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Thursday, March 13, 2014

Wise Professors vs. Professing Wisdom

I am thankful for the wisdom displayed by John Lennox (math professor at Oxford University). He is doing a tremendous job confronting the teachings of the New Atheists, having engaged in high profile debates with the likes of Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens.

In a talk given at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, Lennox remarks, “Nonsense remains nonsense even when taught by world class physicists.”[1] This is in reference to the increasingly popular proposition that the universe arises from nothing (as promulgated by men like Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss). This is true if one defines “nothing” in a new way, such as encompassing the laws of physics, which actually is something. Lennox goes on to explain that the laws of the universe are descriptive and predictive, not creative—just as the laws of arithmetic describe how money in a bank account will add up, but they do not create the money itself.

I am particularly thankful that an esteemed professor at Oxford is the one calling out the fallacy of the New Atheists’ arguments because if it were just little peons like myself doing so, everybody would say that we are simply not scientifically literate enough nor have the intellectual capacity to understand the complexity of their arguments (though this reminds me of the wise insight of J. Budziszewski that there are some forms of stupidity that one must be highly intelligent and educated to achieve). Nevertheless, the New Atheists are indeed brilliant men who have advanced degrees, and I am thankful that Lennox can be counted on their level as he challenges their erroneous philosophy couched in complex scientific terminology.

All of this reminds me of another wise professor who confronted the prevalent philosophy of his day: the apostle Paul. In his epistle to the Romans, he states, “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,”[2] speaking of those who abandoned the recognition of God and began to worship created things rather than the Creator. What is really going on today with the New Atheists is, in essence, nothing new—they are not only denying the existence of God but are worshipping the creation in His place. Listen to what some of them say about the universe:

Lawrence Krauss: If we live in a universe full of stuff, how did it get here? And many people think that very question implies the need for a creator. But what's truly been amazing, and what the book's [A Universe from Nothing] about is the revolutionary developments in both cosmology and particle physics over the past 30 or 40 years that have not only changed completely the way we think about the universe but made it clear that there's a plausible case for understanding precisely how a universe full of stuff, like the universe we live in, could result literally from nothing by natural processes.[3]

Christopher Hitchens: If you want to be awe inspired. . . let me just tell you that those of us who do not believe we are divinely created, let alone divinely supervised, are not immune to the idea of awe and beauty and the transcendent. Let me invite you to look for a moment at the pictures taken by the Hubble telescope. Some of you may have done it. If you haven’t done it now, or yet, do it soon.
The extraordinary revelations of swirling yet somehow beautiful, new galaxies in color and depth and majesty, like nothing, I think, the human eye has ever seen.[4]

Richard Dawkins: When I lie on my back and look up at the Milky Way on a clear night and see the vast distances of space and reflect that these are also vast differences of time as well, when I look at the Grand Canyon and see the strata going down, down, down, through periods of time which the human mind can’t comprehend, I’m overwhelmingly filled with a sense of, almost worship. . . it’s a feeling of sort of an abstract gratitude that I am alive to appreciate these wonders, when I look down a microscope it’s the same feeling, I am grateful to be alive to appreciate these wonders.[5]

The universe created. The universe is transcendent. The universe is worship-inspiring. It sounds to me as if they have taken the concept of God and simply replaced it with the universe itself. The New Atheists are compelling, however, because they know how to present their views in a highly sophisticated and emotionally evocative manner, but in the end, they are simply professing wisdom rather than demonstrating it. Nonsense is still nonsense even if taught by world class, highly renowned and revered scientists. Thankfully, the God who does exist has provided a voice of reason in the midst of all of this through John Lennox. I encourage others to listen to what he has to say.




[1] John Lennox, “A Matter of Gravity - God, the Universe and Stephen Hawking” (2013), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xy4gMVlUCE; accessed March, 2014.
[2] Romans 1:22 (KJV).
[3] Lawrence Krauss, “Lawrence Krauss On 'A Universe From Nothing'” (January, 2012), http://www.npr.org/
2012/01/13/145175263/lawrence-krauss-on-a-universe-from-nothing; accessed March, 2014.
[4] Christopher Hitchens, Collision: Christopher Hitchens vs. Douglas Wilson (DVD), 2009.
[5] Richard Dawkins, “Atheism is the New Fundamentalism” (debate sponsored by Intelligence Squared), 2009.