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God's Undertaker

Has science buried God?

Making a monkey out of Dawkins

GOD’S UNDERTAKER
Has science buried God?
By John Lennox
Lion Hudson. 192 pages. £8.99
ISBN 978-0-7459-5303-8

The media attention and profile given to Professor Richard Dawkins’s tract The God Delusion has put Christians under great pressure in the public arena in the last year. All who believe in God have been branded as mindless nincompoops by the Oxford atheist.

But the truth is that we are not nincompoops at all as this very fine book by John Lennox clearly shows. Has science buried God? To this question, this Reader of Mathematics at Oxford gives a resounding ‘No’ and provides compelling reasons why. I suppose this is one of the most refreshing and impressive characteristics of the book. Whereas Dawkins’s attack on faith is packed with frantic rhetoric and derogatory comments, Lennox is measured, careful and full of sweet reason.

Off limits?

Lennox begins by explaining the limits of what scientific method can achieve. He then looks at the structure of the universe and the biosphere and indicates why it is reasonable to see them as designed. He takes time to carefully examine the theory of evolution and, while agreeing with the idea of adaptation within a species, shows why full blown Darwinianism of the Dawkins/Atkins type is an extrapolation which goes way beyond what can actually be demonstrated and, indeed, flies in the face of much evidence. Along the way he also punctures the hot air balloon of Dawkins’s claim that no scientist of any note believes in God today. Did you realise that both Francis Collins, the director of the Human Genome Project, and Allan Sandage, probably the greatest observational cosmologist of our time, are both Christians (not to mention many more)?

Dawkins’s own ID

But Lennox truly comes into his own as he, as a mathematician (which Dawkins very definitely is not) looks at the complexity of DNA, the library of biological information. Dawkins (I think in his book Climbing Mount Improbable) acknowledges that the probability of something like DNA being produced by pure chance in random processes (monkeys sitting at typewriters, etc.) is so small as to be discounted. Therefore, he proposed a computer experiment which includes an algorithm which simulates ‘natural selection’ which greatly increases the odds of producing something like DNA. But what this algorithm actually does is a) to identify the end point which is seeking to be reached, and b) to retain any single part of that end point reached in random process, even though it may not immediately contribute any extra viability to the molecule. But, of course, as Lennox so helpfully points out, this is simply to cook the books. Foreseeing what is required and retaining anything useful; that looks suspiciously like a thought process. It is hardly ‘undirected’ evolution. What Dawkins is actually doing is to sneak in ‘intelligent design’ (ID) through the back door. Lennox writes: ‘However, their argument is illuminating in that it could be said to increase the plausibility of intelligent design. For it shows that those attempts to account for the origin of biological information that are based on strong materialistic presuppositions cannot do so without smuggling in intelligently designed mechanisms.’

Lack of integrity

This is a book to test your ‘little grey cells’. You probably need to know some science and A level maths to really appreciate it. But I would recommend it highly.

In fact, the book is so lucid and helpful to those who believe in God that even the reviewer in The Guardian was brought to question the integrity of Professor Dawkins and his side-kick for the Oxford Chemistry Department, Professor Peter Atkins. He wrote: ‘Indeed, atheism — when you boil it down — is little more than dogma: simple denial, a refusal to take seriously the proposition that there could be more to the universe than meets the eye. To use science to justify such dogma, as these professors do, is a gross misuse of their own trade.

John Benton