Richard Dawkins Vs. John Lennox: THIS Is How You Debate.

Do you really think that the the creator of this magnificent edifice of the universe, these the expanding universe, the galaxies, he really couldn't think of a better way to get rid of the sins on this one little speck of dust than to have himself tortured? He's the one who's doing the forgiving after all. Couldn't he just have forgiven?

Because this is a moral universe, Richard, and just forgiving doesn't make sense. You mean he has to kill himself in order to he doesn't kill himself or get himself killed tortured. God God sends his son into the world to provide forgiveness and to provide a basis on which he can justly bring uh forgiveness to me.

Now he has to get himself killed in order to do well half a minute. We need to step back from this a little bit because it's actually a highly relevant topic in your world. Where is justice?

Justice is a human construct of great importance in human affairs and it's something that we have most of us have a a sense of uh which I think probably can be given some sort of Darwinian explanation but I don't see where you're taking this. Well, my question is, is there any ultimate justice? You see, you say this is petty.

I'm saying I find myself in a world which is a broken world. I find myself in a world where there's massive injustice. If there is no God, then there's no ultimate justice.

And one of the things that the resurrection transforms for me from pettiness right into center stage is if this is true then there's real hope that there be a rational evaluation and fair justice at the end of the world. But atheism doesn't give you that. Okay.

Suppose there is no hope. Suppose there is no justice. Suppose there is nothing but misery and darkness and bleakness.

Suppose there is nothing that we would wish for. Nothing that we would hope for. Too bad.

That doesn't make it true just because God would make us feel good. Well, of course it doesn't. Well, then why do you make bring that argument up?

Because I believe that there is evidence that it is true. I don't believe in the resurrection just like that because faith is based on evidence. What you said before was that there is no hope without God and it sounded Well, that's true.

That's absolutely true and you just admitted it. So I haven't admitted it. I said if that's true, so what?

I didn't say it was true. But anyway, but therefore the question to be decided then is is there a god? And has he revealed himself?

And that's where again I think this pettiness needs to be pushed aside because I can't get to know you as a person. You're not just a scientific object. I could look at you through a a a a telescope or a magnifying glass.

I could even dissect you and so on so forth. But because you are a person, I cannot get to know you unless you're prepared to reveal yourself to me. So the fact that the claim of of Christ to be the truth, to be God incarnate, that makes perfect sense to me because if there is a God who invented this wonderful, marvelous universe with all its science and all the rest, then he has taken the initiative in getting to know us and revealing himself to us.

And he's revealed himself to us at the level we can understand. We're persons. He's a person.

That at least makes sense. So, one of the very important questions to ask is, is that really true or is this simply myth and fantasy? Well, myth and fantasy for me.

Yeah. Well, do you know that disturbs me for the following reason? Reading your book, The God Delusion, you say that it's under scholarly dispute among historians that Jesus actually existed.

Now, I checked with the ancient historians that is not so. And it disturbed me. History is not natural science.

But what I don't understand is this. Why you would write something like that? I don't think it's a very important question.

Sure, Jan. Uh, whether Jesus existed, there are some historians, most historians think he did. Some They certainly do.

I couldn't find an ancient historian that didn't. Well, there are one or two, but I don't really care actually because it precisely because it's petty. I mean, I cannot I mean, if you could you could possibly persuade me that there was some kind of creative force in the universe.

There was some kind of uh physical mathematical genius who who created everything. the expanding universe devised quantum theory, relativity, and all that. You could possibly persuade me of that.

But that is radically and fundamentally incompatible with the sort of God who cares about sin. the sort of God who who who is interested who has the slightest interest in your private thoughts and wickednesses and things like that. Surely you can see that a God who's grand enough to make the universe is not going to give a tapany cuss about what what what you're thinking about and and your sins and things like that.

So you think that morality is not important? Of course I don't think morality is not important. I'm a human being.

Sounds like you're saying it doesn't I'm a human being and I live in a society of human beings and within a society of human beings morality is of course important but we are one of billions of planets on a huge scale and a cosmic god who bothers about this kind of human scale is not the kind of god that is is that is compatible with a scientific view of the universe. It's a medieval view. But do you think that size is the measure of importance?

Incidentally, on a logarithmic scale, you are about halfway between the atom and the universe. So if God thinks in terms of logarithms, your point falls, I think. I mean, this is in a sense an emotional argument we've we've come into now.

And I don't think so. I want to I want to resp if if if I were going to respect a god, it would be the kind of god who the sort of god that Carl Sean might have might have worshiped. Not the sort of medieval god who fusses about sin, the obsession with sin and and righteousness and and sort of I I keep coming back to this word petty and I stand by it.

We need the evidence. We need the evidence. And what I'm suggesting to you is that we do have evidence.

We have it in science, part of God's revelation. I get the impression that you're not taking history really seriously. Otherwise, you'd interact with it.

And I'm trying to get to the basis of why that is so because you regard what Jesus has done and who he is as petty. And I find the contrast between standing tall in a silent and cold universe with no hope, believing that your moral sense must ultimately be illusion. You're crying for justice because most people will never get it because death ends everything.

The contrast between that and enjoying the friendship, the personal friendship of God and knowing that ultimate justice will be done is immense. Well, the basic question is, is it true or not? Yeah, that is the basic question.

It is completely irrelevant. If it's comforting, if it gives you hope, if it gives you happiness, that has nothing to do with whether it's true. That I agree with entirely.

So, so we need to know uh whether it's true. Yes. Now, um, when you look at history, and let's let's leave aside maybe I I I alluded to the possibility that some historians think Jesus never exists.

I take that back. Jesus existed. However, if you're going to say that Jesus was born of a virgin, that Jesus walked on water, that he turned water into wine, that is palpably anti-scientific.

There is no evidence for that. And if there were, you would be well, I mean, no, there simply isn't any evidence for that. And no, no scientist could possibly take the idea seriously.

I can make it worse for you. I know you can because Jesus actually claimed to be the logos that created the whole universe. And if this is the creator incarnate, making water into wine and so on is really a triviality.

the the the more fundamental thing is the fact that he claimed to be and gave evidence that he was God. When you say it's anti-scientific, I don't think it's anti-scientific at all. Science cannot say that miracles do not occur.

I can say they're highly improbable. But nobody is claiming that these things occurred by natural processes. They they occurred because God fed his power in nor did the whole universe uh if we look at it occur in that sense by natural processes.

God created we study all the natural processes within it. So when you say it's anti-scientific I think it's not anti-scientific. What I mean by that is that if and when doing science we constantly have to keep in mind that at any moment there might be a little magic trick slipped in that would completely nullify the whole enterprise of science.

Oh, I agree with that. But you see allowing that? No, no, I'm not allowing that at all because in order to recognize what the New Testament calls miracle, a special act of God, you must be living in a universe that has regularities.

and we recognize them. I agree with you entirely. Otherwise, you wouldn't notice the miracles.

That's exactly true. You wouldn't recognize if dead people were popping up all over the place. You wouldn't think it was very special.

But the fact is you need two things, not one. You've got to have rec regularities which we call the laws of nature. Although they're not causes, they're in a sense descriptions that we can use.

You also need to be able to recognize those. So that for example when um Joseph discovered that his uh wife to be Mary was pregnant he simply didn't believe her story. He was going to divorce her.

He knew exactly where babies came from. He knew the regularity. It took very special convincing for him to realize that something extremely special had happened.

But science cannot stop that. The question is of course did such a thing ever happen? And the central focus in the New Testament is not that which is not so readily accessible to evidence, the virgin conception, but the resurrection of Christ.

And ancient historians, and this is fascinated me recently going over it. ancient historians whose discipline is very venerable and I'm not talking about Christian ancient historians ancient historians many of them even at the skeptical end of the spectrum say that the evidence for the resurrection of Christ is very powerful the explosion of the Christian church from a nonprilitizing group of Jews in the first century the empty tomb and all the rest of it has even led Giza Vermesh who's one of the most distinguished ancient historians in Oxford to to say yes this tomb was empty and hallucinations and this kind of explanation do not wash. So we have to ask ourselves are we prepared to believe in historical testimony or not.

Well, you must talk to different historians than the one I talked to. In in any case, I I I still come back to the point that you cannot do science if at any time you you you remember that famous cartoon of the No, I do. And therefore, a miracle happens.

Yes. I mean, that is that is deeply against the spirit of science. And I I don't think I could do science if I thought that at any time something like the resurrection, something like the virgin birth was going to be smuggled in by a by a a godly caprice.

So what is the ultimate meaning of life for you? Uh the ultimate meaning of life depends on what you mean by it. Obviously um each one of us can make an ultimate meaning.

We each one of us can can have a private meaning, a purpose in our life. um what we hope to achieve in our life or a biologist might say the ultimate meaning of life is the propagation of genes. Uh that would be a very different kind of meaning they're both true.

I suppose the basic question for me here is what is the nature of ultimate reality? If ultimate reality is simply the universe in some sense or multiverse that's one thing and I am at a loss to understand how you get from simple atoms elementary particles and so on to a a brain let alone a mind the eye the person and we don't understand what consciousness is and so on. I don't begin to see and I don't think scientists begin to see how you can get to something that even understands the concept of meaning.

But I can understand it if behind the universe the ultimate reality is not impersonal matter and energy that somehow has produced all this stuff bottom up. I can understand it if it's top down as well as partly bottom up. And that is that there is a God who is personal, who is good, who is the source of life and meaning and who reaches out to me as a person and who in fact far from stopping me doing science encourages the development of the mind that he has given me.

And so meaning to me has all kinds of dimensions as you would agree with in my family with my wife and my children and my work and so on. But it's not bounded by the three score years and 10. It's not bounded by the the death of the universe either.

It's got an expanding horizon of hope. And that to me is the only thing that is worthy of the God that created this vast cosmos that our lives are not going to be extinguished just like that. There is a beyond.

And I can walk with confidence into that beyond because I have a real relationship that's got a firm basis with the God who invented it all. When you say faith is rational and evidence-based, I mean, if that were true, it wouldn't need to be faith, would it? I mean, if if there were evidence for it, uh why would you need to call it faith?

You'd say just evidence. And when you said that we that that faith in relativity in in Einstein's theory of of relativity is is evidence-based that of course it is but the evidence is is all important. I mean Einstein's predictions fit in with observed fact and and with a whole body of theory whereas we only need to use the word faith when there isn't any evidence.

No, not at all. I presume you've got faith in your wife. Is there any evidence for that on which you base it?

Yes, plenty of evidence. Um, I [Applause] Let's generalize it. Never mind about my wife.

Let's head out.