What is TRUTH? | Practical Wisdom Podcast

Science has only been taken seriously for about four or five hundred years, he said. It doesn't matter; the meaning must imply a mind. Then he told me he studied DNA, and I asked, "What's the origin of this long word?" It has a semantic dimension because it codes for proteins.

"Oh," he said, "chance and necessity."

I replied, "But look, you've just told me that a five-letter word requires a mind. Why doesn't a 3.4 billion-letter word require a mind? We need to know that."

I think that's one of the important ways in which God has written into each of the 10 trillion or so cells of our bodies this huge database that's screaming at us: "In the beginning was the Word."

Hello everyone, and welcome to this new episode of Practical Wisdom with me, Samuel Marusa. Today, we're going to be talking about the truth about science and faith, and I'm delighted to be joined in this conversation by Professor John Lennox. John, it's a pleasure to be here with you.

Hello! It's a delight to be with you as well.

John Lennox is a professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford, and he is a renowned author and international speaker. He has debated Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and many others. He’s a very loved author, having published "God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?" A more recent book is "Can Science Explain Everything?" He’s also written "Cosmic Chemistry: Do God and Science Mix?" and many other books.

John, I'd like to start by talking about truth—this idea of truth. Now, it's a very difficult concept to define. We have this theory in our contemporary culture that there's only one way to truth, which is science. When you say God exists, there's no way you can verify that. Logical positivists say metaphysical propositions are nonsensical because you can't establish whether they're false or true.

Then, Karl Popper, who wasn't a positivist himself, came up with this falsifiable theory, which goes along the lines that you need to be able to prove that something can be falsified in order to show that it's correct. For example, if I say all swans are white, then you only need one example of a black swan to disprove my theory.

So my question to you, John, is: what is truth?

Well, you've made quite a number of assertions just now, and we need to tease them out a little bit. What I think is mostly worth discussing is the dominant notion that science is the only way to truth. We call that scientism, and it's a strange thing. I love logic, as obviously you do, and to my mind, that is logically self-contradictory straight away because the very statement "science is the only way to truth" is not a statement of science. So if it's true, it's false. It's logically incoherent.

Therefore, you're right in saying truth is hard to define, but so are all the interesting concepts in life. The really big things are hard to define. My instinctive response to the question is, of course, to talk about the usual criteria for truth—the two main lines of thinking there.

First of all, the idea that if a story is going to be true, it must be coherent within itself. Secondly, it must, at some level, correspond to reality.

Now, in your introduction, you made a statement that the idea that God exists is not verifiable. I would contradict that straight away. I think it is verifiable in the sense that you can adduce evidence for it. In other words, you can begin to put up a case that it corresponds to our experience of reality, and I would want to defend that.

Of course, I think there's another dimension to truth because, from where I sit as a Christian, ultimately, truth is a person. Since my teenage years, I've been absolutely fascinated by one of the central claims that Jesus made: "I am the truth." I noticed very early on that his claim was not "I say the truth." Of course, that is true, but "I am the truth."

Now, if we step aside from that and we ask, "What is the truth about this piece of matter?" Well, we start examining it, and we can give a list of the various materials of which it's made. Then we can ask, "What's the truth about those materials?" Well, they consist of molecules.

Then we ask, "What's the truth about the molecules?" Well, they consist of atoms.

Then we ask, "What's the truth about the atoms?" Well, they consist of elementary particles.

And the question is: does this series of questions go back forever? I don't believe it does. I think at the end of every question series like this, the huge claim at the heart of Christianity is you find Christ standing and saying, "I am the truth," because ultimately, he is the cause for which all of this exists at all its different levels.

So truth is a person, and I constantly emphasize to people that God is not a set of propositions. There are plenty of propositions about God, but God is personal.

So when you ask the question, "What is truth?" then how do I get to know the truth about a person? Now, if I want to get to know you, Samuel, I could lay you on a sophisticated table and scan your brain, and I could measure some of the electrical impulses, but I would never get to know you.

The only way I would get to know you is if you reveal yourself to me. Now, once you begin to reveal yourself to me, which would normally be in the first instance by your talk, gestures, and demeanor, I can then apply criteria to that. Does it make sense?

If you say, "Well, I actually come from the Moon," I would want to put that up against some kind of measurement. I think this is hugely important because getting to know a person means you have to reveal yourself.

The basic question, the basic God question, to my mind, is: if there is a God, has he revealed himself?

Now, the other big claim of the Christian faith is that God has disclosed himself in two major ways: one, by speaking through his word, which we have written in the Bible, and at the deepest level, in Christ himself.

So there is a revelation so that we can get to know the truth about God—not by guessing, as the philosophers have been doing for years, and that's fine; I'm joining them. I love philosophy—but by realizing there's another category that will yield truth, and it's not simply human reason. Human reason is God's revelation.

The important thing there—and with that, I'll stop because this has been a rather long answer—is that the important thing about reason is it's not in opposition to revelation. If you tell me about yourself, Samuel, I will use my reason on your revelation, but my reason alone will not produce that revelation.

It's exactly the same with God. God has revealed himself in Christ and in Scripture. My reason doesn't produce that; it's a given. I'm a scientist; I study a given universe with a given mind. They're both given. Scientists are people that study givens with a given.

The other thing that's in my orbit, so to speak, as a source of information, is God's revelation, but I use my reason to study it.

You're right; you raised some very significant points earlier, and I think it's amazing that actually truth isn't a concept; it's a person. You also mentioned the correspondence theory of truth, which you seem to agree with.

You used the word "category" there, and I want to pick up on that. There are many scientists and people of influence, including actors, who seem to make a category mistake. They seem to make claims about God, for instance, that simply don't make sense or are simply from a different category. They argue for a point using a different category.

For example, many people would ask you, "Well, who created God?" But if you ask, "Who created God?" it already implies that God has a beginning. It already implies a certain understanding of the concept and of the person of God.

Also, many people would say, "I don't believe in God because I don't believe in ancient deities or the Greek gods." Many people would come to me and say, "You seem to be a reasonably rational person; surely you can't believe in God. We don't believe in Santa Claus anymore."

When people say that, I feel that there's a different category that they put God and the idea of God into. You have people like Stephen Hawking who make similar claims outside of science.

So how can Christians engage with these types of arguments?

Well, I tell you how I engage, and I think you're putting your finger on something immensely important because that's often the main barrier that people put up. If you can't get through that barrier, you don't get any further.

I was doing a kind of interview debate in the Netherlands some time ago, and a professor of physics was put up against me. He said, "Your faith in God is like belief in Santa Claus," the one you mentioned.

So I thought I would do a little experiment. I said to the audience, "How many of you came to believe in Santa Claus as adults?" Not a hand went up.

Then he said, "How many of you came to believe that Jesus was the Son of God as adults?" There were hundreds of adults there—a couple of thousand people in the audience.

Then I turned to this professor and I said, "You know, I'm going to be very blunt with you. You're insulting this audience's intelligence because the minds of many have spent centuries trying to understand the nature of God because they believe in his existence. There is not a similar group of intellectuals studying Santa Claus because we all know he doesn't exist. So you are making a fundamental category mistake."

Now, you mentioned Hawking, and I think he was a brilliant mathematician, but he had very little knowledge of philosophy. Again, he placed God in the wrong category.

I used to wonder why it was that—and this I found very helpful, and others I think have found it helpful—why it was that Hawking was so enthusiastic about saying to us all, "You must choose between God and science."

Now, to me, that is a category mistake for various reasons, but it was why that choice. Then I realized that he had problems in two separate directions. One was: what is science as a category? But the second one was he put God in the wrong category.

He thought that people like me and you believed in an ancient type of Greek god—that is, to use the common phrase, a god of the gaps. "I can't explain it; therefore, God did it." So that advance in knowledge pushes God out. God is the god of the gaps.

Suddenly, it dawned on me—and it should have dawned on me years ago—that if you define God as a god of the gaps, then of course you have to choose between God and science because of your definition of God.

Sometimes I say to people, "You know, the first statement in the Bible is, 'In the beginning, God created the bits of the universe we don't yet understand.'" That brings a smile.

I said, "No, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." That is a merism, in technical grammatical language. He created everything—the bits we do understand and the bits we don't.

But the interesting thing is that serious scientists who are believers in God—there are many of them—find their evidence for God coming from science. It doesn't come from the bits they don't understand but from the bits they do.

Isaac Newton is a classic case. When he discovered, among other things, his law of gravity and brought out his famous book "Principia Mathematica," which is probably the most famous book of science ever written, he didn't say, "I now understand how it works. I've got a law of gravity; I don't need God."

No, he said, "What a wonderful God that did it this way." He dedicated this book hoping that people would read it and come to believe in a deity.

So that's such a serious category mistake. There's another one, which, if you like, we can talk about, which is to do with the definition of science.

But the first one that you mentioned—getting God in the wrong category—and as you started this, you talked about this absurd knockdown which Richard Dawkins thought, which staggered me. I used to meet this argument in Russia, actually, when I first began to go there: "Who created God?"

And the argument that if you can say, "Well, I believe God created the universe," you must ask, "Who created the Creator?" Then it goes back forever in its nonsense.

I was amazed that Dawkins couldn't see through that. As you say, you're placing God in the created category, but nobody believes—at least nobody sensible.

Yes, absolutely. If we are to look at this from this way, I don't believe in the god that Dawkins doesn't believe in either. He didn't like that when I said it to him.

But there is a philosophical point that lies at a slightly deeper level, Samuel, I think, and that's this: do the arguments go back forever anyway? I don't believe they do.

The atheist will stop asking the questions with mass energy, or the most popular these days is "nothing." You have to redefine nothing to get there. The Christians, like me or the theists, will stop with God. That's where it stops because God, by definition, if he's worthy of the name, is eternal.

Therefore, people that raise that question, what I say to them—and this used to be very interesting in the Russian context because there was a strong materialism—is your problem that you cannot believe in anything eternal?

They would tell me they believe in the eternity of matter, and I'd say, "Oh, if you believe in the eternity of matter, then the eternal is conceivable."

So I'm telling you that the only sensible kind of God to talk about is an eternal one.

What about evidence? Can we talk a bit about evidence?

Of course! What role does evidence play in establishing truth? I want to quote to you—you mentioned Richard Dawkins in your book "God's Undertaker." Richard Dawkins is saying, "Next time that somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them, 'What kind of evidence is there for that?' If they can't give you a good answer, I hope you'll think very carefully before you believe a word they say."

I wish he'd take his own advice because when it came to—I actually asked him whether he had any friends he talked to about things like the evidence for the resurrection, and he just shrugged it off.

I think the number of very high-profile atheists who aren't really interested in evidence beyond the narrow kind seems to be that you have to open up your mind to various levels of evidence when it comes to the God question because of the nature of science as a category of investigation.

The idea that science can answer every question is false. Sir Peter Medawar got it exactly right. He said, "It's obvious that science has its limits. It can't even answer the basic questions he called them of a child: Where do I come from? Where am I going? What's the meaning of life?"

It can't answer the why question. It can't answer, well, the why question of purpose. The theological question—it does have a why question it can answer, and that's the why of function.

Sometimes, what is that bit doing here? Why is it there? That's a genuine scientific question, but not the why of purpose.

I often think this is hugely important, Samuel, actually, and I place a lot of emphasis on it in my little book "Can Science Explain Everything?" because what many people don't realize is that science is even limited within itself.

What I mean by that is this: when I was at school, I was badly taught physics, and I thought that the law of gravity explained gravity. It wasn't until a number of years later that I realized that the law of gravity is a brilliant mathematical equation that enables one to do very precise calculations—good enough to land someone on the moon—but the one thing it doesn't do is tell you what gravity is.

It just describes it. Yes, it just describes its effect, and Newton realized that. So it was limited. No one knows even today what gravity is.

Now, that's interesting. That's a hot question. I like to tell people that I'm passionate about science, but it doesn't even deal with the what questions that you think it deals with.

To take a very simple analogy, here is water boiling. We can ask, "What's going on here?"

Well, why is the water boiling? Well, because the molecules are being agitated by the heat conducted through the kettle base, and that's why it's boiling.

Okay, I can equally well say it's boiling because I want a cup of tea.

Now, the interesting thing is what Dawkins and Hawking—even more so, actually—seem to be saying is, "You've got to choose between those two explanations," which are ridiculous. They lie in different categories.

I feel a huge amount of the so-called opposition between science and faith in God—and I'll come to that addendum in a moment—is because of this category difference, that it's a different class of questions that's being answered.

I put it to school kids, and I say, "Please choose between those two explanations of the water boiling," and they say, "But sir, you need both!"

Why can't some scientists see that?

By the way, if I might just add, I'm frequently asked to speak on science and faith, and I say to people, "Do you want me to talk about God?" and they say yes.

Well, I said, "Where is it in the title? Faith."

I said, "But look, I can give you a lecture on science and faith without mentioning God because faith is essential to science. Do you realize that your title is in itself an atheistic formulation?"

Because what they've cleverly done is to get across the idea that faith is a religious concept. It means believing where there's no evidence, whereas faith is a normal concept.

I only would take it seriously if it is based on evidence.

Einstein's wonderful quotation: "I cannot imagine a genuine scientist without that faith." Not faith in God, but faith in the rational intelligibility of the universe.

All scientists are people of faith, and they bring that faith to the science because you cannot do science unless you believe that it can be done, unless you believe that the human brain has some access to what we believe to be the real world out there.

So I always am very careful. If you want to talk about science and faith, well, faith in God—but still, that's not a balanced thing because it's giving the impression that faith is all on the side of religion, and that is a category mistake of the worst kind, to my mind.

Well, you mentioned the water boiling, and there are two ways to describe it. There's the scientific way to explain what the molecules do and also the personal way—the purpose of water, the why the water is boiling, which is because I want a cup of tea.

So the two ways of describing reality are not conflicting; they're complementing each other.

You also said that even atheists have faith, and scientists also do science using faith. It's not only theists, which is a very significant point, I think.

On that point, I want to say that many in our popular culture, many people will simply take someone's argument for granted just because they are a person of authority.

For instance, I saw a very popular actor saying, "Well, there's no God," and the way to prove this, he said, "If you take the Bible and destroy it, for instance, in a thousand years' time, you will never get anything like it. But if you get a book of science and destroy it, in a thousand years' time, you will get the exact same book because it follows certain tests."

It seems to me that these claims are very easy to refute, but because they were made by someone in authority, or someone like a scientist, for instance, if we say like Hawking, "Who am I to disagree with Hawking in this aspect?"

That's right. That's why I wrote my book about Hawking because it had a trigger story. I had received a letter from a young man in Northern Ireland, where I self-evidently come from. He wrote to me and said he was driving his car along the road and saw a hoarding saying, "Stephen Hawking says there is no God."

He said it had a shock effect on him. He had to stop his car and thought to himself, "Well, if Stephen Hawking says there's no God, who am I to believe there is?"

That's why I wrote my book "God and Stephen Hawking," because I do not think Stephen Hawking actually understood enough of philosophy or religion.

Interestingly enough, that was said by another person who's not a theist, Lord Rees, who's the Astronomer Royal. He said, "I know Stephen very well, and he knows little philosophy and no theology, and I wouldn't listen to him on either of those two subjects."

But because of this authority, and that's a huge question, and it's a question for me because those of us who talk about these things—we're talking about subjects on this podcast that are not my main field. My main field is pure mathematics.

So what right have I to talk about this? My answer to that is that if you go into a field that's outside your own professional expertise, you must consult the experts in that field, and I've tried to do that.

I'm sure I failed to do it rigorously, but to give you an example of the opposite—and I'm afraid it's Dawkins again—he points out in one of his books, I think it's "The God Delusion," that a good case can be made that Jesus never existed.

Although, fair enough, he said he wouldn't make the case himself. Well, if he wouldn't, why mention it? He quotes a certain professor, but I looked up this professor, and this was a professor of German.

In other words, there was no ancient historian he consulted, and that, to my mind, is a cardinal error. I try to be extremely careful to trace sources of real experts in the field I go into.

I approach things at the level of what one might call the public understanding of science.

You mentioned that if you want to know about something outside of our field of expertise, we ask the experts.

Now, what about the lay Christian who can't understand philosophy or theology but has faith in God? They can't explain the ontological argument or the argument from design, perhaps, but they still have faith in God.

They can't quite argue or make a case for Jesus or a case for God. So what do you say to people who are not able to defend themselves with respect to their faith?

Does that mean that because they don't have the evidence or are not able to point to the evidence, their faith is not valid?

Of course not! You don't have to understand electricity to be able to trust it and use it.

I think the important thing here is that not everyone is called upon to be, in that sense, an intellectual defender of the faith. There must have been many Christians in the early church who were very grateful that people like Paul existed because he was the defender.

That's the first side of it. But there's another side to it: that explanation and argument are extremely important. Jesus argued.

When it comes to the defense of the faith, we often use the sorry word "apologetics" for that. I say "sorry" because transliteration from one language to another can be a dangerous thing, and that is exactly what's happened with the Greek word "apologia," which simply means defense.

It's now become an elitist topic for clever Christians and a sort of subdivision of philosophy 101. But "apologia" is defending.

I find it very interesting that in most of the occasions that it's used in the New Testament—and they are by Paul or, in that context, by Luke describing Paul—his first line of defense is his experience of meeting the risen Christ on the Damascus Road.

Now, it seems to me that therefore evidence splits into two rough categories, although there are gray areas between them.

They are the objective and the subjective. Some of us have been taught how to argue philosophically and so on, and that's very important, but that would be valueless in itself when it comes to God as a person and Christ as a person and Christianity as a personal relationship if we had no personal experience.

So it seems to me that there are several, in that sense, categories of evidence. There's the evidence from the natural world, there's the evidence from logic, argument, and philosophy, but then there's the evidence from experience, from psychology, and finally, and very importantly, from history.

Putting all those things together, I see it as a cumulative thing. But I would want to say that we haven't necessarily—and this is a wild generalization—we haven't in the Christian church done a good job of teaching people to answer questions.

Because, you know, you say Christians don't know how to defend it, but if they've had an education of any kind and they're living in a pluralistic, complex world, they're going to be faced with questions.

I think that's a very significant point you're raising. I think this is a major point in Christianity in general—the fact that some people would argue that Christians don't need to defend their faith.

They just—because faith is believing in something that you cannot see. Of course, many atheists would argue that all faith is blind faith.

Some would say, "Well, why study the evidence? Why look at the evidence?" Because that somehow would probably make you doubt the existence of God as a Christian.

Yes, what is your take on that?

Oh, well, my initial reaction is to say it's very superficial thinking because if you go in to try to get a mortgage for a house, you'd better bring some evidence that you've got collateral to support your payments, and people all understand that.

Indeed, the notion that faith is blind is a complete invention that all faith is blind is a complete invention of the so-called new atheists.

Well, they're old now because faith is an ordinary word from the Latin "fides," from which we derive "fidelity" and "trust." The cognate words in most of the languages involved in the New Testament are words that lead us to think—you look at the OED on faith, and they will talk about evidence-based commitment or belief and trust.

We all know what that means, especially after the financial crisis, where we thought we could trust the bankers, and until evidence came back, it froze the entire market.

I find, on inquiry, that people know what evidence-based faith is, and the difficulty is it's a total intellectual cop-out for atheists.

I have quite a few of them here in Oxford who keep insisting that faith is a religious word and means believing where there's no evidence because that actually absolves them from actually seriously considering any evidence, which I naturally want them to do.

I think we need to help Christians. I do believe that the average Christian can be taught, without having a scientific or humanities education to any high level, just common-sense arguments that they can use to break through a lot of this stuff.

I do feel our churches ought to take more responsibility for doing it, especially dealing with this kind of argument from the pulpit.

Not simply—and of course, there are many churches that already do this—but there's a danger of confining Christianity to the devotional rather than having an intellectual dimension.

When all these people go out to work, they have an intellectual dimension to their work, especially if they're professionals.

You touched upon this very briefly just now on objective truth and subjective truth, which leads us to this concept of moral relativity.

Now, many people would argue that if you're making statements about God, for instance, then that's just your opinion. So if you say that there is a God, you can't really say that that's an objective truth; that's just your opinion.

I have a friend who says people only take that postmodern relativist view in areas that they think are not important. That's aside from the fact that I know that postmodernism is a category within art, and I leave that aside.

But this idea of moral relativity and truth relativity—people don't live like it because they can't live like it.

I think there again, it's important to get across to people that they do believe in truth to a very large extent; otherwise, life would be utterly impossible.

So this idea that we've shifted from the premodern to the modern to the postmodern in terms of chronology, I think, is false. We can have all three in the same person, let alone in the same age.

Let's move on and talk about how the universe came to be and the Big Bang. Because obviously, you're a mathematician and a scientist. What is the Big Bang, and what might have been there before the Big Bang, if we can contemplate the existence of time and whether something else existed before time was created?

Well, the Big Bang is a mystery. The term was coined as a joke by Professor Sir Fred Hoyle, whom I met on several occasions to discuss these things because he didn't like the idea of a start to the universe.

It simply means the universe started, and it's important to emphasize that because I meet a number of Christians, and really they ought to know better, who are worried about that expression.

It's simply saying there was a beginning, which is wonderful because that's exactly what the Bible has been claiming for many millennia, which in itself is an interesting thing.

I'm old enough to have lived through the 1960s, and I remember in the 1960s when the most powerful evidence to date came in that there was a beginning to space-time, which was labeled the Big Bang.

Interestingly enough, that idea had been suggested in the 1930s by a Belgian priest called Georges Lemaître.

The fascinating thing in England was that this idea that there was a beginning was resisted at the highest levels of the scientific establishment. John Maddox was the editor at that time of "Nature," and he said, "We mustn't go down that road because—and this is a partial quote—it gives too much leverage to those who believe in creation."

I was at a conference not so long ago with very distinguished philosophers, mathematicians, and physicists, and I was the token Christian, or one of them, who was asked to talk about this.

I quoted, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth," and I was interrupted, heckled from the audience by a very leading professor of physics who said, "Professor Lennox, I hope that you're joking when you suggest that the Bible has anything to say to us in the 21st century."

There was dead silence.

Oh, I said with a smile, "No, I'm not joking at all. I would like to suggest to you that if science hadn't been so imprisoned by Aristotle's ideas of the eternity of the universe and time, you might have taken another worldview more seriously, and that is the biblical one that's been saying for thousands of years that there was a beginning."

If you'd taken that worldview seriously, you might have looked for evidence and found it earlier than you did.

I said, "Of course, Scripture is pre-scientific by definition in terms of chronology, but it's not pre-scientific in that it is not discussing the universe that you study."

The law doesn't say much about how God created. What it does say is of profound significance, particularly in the digital age, because it tells us to put it in contemporary language from linguistics that the universe was created not by unguided natural processes but by a series of speech acts: "And God said."

I said, "In the digital age, that's fascinating."

One leading astronomer said to me, "How did they get that right?"

That's very interesting that you mentioned the speech act theory of John Austin.

You also mentioned that somehow the Big Bang gives leverage to Christianity and also supports the idea that there was a beginning—that the universe might have come into being at one point in the past.

Now, many atheists are chary of this. Many atheists would argue, on the other hand, that Christians have changed their views based on the evidence of scientific discoveries.

For example, following Darwin and evolution theories, there are Christians who believe that actually we evolved and believe some sort of version of the evolution theory.

What is your answer to that?

Well, there are two or three separate questions there, Samuel. Let's take the first one first. Do we use science in understanding Scripture? Of course we do.

Here's a simple example: when Jesus said, "I am the door," how do we know he wasn't saying he was made of wood or steel or plastic?

Well, because we know about physical doors. We know something about, in that broad sense, science and technology. We can't avoid understanding words in Scripture without having the reference of the surrounding nature around us.

So saying that we can't use science is absurd; we're already doing so.

Secondly, I would say that one of the very interesting things is this: I look at science and at Scripture, and we must be careful to talk about the current state of science.

In other words, the current state of science appears to me to be teaching that there was a beginning that correlates with Scripture.

I'm not saying that science won't change or indeed that the interpretation of Scripture won't change, but to bore a bit deeper into the question: the notion—and it's possibly simpler to deal with it—you mentioned Darwinian evolution.

Now, in every age, there will be Christians who will go overboard, as I see it, on the scientific side.

Let me give you a simpler example, which is the one I use in my book on Hawking, and that is this: there is a controversy among some Christians about how old the Earth is, for example.

Even before you come to the question of evolution, that has been a controversy in the last century largely. But at the time of Galileo, the controversy wasn't anything to do with the age of the Earth; it was to do with the motion of the Earth.

Now, this is a very interesting case. At that point, Galileo was a brilliant thinker, and he challenged a familiar notion, which was fundamentally Aristotelian.

The interesting thing is often people think that it was Galileo versus the Catholic Church—in other words, in their eyes, the Christian church.

So the Christian church was obscurantist and claimed the Earth didn't move. Why did it claim the Earth didn't move? Because the Bible said so.

Quote one of the Psalms: "God has set the Earth upon its pillars so that it cannot be moved." In fact, that's one of the books of Samuel, I think, that has that in it.

So what is rarely realized is that it wasn't only the Catholic Church teaching that apparently from Scripture; it was that the philosophers who were the first to challenge Galileo accepted Aristotle.

So the Earth was at the center, motionless, and everything else rotated around it.

The interesting thing was that it was the philosophers who first opposed Galileo, and then the church had stepped onto the Aristotelian bandwagon because they thought the Bible supported it.

Now, I often speak to audiences, and it's quite amusing because they ask me about evolution and this question of going with science and so on.

We must never use science to understand Scripture, and I say, "How many of you in this room believe the Earth is fixed in space?" Not a hand goes up.

I said, "But the Bible says it is fixed in space, so you don't believe the Bible clearly."

There's huge embarrassment often, and I said, "But just a moment. What we've realized is over the centuries—and it took a long time—Galileo was probably the first moving earther, and everybody else was a fixed earther.

But over time, people began to see that although—and I'm wording this very carefully—you could interpret Scripture as saying that the Earth was fixed, you didn't have to.

You could say that this is referring at a deeper level not to geometric and motion fixity but to stability, and the Earth is stable, and it will go on.

So none of you believe the Earth physically moves, although that's a possible interpretation of Scripture.

I make the point in my book in some detail that you could argue from Scripture that the Earth is young and therefore there's no time for any evolution, for example.

But there are other ways of understanding it—that these speech acts that I referred to are separated in time.

Now, the matter of evolution is a huge thing that could occupy us for hours. I'll just make two points.

One, there are two issues here. The first is: can you logically deduce atheism from biology? The answer is clearly no because there are many people, as you say, who accept evolution at different levels and believe in God.

So the first thing is: can you logically deduce a worldview, atheism, from a biological theorem? The answer to that is no because that's another category mistake.

But then the second question, which is a scientific question, is: does the Darwinian, neo-Darwinian synthesis, or the modern synthesis, as it's called these days, bear all the weight that's put on it?

I'm not a biologist, but what I find absolutely fascinating is that the theory, the neo-Darwinian theory, is now under attack as never before, which is why I wrote my latest book that you mentioned, "Cosmic Chemistry: Do God and Science Mix?"

To point out that within the scientific establishment, among people who are still looking for a naturalistic solution, they are saying not that Darwinism must be refined, but it must be replaced.

Why? I think that I understand correctly that the real problem brings us straight back to the speech acts, is that the different levels of informational dimension to all the levels in biology—from the human genome to epigenetics and all that kind of thing—are just way outside the capacity of simple things like mutation and natural selection to produce.

So I'm fascinated by this, sitting on the outside and watching in. I think mathematicians have got—I must confess to you—a serious track record right from the early days of doubting the Darwinian mechanism.

But now the scientific reasons are coming in, and I think we need to be open to the fact—and this is now the major issue—that there are two ways of looking at the question of the universe: they're top-down and bottom-up, as a crude way of putting it.

Either the universe, the mass-energy, or nothing, quantum vacuum, is the basic thing, and everything is derived from it, including mind and the idea of God because there isn't a God, or there's both top-down and bottom-up—that God caused the universe to be.

Now, you hinted at a question a little bit earlier, which I will address now: the cause behind the universe existing.

One of the most interesting things from a linguistic perspective I find is a statement at the beginning of John's Gospel: "In the beginning was the Word."

That is, the Word already was. This, to my mind, is a clear existence statement. The ancient Greeks were very interested in two categories: things that are eternal and things that came to be.

Now, translations obscure this. "In the beginning was the Word." The Word already was; he never came to be.

But just a verse or two later, it says, "All things"—now, frequently, the contemporary translations say "all things were made by him," but actually, the Greek says "all things came to be through him."

So there is that opposition: all things came to be through the Word, who is God.

Now, that is fascinating to my mind—that this is saying that the prime reality is God, and God is Spirit. He caused everything to be, even though he himself didn't come to be.

Therefore, the atheistic worldview is the bottom-up one; the Christian worldview is the exact opposite.

What fascinates me about the contemporary developments in science is the realization that information is coming rapidly to be regarded as a fundamental quantity or quality that cannot be derived from matter and energy.

Now, if that's the case, as I believe it to be, you cannot get meaning from material processes. That's the end of materialism straight away from within science without even going to theology.

So, you can't get to consciousness from a material process.

Well, that as well—nobody knows what consciousness is.

Going back to your first point on Galileo, I think that was a significant point you raised there.

So, Galileo, you're saying, didn't just go against the church; he went against all of science as well, against Aristotle's view of the world and his cosmology.

Sometimes science, it seems, doesn't always get it right.

So Aristotle, for instance, said if you throw a big ball into the air, it will fall very quickly. If you throw it into the air, it will fall very quickly, much quicker than if you threw a small ball.

Yes, now science has proven that, and we know as a fact that that's not true.

So it seems that science isn't always irrefutable; sometimes it corrects itself.

I want to raise this point about the Big Bang. There are scientists and mathematicians like Sir Roger Penrose who say before the universe, there might have been something else, like energy.

There is a body of research now—excuse me for saying that the Big Bang might not have been the very initial point when the universe was created and that it was created by something else.

What is your take on that?

Do we go back to the Aristotelian view of the universe?

I doubt it very much. Now, I'm not a cosmologist; I read as much cosmology as I can.

What I understand is that there's a fundamental theorem that was proved not so long ago by Alan Guth and another man from originally Ukraine called Vilenkin, and I've met both of them, who believe from a mathematical perspective that there was a beginning.

Even if you introduce a kind of multiverse theory, in other words, there was a singularity and that you don't go infinitely backwards.

In that sense, there's been a series of speculations that some of them fit with a biblical view, some of them do not.

Science changes, and the very difficult thing in this area is the matter of evidence.

For example, Martin Rees, our major cosmologist, astronomer royal, he likes the multiverse theory. So did Hawking.

But then the man that taught me quantum mechanics, Sir John Polkinghorne at Cambridge, he says, "No, no, no, because these other universes—there's no access to them. We have no evidence that they exist."

I think the jury is out, which is why I said earlier, before you asked me that question, science can change.

I would still maintain that a substantial part of modern cosmology fits with the idea that there was a beginning.

Now, the Bible gives us relatively little information; it gives us enough, it seems to me, to indicate this is highly sophisticated writing in Genesis 1.

That's another topic, but also that behind it lies a huge amount of stuff we know nothing about.

One very striking feature is this: the creation story occupies very much less than the story of Joseph at the end of Genesis, and that gives us an idea of proportion.

God wants us to know something; he hasn't told us everything, and that may be for a reason that the Bible itself tells us.

Interestingly enough, biology of all subjects was started by God according to the Genesis text. He told the first humans to go and name the animals.

Now, taxonomy is the fundamental intellectual discipline—naming things.

You, being a linguistics expert, will know that far better than I do, and that has always fascinated me because in the text of Genesis 1, God names two or three bits of the universe.

That is very significant in light of the fact that he later says, "You go and name the rest of it."

So there's that mandate to do science, which is confirmed in the famous statement from the Psalms that stands above the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge: "Great are the works of the Lord and searched out by those who take delight in them."

It's still there today, both in Latin and in English.

It's very interesting you mentioned that science—again, there are many mysteries that science can't explain in terms of how the universe came to be.

One of them is dimensions. There's a famous physicist, a New York physicist, M. Kaku, claiming that there is a possibility that there are other dimensions in the universe.

He's saying around 11 different dimensions—the string theory.

He's saying if you look at a fish in a pond, the fish has limited vision and wouldn't see you as a human being above looking at the fish.

The fish only sees sideways and understands or has some understanding that there is something above water, although the fish might not even see water itself.

It's just a divide there, and the air and all of this reality—this new dimension that the fish doesn't see—is all around him.

Might there be another dimension that we're not aware of?

I think the Bible hints to this, actually, when it gives us the baby-in-the-womb metaphor.

The baby in the womb doesn't understand that there might be something else, like air, outside of the womb—that there might be a whole new world waiting for him to develop.

And that's actually us.

Might it be the case that there is another dimension after death?

No, I would go further than that. I would say there is another dimension.

You know, I owe a great deal to the late C.S. Lewis, and he was brilliant. I think, although he was not a mathematician, he claimed he was a good geometer, and he used the mathematical notion of dimensionality and geometric dimensions to illustrate this kind of thing.

He used a very famous satire, "Flatland," to illustrate this.

If you live in a world of two dimensions on paper, say, you would not be aware of anything above or below you.

If there is such a thing as a third dimension in which a sphere exists, and the sphere passed through your world, you would experience it first as a point, then a little circle, a bigger circle, and growing bigger, and then it would get smaller and smaller and disappear.

I think this is a superbly good analogy to help understand that we are used to our four dimensions—three dimensions of space and one of time—and the relationship between those is a matter that's much discussed by philosophers and physicists.

Then we get string theory that introduces many more dimensions.

Now, mathematicians, as such, are very used to having multiple dimensions in their thinking because they apply in all sorts of different areas of life, and I'm not going to go into that.

But what is very interesting about this idea that there is nature and there's supernature—and C.S. Lewis was always constantly going on about that—is that humans have a sense that there's something else.

There's something other.

He makes the point that we find certain appetites in our persons as human beings, and it would be very surprising if those appetites existed without some objective satisfaction for them in the world.

He said if we find ourselves longing for another world, it may be that we were made for another one that actually exists.

I think quite a bit of the Gospels and the New Testament in particular are arguing that there is what we might term a supernature, and Christ claimed to come from above.

Now, he wasn't merely talking geometrically, although the geometrical movement was in itself an indicator that there was another reality beyond.

There is another world, and I feel it's one of the most important things to say.

What I discover in contemporary society, particularly among some of my very bright friends, is a growing sense that there must be something more.

Ian McGilchrist is a very interesting writer, as you probably have come across him, with his recent absolutely incredible magisterial work "The Matter with Things."

McGilchrist is not a theist, at least not in any conventional sense. He's a polymath of the first order, actually, and as a neuroscientist, he tells us that his research in the brain is telling us that what we've done over the past centuries is neglect the right side of the brain that looks for meaning and concentrate on the left side of the brain—that's the logic, science side, etc.

But in his major book, which is nearly 2,000 pages and 200 pages of references, which is being hailed as one of the most important books in the last 200 years—I mean, I've read quite a lot of it—he writes a very interesting chapter as a non-theist on space for the sacred.

He says we must reserve space for the sacred; we must talk about God.

His book is really a strong anti-reductionist, anti-materialist argument from neuroscience.

The left brain—that there's something more.

Now, he lands up, not surprisingly, in what he calls the panentheist position—that everything's in God and so on—which is just a step removed from pantheism.

You can understand it if you are moving from a position where the left side of the brain has been overemphasized.

I want to say that he's not going far enough—that there's evidence to show that there is something more, and that something more is not vague, but it has revealed itself to us.

That's where the category of revelation becomes very important to date in the modern discussion.

So you're saying that nature has some clues. There are some clues that we can find in nature, and actually, scientists point to these—that these signs hint to a different reality, something else, something above us.

It was Francis Bacon that said, "God left us two books: the Bible and nature."

Yes, and I think one of the biggest hints lies in the concept of a written book.

You know, when the human genome was classified and written out, Francis Collins said, "Today we can reveal the book that hitherto has just been known to God."

I think one of the most compelling evidences from the intellectual world, so to speak, for me that there is something more and that something is intelligent lies in the fact that all human beings, when they see signs, symbols, marks that carry meaning, immediately infer not downwards to material processes alone but upwards to a mind.

All you have to see is the four-letter word "exit" above a door to know that whatever materials are used and material processes are used—robotically created or whatever—there's a mind behind it because that word is meaning.

Because you've independently learned a little bit of Latin, and that, to my mind, is the vastly important thing.

I find it ironic, and I've talked to people about it again and again, that my scientific friends will admit that argument—admit it clearly.

I often use the illustration of a menu, and I've done the experiment many times with many scientists who claim to be reductionists—that there's only material.

I say, "Okay, look at this menu: roast chicken, R-O-A-S-T, five letters. How do you know it's roast chicken?"

And they tell me, "Well, it's English. I've learned the language; that means roast chicken."

And you are a reductionist?

"Yes."

Okay, you explain to me how those marks on paper with ink carry a semantic dimension—the arbitrary linguistic sign.

Just use the physics and chemistry of the paper and ink to explain it to me.

I remember the first one I tried that on; he said, "I can't do it."

He said, "For 40 years, I've come into my lab in Oxford thinking that that could be done, and it can't."

I was so amazed that I said, "Look, science has only been going seriously for four or five hundred years."

He said, "It doesn't matter; the meaning must imply a mind."

Then he told me he studied DNA, and I said, "What's the origin of this long word, which has a semantic dimension because it codes for proteins?"

"Oh," he said, "chance and necessity."

I said, "But look, you've just told me that a five-letter word requires a mind. Why doesn't a 3.4 billion-letter word require a mind? We need an answer to that."

I think that's one of the important ways in which God has written into each of the 10 trillion or so cells of our bodies this huge database that's screaming at us: "In the beginning was the Word."

You mentioned the human genome and the DNA and hinted at the argument from design and the fine-tuning argument.

Now, it seems to me that these are the strongest arguments one can make for theism.

Why is it that scientists and atheists reject these?

Well, because the whole issue is not purely intellectual. You're right that they are powerful arguments.

I have debated a philosopher here in Oxford who's an outspoken atheist—a delightful man—and he invited me to lecture his students and talk to them about God.

He said, "By the way, I hope you're going to use the very best argument against atheism that there is."

I said, "Well, if you tell me what it is, I'll use it."

He said, "Fine-tuning. If ever I were to become a believer, he said, it would be that."

There are a few skeptics about fine-tuning, but the interesting thing is they're faced with it.

Hawking was faced with it, and they realize that it demands an explanation.

Their problem is if they do not want there to be God as a solution, then they're forced to look at extremely speculative solutions in terms of multiverses and all this kind of thing.

Now, why would someone not want there to be a God?

There are several scientists today who explicitly say that that's a moral position.

The problem with the God question is that even the mention of God disturbs some people because it raises scary questions.

If there is a God, am I accountable?

Wasn't it one of the Huxleys who said what a marvelous thing it was when I discovered there was no God? I could essentially live as I liked.

We've got to bring that into play. If the biblical analysis is correct, which I believe it to be, human beings are not only intellectual beings; they're moral beings, and they're in revolt against God.

That is why people are prepared to use the most shoddy and pathetic arguments—intellectual arguments—to put up a smoke screen against God.

Now, of course, I believe there are genuine intellectual arguments, and we must try to address them.

But I've discovered very often in life, talking to individuals—which is where you learn this—that there's a much deeper-seated thing.

Maybe they've had a very bad experience with some professing church member or Christian, suffered a loss, or suffered major loss.

There's that rebellion point of view, and perhaps that's what you were saying.

The other really big reason that people bring—and I can understand it—is the problem of suffering and evil, which is the hard question.

That's a topic on which concerns me a lot because that's the hardest question that not only I as a Christian face but that any worldview faces.

But dealing with that would take quite a bit of time.

Now, we talked about truth, about science, the beginning of the universe, and arguments for the existence of God.

But it seems to me that this way of new atheism is probably not as significant now as it was 10 to 15 years ago.

So it seems to me that it's drying out, and in this secular society, it feels to me that there's something else coming on in which people look at religion differently.

You have secular historians like Tom Holland, for instance, who argue that not only European values have Christian roots, but there's also some value in Christianity itself.

There are intellectuals and secular thinkers that appreciate the value of Christianity.

So what do you think is coming, and how do you think Christians should equip themselves?

Well, there's a mass of material in there that's important. First of all, I think you're right in that there's been a change.

The new atheists have lost their grip, partly because of their aggressive attitude.

I still find that the science-God debate is very much off the moment, particularly among students and young people. It's hugely important.

But what has happened is that the meaning questions—who am I?—are moving into center stage now.

There are a lot of dimensions to this. Charles Taylor wrote a book some time ago called "The Secular Age," and he pointed out what is clearly the case: that what has happened for various reasons is that you get Christianity pushed—unreligion in general—to the margins of the culture.

Then you get a reaction from believers themselves that they move into a private space and live in a private space and discover that they're in a new kind of world.

The new kind of world is a world where Christianity is only one option among many other options.

My reaction to that is this: this is exactly the position that the early Christians were in. They were a very minor group, a minority worldview, and yet they didn't disappear, as the secularization thesis, so-called, predicted.

We're still here, and there's a multiple of things here that we do need to get to know what our fellow citizens believe.

I'm very fortunate; I was taught to do that as a teenager. I didn't have to wait for adulthood to find out other worldviews.

I think it's very important to learn about other worldviews and other religions so that we can test what we believe.

We started with truth—that Christianity is the truth—and that is my passion.

It's not that I find it helpful; I do, of course, find it very challenging and sometimes painful from time to time.

But the fundamental conviction that lies at the heart of my whole life is that Christianity is true, and therefore it must go into the marketplace and defend itself.

That's hugely important in terms of its intellectual credibility and in terms of its moral effects and spiritual effects, and that it brings meaning into people's lives.

It's no accident, to my mind, that all over the world, universities are beginning to develop courses on "The Good Life," what it means to have a life that's thriving, what does human thriving mean.

These are very important things for a Christian to address, and they have moved a bit away from the purely cereal science-religion debate.

You're absolutely right there.

I'm not a prophet, so what's going to happen in 70 years, I don't know.

You mentioned AI. Now, that's another topic for a podcast, really, because I've written about it, and I think there are hugely important not only technological issues, but they affect one of the biggest questions that we can ever ask: what is a human being?

They raise very deep ethical questions, particularly in light of the idea that we'd be able to transform ourselves into transhuman creatures.

What's coming out of the Institute for the Future of Humanity here—the so-called long-termism—that we ought to invest the money in the intelligent, wealthy, essentially Western part of the world and forget the rest, which is absolutely horrific because it devalues humans.

We're into a new ball game, completely.

Samuel, John, thank you very much for your time.

It's my pleasure; thank you.

Well, let me tell you, for your encouragement, that's one of the best interviews I've ever done.

I'm very glad to hear that.

Excellent! I'm very glad to, and I'd be very happy to do more.

I would love to do another one.

Yes, well, there you are. Thank you.