indivisible. We know they’re divisible, but the basic idea is there is stuff — very tiny stuff. And everything — but everything — is made of that stuff.
But I have to say, as proud as I am to be Greek, the idea that someone in Greece in the fourth century, Democritus, came up with that idea — how in the world, without going into this too much, could they back then have come up with this idea? Well, by a brilliant piece of reasoning. They could take a piece of wood, and they could cut it, and it was smaller and smaller and smaller, and they reckoned there must be a point at which that process stops — by something that couldn’t be cut.
And this is the basic stuff of reality. But then they made a leap that this would be all of reality. Now that view travels up through the centuries and it sits in Oxford. It’s, in fact, the dominant philosophy in Western academia, and we call it materialism. Now there’s another version which we call naturalism. They’re both atheistic; they both deny anything beyond, but some give a little bit more weight to the existence of mind that’s independent of matter.
Now if you are a materialist, then you’re going to say that when everything else is said, mind reduces to brain. That’s all it is; brain reduces to physics and chemistry, and all we are is physics and chemistry. Now back to my little story, you see. Let’s suppose that’s true for a minute, and I say to my friends, “Tell me what you do science with.”
“I do it with my brain.”
“Tell me about your brain.”
I have great fun with this. I love it! Tell me about your brain. What is the brain? Give me the short story.
Well, the short story is the brain is the end product of a mindless, unguided process. And I look at them and I smile and I say this: “And you trust it?” You trust it? Now tell me honestly. I let this sink in. If you knew that the computer you use in your laboratory or any of the instruments was the end product of a mindless, unguided process, would you trust it?
I’ve never had the answer "yes" to that. No. And yet, it’s now I say, there’s a problem there. Can you not see that you are using something that your theories — that is, your philosophy, your worldview of what is ultimate reality — is destroying the very thing you want to trust? I regard that as totally inconsistent.
Now, from where I stand, atoms aren’t ultimate reality. Ultimate reality is God, who is mind. You’ve got it exactly the wrong way around. The fundamental stuff of the universe is not mass energy; it’s Spirit. God is Spirit; He’s not material. Therefore, I believe mathematics is very reasonably effective because mathematics, being a product of the human mind, is a reflection of the God in whose image we are made.
And that is why science rocketed up in the 16th century, because that’s exactly what Newton and company believed.
Okay, so here’s what C.S. Lewis said that I think ties this together really nicely. He said, “Unless human reasoning is valid, no science can be true.” Men became scientific because they expected law in nature; they expected law in nature because they believed in a legislator or a lawgiver.
And I think this is a really interesting point because I’ve noticed that in a lot of these clips where you sort of have like an atheist and a Christian talking about something: on the atheist side, there seems to be this bedrock assumption about reality — regardless of what question in particular is being asked — that things just are as they are. Things just are what they are. You often see this when it comes to the moral question; you see this when it comes to the comprehensibility of the universe.
But I love this clip that we just watched because it kind of peels back that layer and actually asks a deeper philosophical question: “Well, wait a second, why is this actually the case? Why do things add up?”
Now, there’s not just an evolutionary explanation for this, because this actually has nothing to do with evolution. Evolution is, you know, from the beginning of life going forward, and we’re not even getting into evolution right now. This is a deeper, broader question about the comprehensibility of the entire universe and the way that humans fit into this vast physical system of the universe.
So the bedrock question is: is it more reasonable to believe that we have a mind and consciousness and intelligence that are derivative of a mind, consciousness, and intelligence in the form of the original mind, which is God, or that we have a mind as a byproduct of matter? What is more reasonable to believe?
But then there’s the secondary question of what we mean by reasonable and how can we even trust this idea of reasonability, which is the point that Lewis is making in this quote and ultimately the point that Lennox is making as well.
And so, the first time I watched this video, frankly, some of it kind of went over my head, and I didn’t understand exactly why the questions were actually intriguing. But there really is something here. Maybe you have to pause and reflect on it. There is something here that I think we can easily take for granted that upon further reflection we realize we ought not take it for granted.
And the more that you ponder these questions raised by Lennox in this video, the more that you realize that the reasonability of the human mind is best seen in light of the original intelligence, which is God Himself.
And obviously, this entire thing is just, as I often say, just a stepping stone towards ultimate reality. This doesn’t prove that Jesus Christ is Lord; this video is not about that. But it does raise questions that bring about thought, and I think these questions can be helpful stepping stones to break one out of the paradigm of pure materialistic atheism.
And for that reason, I like this clip. I hope you guys did as well, and I’ll see you guys in the next [Music] video.