Proclaimer Blog
Lennox in The Times
Today's Times carries a long interview with John Lennox. Worth a look if you can get beyond the paywall, or you may have do the old fashioned thing and buy a print copy. I can only (for copyright reasons) cut and paste an excerpt.
Stephen Hawking is wrong to assert that God did not create the Universe, says Christianity’s new poster boy John Lennox
In September, when The Times made international headlines with the news that Professor Stephen Hawking had concluded that God had not, after all, created the Universe, it should have been a blow to John Lennox. The 67-year-old Oxford University maths professor has in the past few years emerged as academia’s lead champion of Christianity against the post-9/11 “New Atheists”. He has three times debated their leader, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, two years ago at the university’s natural history museum in what some hailed as a rerun of the great 1860s evolution debate between Darwin’s supporter Thomas Huxley and God’s Samuel Wilberforce.
But now the war was being fought on a new front — physics — by a scientist whom Lennox had admired since their student days at Cambridge.
Yet Lennox says that it wasn’t a blow. “No, not in the slightest. It was fascinating. I thought, ‘What new arguments does he have?’”
This, one might say, is the Oxford mind at work. For others, however, the shock was real enough. A “simple believer in the Christian faith” e-mailed Lennox to say that he had driven into a petrol station and seen the headlines. “He said it hit him viscerally. It knocked him for six.” Perhaps it was for him, then, that Lennox has now written in retaliation God and Stephen Hawking: Whose Design is it Anyway?, a short book that he will give us a sneak preview of on Monday with a lecture at the University of Dundee.
We meet at Green Templeton College, Oxford, for which, among his other jobs, Lennox is pastoral adviser. The first thing to say about him is that he is extraordinarily nice. He is plump and beaming and untidy, a father of three and grandfather of four. There is huge warmth in his Northern Irish accent, as well as what appears to be a genuine interest in others. The second thing is that he extremely clever. As a young father teaching at Cardiff University he subsidised his salary by translating Russian, a language that he taught himself as he went along. He also speaks French, German and some Spanish. Maths, on which he has published 70 peer-reviewed articles, he regards as just “another language”.
He has just returned from a lecturing tour in America. Maths or God, I ask over lunch in the college.
“God,” he says although anyone who has struggled with his bookGod’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? will know that a knowledge of advanced maths might prove very useful when discussing God with him were he mean enough to shift the debate to the origins, divine or otherwise, of amino acids.