Prof. John Lennox: Atheistic Criticism Of Worldviews

Prof John Lennox started his speech with a consideration of worldviews. Atheistic critics of religion by trying to draw battle lines between science and religion. Prof John Lennox dispels this myth with a pointed argument that worldviews actually shape the way everyone, atheists included, view science, so that the real battle is not between atheism and religion, but between the philosophical system of naturalism (nature is all there is) and the philosophical system of theism. In the process, he takes on the two most popular historical examples often cited to show that there is a “war” between science and religion: Galileo and the church, and the Huxley–Wilberforce debate. He explains that in Galileo’s case, the real problem was the Catholic

It is extremely difficult as we think of it as the biological principal code. But Lennox emphasizes that to think of DNA as a straightforward code that simply gets translated into biological structure is very much an oversimplification. Science is learning that DNA, and its relationship to proteins, is much more interesting and complicated than this. Lennox describes some of the relevant issues. Science is learning about the ability of genes to switch on or off. It is learning about the error-correction work conducted by repair enzymes. And it is learning about the relationship between the genome and all the possible proteins that can arise out of it (the subject of the burgeoning discipline of proteomics). Each of these complications makes evolutionary accounts of DNA origins that much more difficult. Lennox return to the issue of the god of the gaps, noting that it is knowledge, not ignorance that leads to the conclusion of design, it is knowledge of the nature of biological information and knowledge that intelligent sources are the only known sources of information, taken together with the circumstance that chance and necessity cannot generate the kind of multifaceted specified information which occurs in biology, that point to design as the best explanation for the existence of information-rich DNA. If this is a gap in scientific knowledge, it is a virtuous gap; it is good

Evolution doesn’t import to be anything. It is part of natural history. It is the Darwinists who claim that evolution can be described in terms of natural selection, and that natural selection is a biological mechanism. For reasons why natural selection should not be considered a mechanism. Furthermore, the claim that “those who believe in God regard him as a personal Agent who, among other things, designs and creates mechanisms” are palpably wrong. I, for one, believe in God and I do not visualize God as manipulative and generating mechanisms. What I visualize is that by subjecting God creative energy to what appear to be inflexible laws, God creates what appear to be mechanisms, which appear to be designed. All of these appearances exist in the sense of the stable