[00:00:07] Speaker A: Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
[00:00:13] Speaker B: Welcome to ID the Future. I'm Jay Richards with Discovery Institute here in Seattle. Joining me today is Professor John Lennox. Professor Lennox is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and Fellow in Mathematics and the Philosophy of Science at Green Templeton College. You may have heard Professor Lennox, you may have seen him on YouTube, you may have even read some of his books. He's debated quite visible and famous atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, and he's lectured on science, religion and related themes around the world. Professor Lennox, thanks for joining me.
[00:00:44] Speaker A: My pleasure.
[00:00:45] Speaker B: Well, you have this brand new book out called Seven Days that Divide the the Beginning According to Genesis in Science, published by Zondervan here in the United States. I just finished the book. I have to say I love this book. I'm going to be recommending it very widely. But you're taking on a very controversial subject for Christians, this question about the age of the universe, how to interpret Genesis 1. Why did you decide to write this book?
[00:01:08] Speaker A: Well, because I visited the United States many times and very often this question comes up and I find many young people, intelligent young people, facing attention because it seems to me sometimes they're told that there are only two alternatives when it comes to Scripture. Either you take a young Earth view of Genesis and then you're faithful to Scripture, or you are an extreme evolutionist of some kind and there's no position in between.
And my heart goes out to people who, like myself, want to take Scripture seriously, and I have a very high view of Scripture and accept its full authority, but at the same time, they want to take science seriously. Not that they are credulously believing everything that's said to them, but they want to be absolutely sure that they're not making a mistake like the people did in the time of Galileo, when in the name of the Bible, they thought that the Earth did not move, but they discovered it did.
[00:02:18] Speaker B: Well, indeed. In fact, you spend the first part of the book dealing with this lesson from History of Galileo. Why do you think that's really important?
[00:02:26] Speaker A: Well, I think it's very important because if we could transpose this interview 500 years back, that would have been the question you would have been asking me. What are we to think of this new view that the Earth moves? Surely it contradicts Scripture because Scripture says the Earth has been founded on pillars and so on so that it shouldn't move.
And why I use that is because in those days, people would have felt that Galileo was a threat to them by claiming it did move, a threat to them because this new science appeared to contradict Genesis. But then over the years, it took a long time. I must say, I calculated it took about 1700 years for the disordered out. The interesting thing is that you won't meet a Christian today, at least I've never met a serious Christian today who thinks that the Earth is fixed in space. So somehow they've come not to lower their concept of the authority of Scripture, but they've come to see that there's more than one way of interpreting Scripture. You can interpret Scripture in such a way as to think that the Earth is fixed, but you don't have to.
And it's very interesting. I developed this in the book, of course, that we do allow our understanding, understanding of the natural world to help us to understand Scripture almost unconsciously. You see, our concepts of day and night and the earth all come from our experience of nature. And I try to show how, although you could interpret Genesis in terms of a young earth, Scripture itself doesn't demand it.
[00:04:08] Speaker B: Well, what would you say, and I've had to deal with this objection as well, that what you're really doing is just reading the science into the Bible. And basically Scripture is like a wax nose and you're just twisting it around whatever you think the science is, and not treating the text with integrity. How do you respond to that?
[00:04:26] Speaker A: Well, I go back again in history and say you can make exactly the same objection to the plain, straightforward statement of Scripture that the earth is fixed and it doesn't move. And you can say, ah, well, now, if you believe it does move, you're twisting Scripture, but you're not. You see, what you are doing is realizing that there's a perfectly sensible interpretation of Scripture in terms not of being geometrically fixed, in terms of motion, but that God has built a stability into the universe that's equally real. And so it seems to me that it's not a question of reading the science in. There must have been a time when there were fixed Earthers and moving Earthers, you know, and as the evidence began to come in, the fixed Earthers had to say to themselves, are we going to maintain this, or are we going to allow this new information to control our exposition of Scripture, as we can now see that there's a perfectly sensible explanation of Scripture that doesn't compromise its authority, but makes much more sense.
But actually, Jay, there's another consideration.
You see, reading the science into the Scripture, I would say, look, the first thing we need to do is read scripture seriously itself. Let me give you one example of that. On the precise question of the age of the earth, you see, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And then you have this sequence of days.
Now it's quite noticeable that from day two on, the days each start with and God said. And God said. So the presumption would be just on reading this, that day one would begin. And God said. And so it does.
But that means that the statement in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth doesn't belong to day one.
That's something we read into it, you see. So if we just look at the scripture as it stands, you have in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. When was that? I don't know in the sense that it could have been recent, but it might well have been 13.7 billion years ago.
The sequence of days, whatever you think about them, isn't in the beginning. And Hebrew experts like C. John Collins point out that the Hebrew tense changes from the first couple of verses from the perfect tense to the narrative tense, which is a normal way of indicating that the first bit is something that happens before the main action takes part. So it seems to me, quite apart from science, scripture itself opens up that possibility.
And my own view is simply this. I don't want to say anything less than what scripture says, but I don't want to say anything more than what scripture says. I don't want to read more into scripture than is actually in there. That's just as dangerous as the other thing.
[00:07:29] Speaker B: Well, you know, it's wonderful. I've often said something along these lines that we don't want to read some contemporary scientific idea into the text.
We want the text to have its own integrity. Nevertheless, discovering something either in science or in nature someplace else can become an occasion for us to look at the text and say, now does it say what we thought it said? And it turns out, you know, we discovered there's all sorts of things we thought the text said that it doesn't.
[00:07:55] Speaker A: Well, absolutely. And I find in my life the result of doing that has been to increase my confidence in scripture rather than be afraid of facing it in case you might find out something that you don't really like.
[00:08:08] Speaker B: Well, it's amazing how there's something about this text. I honestly, I attribute it to the genius of God, that it's a text, that a simple person, a simple tribesman, you know, in the Stone Age, could have heard this and have understood and grasped the large point. But nevertheless, it's like a bottomless pit that you can study your entire life and continue to discover things that you didn't realize were there or discover that you were assuming it said things that it did not. I'm frequently asked, do you interpret Genesis 1 literally or figuratively? And I say, well, what do you mean? He said, Well, I mean 24 hour days or not? I said, well, but it doesn't say God created the world in six 24 hour days. That would be. If it said that, I would have to say, well, I would take that figuratively. It just simply says days. For all we know, God can have days. And those are literal days for him. So the question's not primarily is it literal or figurative, but what are these days that are being referred to?
[00:08:59] Speaker A: Well, that's right. And the words literal and figurative aren't very helpful because I argue in my book that the word day has four different meanings in the Genesis account, and if you like, each of them as literal, but they're all different.
And that's the trouble that we've got to take them on their own terms and then see what exactly the text is saying.
And what excites me very much about the Genesis text is it's short and yet it's utterly profound. It says what scientists didn't believe for centuries, that there was a beginning.
But the thing that I think is most important about it is what's repeated again and again. And God said, and God said, whatever these days are and whatever your view of them is, you don't get from one to the next without an input of information and energy from outside. And God said, and that locks into the New Testament explanation. In the beginning was the Word, all things came to be through him.
In other words, we're speaking in two very powerful ways about the same thing, about intelligent causation.
[00:10:14] Speaker B: A lot of us that are interested in these theology and science questions focus on those first days. I've in my own writing, focus mostly on the first few days, Genesis 1:1, and not in my own case really written a whole lot about day six. And yet you have a chapter in which you talk about this question of the special creation of why do you think that's important to draw?
[00:10:34] Speaker A: Well, I just come from Australia and debating Peter Singer, debating him not on moral issues, but on the question of God. But the point there is this, that one of the things that's very much under attack today is the moral status of human beings. And Singer wants to argue that most of our problems have come from giving a special status to human beings and then causing suffering to animals and so on and so forth. I think actually the case is the exact opposite way around. We haven't taken seriously the special status that God gives to human beings. And so I'm focusing on that because I'm very interested in these moral issues.
Seems to me that there are two big areas of discourse. The first one, the science, religion debate, if you like, is about the status of the universe, is it created or not.
The second one, and perhaps for most people the more important one is the status of human beings. Are they made in the image of God or not? And that's why I felt it very important in a book that's trying to answer an age old problem that people don't feel that the only thing that Genesis is talking about is the age of the earth. In fact, the New Testament doesn't even mention that. But it does mention these other things that are massively important for our whole understanding of the meaning of our universe and the meaning of ourselves in it.
[00:12:01] Speaker B: Well, you have a wonderful chapter in the book on the message of Genesis 1 and you talk about the sort of key themes and I'm not going to talk about that in this interview because I want listeners.
[00:12:09] Speaker A: Oh no, we want people to get the book.
[00:12:10] Speaker B: I want them to go get the book. We don't want to give them everything but that one chapter. I say, is it worth the price of the book? But I do want to ask you about your Appendix E. It's called Theistic Evolution and the God of the Gaps. Now you start by affirming much of the work of people that we would identify, I suppose as theistic evolutionists, people like Francis Collins, the American geneticist, or Simon Conway Morris, the paleobiologist at Cambridge. And many of the things that they've talked about endorsing the idea of fine tuning and purpose in the universe. And yet you also part company with them on a key point. What is that?
[00:12:44] Speaker A: Well, the key point is, and I'm not a biologist, you see, I'm a skeptical mathematician and I'm well aware, as I say this, that there was a famous Wistar Institute meeting many years ago where the mathematicians were very skeptical of the creative power of natural selection.
And, and what I try to do there is just to raise questions, questions about the notion that selection and mutation as natural processes can actually create anything. I have no difficulty with the kind of thing that Darwin observed, the micro evolutionary change in finch beak lengths and so on that we can observe even in humans today. But that's not the issue.
The issue is can we see evidence that this is a creative mechanism? And then to point out of course, what for me is the most important question of all here, the origin of life itself, which by definition evolution doesn't deal with because evolution, normally understood depends on the pre existence of a mutating replicator. So it can't explain the existence of a mutating replicator. And here's where as a mathematician the whole question of the, say, the information content of DNA comes into play because of course DNA is extremely ancient and by random processes you don't even have time to get it. But it's the nature of that information, it has a semiotic dimension. And whenever we see anything like that, our immediate inference is not downwards to natural processes, whatever natural processes may or not have been involved. We say there's a text here. So there is a text creator, there is intellectual behind it. So I'm raising some questions. No doubt I'll get a tremendous amount of flack on this. But it seems to me that something does need to be said because I'm not sure that the scientific verdict is as clear as some people make it out to be. And I've been intrigued to notice the increasing chorus of voices and you'd know more about this than I. The increasing chorus of voices querying the actual power of natural selection.
[00:14:57] Speaker B: Yeah. And that's happening on the scientific side.
[00:14:59] Speaker A: Yes, that's what I mean. People like will provide have shifted.
[00:15:03] Speaker B: That's right. The word is in fact out. Now what people say when the microphone is on is different from what they'll say privately. But word is out about the limits of the creative power, I think of the mutation selection mechanism. You raise, what I think is the key theological point is that you object that at least some theistic evolutionists seem to take a sort of a priori decision that God wouldn't do things a certain way. So rather than saying, well, God's God as you say in the book, he can do things lots of different ways, the question is what has he done? And we have no justification to just assume ahead of time that he's front loaded everything into the fine tuning of the laws of physics or what have you.
[00:15:41] Speaker A: Yes, and especially when there's no evidence of that. Clearly if you've got matter, wherever that came from, and of course God was behind it in the laws of physics, things can happen, sure, but it's the nature of the things that happen. And you see the Genesis account doesn't talk about God micromanaging all over the place, as some people accuse the number of statements and God said is very small. And that's what interests me, especially when it comes to the fact that my friends who are theistic evolutionists, some of them like Francis Collins, say that when it comes to the human spirit, God does something special.
[00:16:18] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:16:18] Speaker A: Now, it seems to me that once you've conceded that, and in addition conceded that in the past 20 centuries, God has done something massively special in the incarnation and the resurrection.
Where is the a priori difficulty in conceding that Genesis in its sequence, a sequence of creative acts which stops?
That seems to me to be signaling to us that whatever processes are going on at present, they're not adequate to account for that sequence of steps. That seems to me to be one of the implications of the Sabbath Shabbat. God rests from creating, not from sustaining the universe. But the implication is that sustaining the universe is not, peace be to Augustine, the same as the creation process.
[00:17:04] Speaker B: Absolutely.
This is wonderful stuff and I don't want to give everyone the entire contents of the book that we can talk about it if it were up to me for a couple of hours.
Professor John Lennox, it's wonderful to have you here in Seattle. Thanks for joining us.
[00:17:17] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:17:18] Speaker B: Well, the new book, folks, is Seven Days that Divide the the Beginning According to Genesis and Science. It's published by Zondervan, just out. You can find it at your local bookstores and of
[email protected] well, for ID the future, this is Jay Richards of the Discovery Institute here in Seattle. Thanks for joining us.
[00:17:35] Speaker A: This program was recorded by Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. ID the Future is copyright Discovery Institute.
For more information, visit IntelligentDesign.org and IDTheFuture.com SAM.
