Transcription
I sometimes say to people, "How does Genesis start? In the beginning, God created the bits of the universe we don't yet understand." Well, that's what Hawking believes. You see that kind of idea?
No, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth; that is everything. In other words, the bits we do understand are the bits we don't. But here's the interesting thing: it's the bits we do understand that point so strongly towards God.
So it's important for us to understand, as much as we revere what science can tell us, it's important for us to understand the limits of science. I was talking to Dr. James Tour of Rice University in Houston. Do you know Dr. Tour? Very well. He was telling me—he's probably, no not probably, he would say probably because he's being falsely humble—he is without doubt the brightest and best nanoscientist, nanochemist, nanobiologist on planet Earth today.
He creates molecules in the lab, and he knows how difficult it is to create molecules. He tells me that without any question, science has never even begun to answer the question of how life began and how molecules assemble themselves. Because of course, we can't be talking about evolution because there's no life; we're talking about dead molecules.
I thought if ever I needed an illustration of the limits of science, here you have the greatest nanoscientist in the world telling me— and of course he's a Christian—telling me that in fact not only don't we know it, we haven't even made any progress on figuring out how molecules assemble themselves. He's very convincing. I find his arguments absolutely convincing in that sense.
I've long maintained that the origin of life is the crucial thing, and as you rightly say, you cannot explain it by evolution because evolution, whatever it does or doesn't do, depends on the existence of life. The existence of life is certainly bound up with the idea of a word base, a coded base, a genetic code and all its sheer complexity.
It's not only the complexity of it; it's the nature of that complexity. This is a word—this is like a computer program. It has always fascinated me that the language that has been deemed appropriate to describe molecular biology at this level is taken from computer science. Therefore, the evidence that comes pouring forth is that no matter how far we go with naturalistic presuppositions, we're never going to get a solution.
It would be better to follow the evidence where it leads. It's very interesting to me that one of Dawkins' predecessors, the famous philosopher Anthony Flew, who was a great advocate of Hume's ideas that miracles violate the laws of nature, aimed to believe in God. He believed in God because of the discovery of the nature of the genetic code, that it was a word, this kind of semiotic language. There was no way it could be generated by chance.
He was perfectly prepared to make a very important point: it's this: I want to follow the evidence where it leads. You see, if you assume that what science means is that you've got to have a naturalistic explanation, well then I believe you're never going to get one. But if you say, "Look, I want to follow evidence where it leads," here's a word: what is our common experience of the genesis of words that have meaning? It's mind.
Therefore, here is certainly our priority reason to believe that there's a mind behind this whole business, as James Tour so very clearly asserts. I would encourage listeners to watch his lecture at the University of Waterloo, the Pascal lectures. He followed me, or I followed him, but his lectures are far better than mine and they're well worth watching.
Well, I have to say that it seems to me the more I meet and get to know people like you and your books, and James Tour, and some of the proponents of intelligent design like Stephen Meyer and Michael Behe, the more I am convinced that anyone with an open mind has to conclude at this point that there is no question that the evidence leads us in the direction of believing in a God who created the universe.
In other words, even though we might not be able to prove it, if I had to make a choice, the evidence of late—perhaps 100 years ago this wasn't true—but because of what we now know through science, the evidence has become overwhelming, pointing in that direction.
That's how I said: let me just pick you up on the "although we cannot prove it." The word "proof," unfortunately, is ambiguous in the English language. When we say we don't have proof, what that should mean is we cannot prove it like we can prove a theorem in mathematics. But you cannot prove anything like that outside mathematics, right? You can't do that in physics or anywhere else, or chemistry.
What you get in these fields is proof in the legal sense—that is, beyond reasonable doubt. Now, when people react and say, "Oh, that's not strong enough," I say it's strong enough. I couldn't prove to you mathematically that the jumbo jet that brought me to New York a few days ago was going to get me here, but I trusted my life to it because I think there's enough evidence.
When we made an auto-fully automatic landing at JFK in fog, and the runway became visible about one and a half seconds before we touched down, the pilot said, "Switch off all your phones, make sure every electronic thing is off because they could mislead the guidance mechanism.” That'll get your attention.
There's an example of committing your life to these technological masterpieces, but you can't prove mathematically. And then on a more human level, I've been married for 51 years to the same person. I can't prove mathematically that she loves me, but I've risked my life on it.
Do you see the point? In other words, when we say we can't prove it, we mean we can't prove it mathematically, but we can give evidence for it. Well, John, this is the great lie that has crept into the culture, and it's why we're sitting here. Because when we talk of faith in science, we talk about the Christian faith and science. Until fairly recently, there was no divide between the two.
In fact, one—as you said in a previous program—led to the other: a Biblical faith led to the assumptions that led us to do science. But we live in a culture now where we have to make the case over and over and over again because people have drunk the Kool-Aid and are somehow convinced of what they've been told over and over.
For example, that the only proof that we can have is scientific proof. You've just said—and I know it to be true—that it's sheer nonsense. But we have to make that case over and over. I've often said the same thing. You know, we say Napoleon existed and we talk about his life. Well, prove it in a lab—prove it scientifically! Nobody would even want to prove it scientifically, historically. Give evidence!
But of course, we can use logic and we can use evidence, and that's what we do in our lives with just about everything. Of course it is, and we have to redeem the ground in the culture, so to speak. We all know what evidence-based faith is, and the crucial thing to grasp is that the atheists are wrong when they say Christianity is not an evidence-based faith. It is.
I think that we need to bring another thing in. I wondered, why is it that so many of these people, Hawking in particular when he was alive, told people you've got to choose between science and God? I could never understand that until one day it dawned on me what the reason was: it's because of its concept of God.
You see, when I was younger, if I used the word "God," it meant the creator of the universe, eternal, independent of the universe, who creates and upholds it. But you see, now they're so hung up on the idea that God is a fiction that they've reduced the God of the Bible to the level of the Greek God of Thunder.
Now, of course, an atmospheric physics course will remove the need for the God of Thunder straight away. So you get atheists, “Hey there folks! If you enjoy this video and want to see more interviews like this one, make sure to subscribe to my channel. Please just hit the subscribe button below, click the notification bell so you don't miss new content every single week. Ninety percent of you who watch are not subscribed, and you could be in the first 100,000 subscribers to my channel. I would love that! Please subscribe. God bless you.”
Stephen Hawking, the late Stephen Hawking, gave people the impression—and many people have it—that you've got to choose between science and God. If you want to be regarded as a thinker, you forget God. I was puzzled until I realized that that comes from having a false concept of God—that's thinking of God as what we call a “God of the gaps.”
The Greeks didn't understand thunder, so they postulated the God of Thunder. That God will disappear once you've done a little bit of atmospheric physics. So the idea is that God is a kind of placeholder that you believe in until science fills that space.
Now, two bad seriously errors here. The first is that the gods of the ancient world—as a brilliant Oxford don Werner Yeager said—the Greek gods are descended from the heaven and the Earth. They were created by the primeval chaos. The God of the Bible created the heavens and the Earth.
So if you put them in the same category, you just don't understand. It's a failure of understanding what these Greek gods were. Now that's the first thing. But you see, that means that because the God of the Bible created the heavens and the Earth, he's not threatened by science at all.
Because he’s the God of the bits we do understand, as well as the bits we don't. I sometimes say to people, "How does Genesis start? In the beginning, God created the bits of the universe we don't yet understand." Well, that's what Hawking believes. You see that kind of idea?
No, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth; that is everything. In other words, the bits we do understand are the bits we don't. But here's the interesting thing: it's the bits we do understand that point so strongly towards God.
We've just been talking about the DNA molecule. This word, Newton, when he discovered the law of gravitation, didn't say, "Oh, I've got a law of gravity; I don't need God." No, he said, "What a brilliant God that does it that way." And it's the same with us.
If we go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art here or wherever—in London or Amsterdam—and we see a painting, the more we know about painting, the more we admire the genius of the person that did it that way. The less we know about painting, the less we'll be able to admire their genius.
And so, the more I understand as a mathematician—some kind of scientist—of the way the universe works and the way it's describable, the more I admire the God that did it that way. Because science doesn't threaten him, isn't it true?
I mean, I have to say that I wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal a number of years ago, which was a shortened form of some chapters in my book, Miracles, which themselves took much of their information from your book. So I want to tell people to read your books.
In that piece, they titled it, "Yes, that's right," they titled it "Science increasingly makes the case for God." I do make that point that I think scientists today, many of them are scared because they have had a lot of cultural power, and the evidence now very strongly points away from their atheist theses. And they're frightened.
So all they can do is make a lot of noise and try to redefine terms and try to say that you're stupid if you even question these kinds of things and try to use these false arguments. I mean, to say that I don't believe in Zeus and I don't believe in Hera and I don't believe in this one and that one, and I also don't believe in Jesus—as though there's some kind of— that's called sophistry. Let's face it.
Anyone who's serious wouldn't say that. But I really do think that there's a real fear, and that they have a narrative, and that they become hostile because their power has been threatened—their cultural power has been threatened. I think that's fairly real.
But it's good to remind ourselves that not all scientists are like that. First, stepping back from this historically, many people don't realize that in the hundred years between 1900 and 2000, over 60 percent of Nobel Prize winners believed in God. That's point number one. That's amazing.
When people say to me, "Look, science and God cannot live together," I say, "Well, what do you make of Francis Collins, who worked on the Human Genome Project, directed it, and is now the director of the National Institute of Health? And what do you make of Bill Phillips, who won the Nobel Prize for physics?" They're both Christians.
You see, if some God were total aliens and enemies, you would never have a Nobel Prize winner for physics who's a believer. You just wouldn't get it. And that's enough to tell me that this assumption that science and God are enemies—there’s something seriously flawed with it. It's actually absolutely false.