Articles
I Don't Know
The following exchange is told by John Lennox in an episode of Socrates in the City, a series of interviews hosted by Eric Metaxas. Lennox is a Christian apologist, and he is conversing with an atheistic physicist.
Lennox: “We are bamboozled into thinking that science explains … What we have come to think of as scientific explanation is not explanation. It gives a partial description … The great deception of modernism is that the laws of nature are explanations, when they are not.”
Physicist (After a Lennox lecture): “You as a Christian are obliged to believe that Jesus was a man and God at the same time, am I right? Can you explain that to me?”
Lennox: “Can I ask you a question or two first before I try to?”
Physicist: “Sure.”
Lennox: “Tell me, what is energy? Actually, what I first said to him was more difficult; I said, ‘What is consciousness?’ He said, ‘I don’t know.’ So I said, ‘I’ll do something easier; what is energy?’”
Physicist: “Well, we can measure it; we can use it …”
Lennox: “That wasn’t the question; you knew it wasn’t.” I said, “What is it?”
Physicist: “I don’t know.”
Lennox: “Do you believe in energy and consciousness?”
Physicist: “Yeah, I do.”
Lennox: “And you don’t know what they are? Should I write you off as a physicist? You are prepared to write me off … Because the nature of God is infinitely more complex than the nature of energy. But there’s something else: Why do you believe in consciousness and energy when you don’t know what they are? … You believe in them because of their explanatory power of conception.”
Physicist: “That’s right.”
Lennox: “That is exactly why I believe that Jesus is both God and human, because those are the only terms that make sense of the evidence as I see it.”
Lennox finished with this observation: “You never should be ashamed to say, ‘I don’t know. There’s so much we don’t know.’”
One of the ways mainstream scientists and media try to bully believers is by making them think that science deals “only in facts,” that science merely purports to explain the universe by pure, unbiased logic. What it says about the cosmos and life on earth is the last word, unassailable, and all the answers to the main questions have been figured out. This, we must realize, is totally bogus, a smokescreen, a bluff to intimidate and gain the upper hand without actually earning it by argumentation.
Scientific investigation has exploded in the past 50+ years, and things have been discovered on both a cosmic and atomic level that have seriously challenged long held and cherished theories about reality. For example, there is a growing body of thought within the Darwinian biological community that the natural selection of random mutations cannot possibly account for the complexity and diversity of life. There’s not enough time, and the complexity of DNA and functionality of even a simple organism make gradual change an impossible mountain of probability to climb. But there’s a lot of inertia that inhibits these questioning scientists from publishing their doubts (cf. Stephen Meyer, Socrates in the City video).
The Bible is not a science book; it does not contain the divine blueprints of the inner workings of the material world. God has left this to man’s ingenuity and investigation in “subduing the earth”; i.e., learning about it, controlling what we can, manipulating our environment to improve life. This discovery process is riddled with the bias of the observers, ignorance of what lies yet undetected, erroneous presuppositions, economic pressures and the pressure to conform to conventional wisdom.
Don’t be intimidated by the arrogance of academia. Naturalism raises its own questions that physicists, biologists and psychologists cannot answer. If we start with God, we’ll have the best explanation of the facts.
