I received John C. Lennox‘s book “God’s Undertaker” as a gift and took a while before I finally read it. Too bad, I now say: Lennox writes cogently and covers good ground. My impression was that the book petered out a bit, but the beginning is a strong and sure-footed rebuttal of the grand claims of the “New Atheists.” He begins with definitions, then argues two main points: that the natural world shows quite a bit of evidence for a creator and a purpose (mainly from a probabilistic angle), and that the “New Atheists” (Dawkins, Atkins, etc.) resort to fallacious arguments or rhetorical sleight-of-hand in their claims that science has proven the God hypothesis to be unnecessary.
It’s of course worth reading the book yourself, but none of us had endless earthly time at their diposal, so here are some of the quotes I underlined.
In Lennox’s introductory chapter “War of the worldviews,” he writes: “…the New Atheists, in rejecting all faith as blind faith, are seriously undermining their own credibility.” Another section speaks of the forgotten roots of science. I summed it up with “one Creator God, no aprioris, no symbolism.” A final quote from that chapter: “…we should be humble enough to distinguish between what the Bible says and our interpretations of it.”
Chapter 2, “The scope and limits of science,” contains a number of interesting quotes. I can never tell if there is more interesting material as books progress, or if I just become less selective. Lennox quotes Werner Heisenberg, who said: “[T]he natural laws formulated mathematically in quantum theory no longer deal with the elementary particles themselves but with our knowledge of them.” He quotes Richard Lewontin as saying, “…we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations,” showing one example of philosophy coming before science. “What no scientist can avoid,” Lennox says, “is having his or her own philosophical commitments. […] [T]hey may well play a […] dominant role when we are studying how things came to exist in the first place, or when we are studying things that bear on our understanding of ourselves as human beings.” Later, on the limits of science: “[T]he statement that only science can deliver knowledge is one of those self-refuting statements […].” Lennox then introduces his illustration of “Aunt Matilda’s cake,” an illustration to which he returns a few times in the book. His point is that scientists can describe the cake in great detail, “but suppose I now ask the assembled group of experts a final question: Why was the cake made?” In developing the analogy, he quotes Austin Farrer: “And since God is not a part of the world, still less an aspect of it, nothing that is said about God, however truly, can be a statement belonging to any science.” Lennox continues, “It is one thing to suggest that science cannot answer questions of ultimate purpose. It is quite another to dismiss purpose itself as an illusion because science cannot deal with it. […] Medawar‘s view that science is limited is, therefore, no insult to science. The very reverse is the case. It is those scientists who make exaggerated claims for science who make science look ridiculous. […] The point is that in cases where science is not our source of information, we cannot automatically assume that reason has ceased to function and evidence has ceased to be relevant.” In closing the chapter, he distinguishes between different “reasons” – similar to Aristotles “formal cause” and “efficient cause” – and quotes Michael Poole: “… there is no logical conflict between reason-giving explanations which concern mechanisms, and reason-giving explanations which concern the plans and purposes of an agent, human or divine.”
Chapter 3, “Reduction, reduction, reduction…,” talks about the strengths and limits of reductionism. Lennox says: “It is [God’s] existence which gives rise to the very possibility of explanation, scientific or otherwise.” On the difference between a creator God and pantheism, he uses the analogy of Mr. Ford designing his Model T. “Believing that the engine of the car had been designed by Mr Ford would not stop anybody from investigating scientifically how the engine worked – in fact might well spur them on to do so. However, and this is crucial, if they came to superstitiously believe that Mr Ford was the engine, that would stop their science dead. This is the key issue: there is a great difference between God and the gods, and between a God who is the Creator and a god who is the universe.” Lennox refers to Gödel‘s work in his attempt to show the “limits for reductionism in science itself,” quoting Freeman Dyson: “Gödel proved that in mathematics the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts.” Next, Karl Popper: “There is almost always an unresolved residue left by even the most successful attempts at reduction.” Lennox continues with the example of the text at hand: “The ink and paper are carriers of the message, but the message certainly does not arise automatically from them. […] You cannot derive a vocabulary from phonetics, or the grammar of a language from its vocabulary.” Lennox contends that ontological reductionism is self-destructive, quoting John Polkinghorne: “The world of rational discourse dissolves into the absurd chatter of firing synapses. Quite frankly, that cannot be right and none of us believes so.” “Precisely,” say Lennox. “There is a patent self-contradiction running through all attempts, however sophisticated they may appear, to derive rationality from irrationality.”
Chapter 4, “Designer universe?,” explores the indications that the universe might have been designed, rather than entirely random. It covers five such indications: the rational intelligibility of the universe, the existence of the universe, the beginning of the universe, the fine-tuning of the universe, and the anthropic principle. Here are the quotes:
John Polkinghorne again: “Science does not explain the mathematical intelligibility of the physical world, for it is part of science’s founding faith that this is so.”
Paul Davies: “The belief that [the sun] will [rise tomorrow] – that there are indeed dependable regularities of nature – is an act of faith, but one which is indispensable to the progress of science.”
John Haught: “At some point in the validation of every truth claim or hypothesis, a leap of faith is an inescapable ingredient. At the foundation of every human search for understanding and truth, including scientific search, an ineradicable element of trust is present. [This] shows clearly that the new atheistic attempts to cleanse human consciousnes of faith are absurd and doomed to failure.”
“Theism,” says Lennox, “upholds and makes sense of the rational intelligibility of the universe; whereas, as we saw earlier, the reductionist thesis undermines it and dissolves it into meaninglessness.”
Keith Ward: “Between the hypothesis of God and the hypothesis of a cosmic bootstrap, there is no competition. We were always right to think that persons, or universes, who seek to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps are forever doomed to failure.”
Against those who argue that a theory or a law created the universe, Lennox quotes William Paley: “It is a perversion of language to assign any law, as the efficient, operative cause of any thing.”
Paul Davies again: “It seems as though someone has fine tuned nature’s numbers to make the universe… The impression of design is overwhelming.”
After having shown how unlikely the universe is, based on the estimated likelihood of certain of its aspects, Lennox adds: “We should note that the preceding arguments are not ‘God of the gaps’ arguments, it is advance in science, not ignorance of science, that has revealed this fine-tuning to us. In that sense there is no ‘gap’ in the science. The question is rather: How should we interpret the science? In what direction is it pointing?” Regarding the anthropic principle, he says that “viable theories of the cosmos must take into account the existence of observers.” Lennox refers to John Leslie, who argues that “the fine-tuning argument presents us with a choice between, at most, two possibilities. The first of these is that God is real. The only way to avoid that conclusion, according to Leslie, is to believe in the so-called ‘many worlds’ or ‘multiverse’ hypothesis. […] Philosopher Richard Swinburne goes even further. ‘To postulate a trillion-trillion other universes, rather than one God, in order to explain the orderliness of our universe, seems the height of irrationality.'”
Chapter 5, “Designer biosphere?,” takes the same approach with the biosphere we live in. Lennox explores whether evolution can account for the biosphere and looks at the philosophical moorings of evolution. Here are the quotes:
Daniel Dennett: “Darwin was offering a sceptical world… a scheme for creating Design out of Chaos without the aid of Mind.” Lennox says that in Dennett’s view, Darwin’s idea turns the world upside down, for “instead of the universe’s matter being a product of mind, the minds in the universe are a product of matter.”
William Paley of”watchmaker” fame: “It is not necessary that a machine be perfect, in order to show with what design it was made: still less necessary, where the only question is, whether it were made with any design at all.”
Elliott Sober on Paley: “Paley’s argument about organisms stands on its own, regardless of whether watches and organisms happen to be similar. The point of talking about watches is to help the reader see that the argument about organisms is compelling.” Lennox adds: “[T]he fact that the biosphere is now known to contain endless sophisticated clocks means that design arguments of this kind cannot so easily be dismissed. However, it would be a mistake to use them with a reductionist spin in order to give the impression that the universe nothing more than a clockwork. Consequently, in order to avoid potentially misleading associations of ideas, it might well be better to talk about arguments inferring intelligent origin, than about design arguments.”
Lennox then probes into the claims advanced by those who “are convinced that no designer is necessary; unguided, mindless, evolutionary processes can and did do it all.” If that is true, he asks, where does morality come from? What does it mean? Does evolution necessarily exclude a creator? There, Lennox says, a category mistake is made: an agent cannot be replaced by a mechanism. “The existence of a mechanism is not in itself an argument for the non-existence of an agent who designed the mechanism.” Lennox points out how “Dawkins ascribes creative power to the forces of physics and personifies them.” He cites several well-known mechanisms that have one thing in common: “though blind in themselves, [they] are all the products of minds that are far from being blind; such mechanisms are intelligently designed.” Lennox concludes: “The lesson here is that we need to be wary of the rhetoric of sciencein this kind of context, since descriptions of putative evolutionary mechanisms are often loaded with words such as ‘blind’, ‘automatic’ and ‘purposeless’ which, because of their ambiguity in such contexts, tend to convey the impression that the question of the involvement of an intelligent agency has been investigated and rejected when in fact nothing of the kind is the case. […] [T]he evolutionary viewpoint, far from invalidating the inference to intelligent design, arguably does nothing more than moving it back up one level, from the organisms to the processes by which those organisms have come to exist.”
If that is the case, Lennox writes, why “the insistence that evolution implies atheism?” In short, it is at least in part because atheism implies evolutionism. “Historically, the philosophy of evolutionism appeared long before the biological theory of evolution. […] In the contemporary scientific world we thus have the very unusual situation that one of science’s most influential theories, biological macroevolution, stands in such a close relationship to naturalistic philosophy that it can be deduced from it directly.”
Chapter 6, “The nature and scope of evolution,” looks at a few definitions and probes into a few areas where Lennox argues that pure materialistic evolution falls short of explaining reality. “Evolution” can refer to a number of things, from plain change to “molecular evolution,” a shorthand for a naturalistic origins-of-life hypothesis that has little to do with Darwin’s natural selection.
“[N]atural selection is not creative. […] The stronger progeny must be already there: it is not produced by natural selection. Indeed the very word ‘selection’ ought to alert our attention to this: selection is made from already existing entities.” It’s a good point, but I do think Lennox is quibbling here. My understanding is that most would expect the genetic variation to lie within a bell curve, with a mode slightly lower in fitness than the ancestors, but with the high tail progeny improving on its forebears. Natural selection then takes this bell curve and lops off enough of the lower end to move the mode higher. So: no, natural selection isn’t creative, but I can forgive someone who speaks as though it were. The question we need to ask, though, is this: are the variations strong enough to generate innovation (the high tail), and is natural selection selective enough to preserve the one beneficial variation among thousands? Or will the sheer mass in the mode drown out the outlier?
That is precisely Lennox’s next question: “is there an ‘edge’ to evolution,” a limit to what it can do? Lennox quotes several biologists to establish that an increase in complexity or even any generation of new species (types) is not warranted by what we know about the mutation-selection mechanism. “If there are limits [as shown by Grassé] even to the amount of variation the most skilled breeders can achieve, the clear implication is that natural selection is likely to achieve very much less.” Lennox cites the long-term evolution experiment with E. coli where “no real innovative changes were observed through 25’000 generations of E. coli bacteria,” though his argument is weakened by an adaptation to metabolize citrate occuring later, possibly after he prepared this chapter. Lennox also mentions malaria as an example of organisms that can adapt within an observable time (large population and quick reproduction) but still take a comparably long time to produce adaptations (such as chloroquinine resistance). His conclusion is that more complex beings with smaller populations and slower reproduction would take proportionally longer to adapt.
Lennox touches briefly on the likelihood of adaptations, a topic dear to him that gets more treatment later on, on the fossil record (not as gradual as many would like it to be), and genetic relatedness (something one would expect from both evolution and creation). He concludes: “It is surely very evident that ‘evolution of the gaps’ is at least as widespread as ‘God of the gaps’. […] [T]he claim that atheism can be deduced from evolutionary biology is false.”
Chapter 7, “The origin of life,” looks at the step from inanimate to living matter, with a focus on the complexity of cells, amino acids, and protein structures in general. The complexity of all three is undisputed; the question is how it got there. According to Lennox, the main problem to solve is the origin of information, which he deals with in the following chapters. Here are some quotes:
Michael Denton: “Between a living cell and the most highly ordered non-biological systems, such as a crystal or a snowflake, there is a chasm as vast and absolute as it is possible to conceive.”
Jacques Monod: “[T]he simplest cells available to us for study have nothing ‘primitive’ about them… no vestiges of truly primitive structures are discernible.”
Darwin on irreducible complexity: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” Dawkins, too, says the discovery of such an organism would make him “cease to believe in Darwinism.” Lennox spends some time discussing various organisms that, as usual in this debate, are or aren’t irreducibly complex depending on party lines. (At the very least, the question of their genesis leads to some interesting evolution-of-the-gaps arguments.)
On the formation of amino acids and the Oparin hypothesis: “[Recent] evidence suggests that the atmosphere of the early earth would actually have been hostile to the formation of amino acids.” In addition to that, “[a]ccording to current estimates there is relatively little time […] for life to emerge […], since remains of single-celled organisms have been found in the very oldest rocks.”
Because blind chance can’t account for the formation of protein structures, many researchers have turned to the concept of self-organization. “For instance, Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers argue that order and organization can arise spontaneously out of chaos and disorder. […] In a similar vein, Robert Shapiro and others suggest a ‘metabolism’ or ‘small molecule’ first scenario for the origin of life, that is, one that does not initially contain a mechanism for heredity and therefore involves small molecules rather than large information-bearing molecules like DNA or RNA. […] Leslie Orgel […] argues from chemistry that [the] existence [of such mechanisms] is highly implausible.”
Lennox admits fascination with self-organization (who wouldn’t?), but concludes with Stephen Meyer that it is a red herring: “Self-organizational theorists explain well what does not need to be explained. What needs explaining is not the origin of order… but the origin of information.”
Lennox closes with Stuart Kauffman: “Anyone who tells you that he or she knows how life started on the earth some 3.45 billion years ago is a fool or a knave. Nobody knows.”
Chapter 8, “The genetic code and its origin,” starts with a primer on DNA, its function, and its interplay with proteins. Lennox shows the impressive complexity of the DNA in terms of sheer amount of information and how alternative splicing adds to it and repair mechanisms safeguard it. From an article by Gary Marcus on the brain I’d add information compression to the mix. One consequence is that organisms with very similar sets of genes can be very different – we are not 98% chimp! Another is that “DNA would appear to depend on life for its existence, rather than life on DNA, thus calling in question the common notion that life originated in an RNA to DNA life sequence (the RNA-World scenario). Commoner puts it bluntly: ‘DNA did not create life; life created DNA.’ […] There seems to be an irreducible symbiosis here that simplistic models of origins cannot reflect.” Quotes:
James Shapiro: “It has been a surprise to learn how thoroughly cells protect themselves against precisely the kinds of accidental genetic change that, according to conventional theory, are the sources of evolutionary variability.”
Douglas Hofstadter: “There are various theories on the origin of life. They all run aground on this most central of central questions: ‘How did the Genetic Code, along with the mechanisms for its translation, originate?'”
Werner Loewenstein: “This genetic lexicon goes back a long, long way. Not an iota seems to have changed over two billion years; all living beings on earth, from bacteria to humans, use the same sixty-four word code.”
Michael Polanyi: “Whatever may be the origin of a DNA configuration, it can function as a code only if its order is not due to the forces of potential energy. It must be as physically indeterminate as the sequence of words is on a printed page.”
Chapter 9, “Matters of information,” gives an overview of information, from the simple distinction between syntactic information (the number of bits) and semantic information (the meaning of those bits) to complexity and algorithmic information theory (how information can be compressed into an algorithm). It ends with a short and somewhat speculative inquiry into whether, like energy, information is conserved. The consequence of such a hypothetical law of conservation would be that information cannot spontaneously appear without outside input, something which seems intuitively obvious for most information we deal with. If there is such a conservation of information, that would pose quite a problem to evolutionists; I suspect such a law of conservation will be nigh impossible to prove, and evolutionists will argue against it, treating information as a special case of order and arguing that in an open system (the earth receives energy from the sun) local apparent violations of the laws of thermodynamics can occur. Quotes:
John Lennox: “[T]he complexity of [an] inkblot is unspecified. On the other hand, if someone writes a message in ink on paper, we get specified complexity. Incidentally, we ascribe the inkblot to chance and the writing to intelligent agency without a moment’s thought, do we not?”
Paul Davies: “We conclude that biologically relevant macromolecules simultaneously possess to vital properties: randomness and extreme specificity. A chaotic process could possibly achieve the former property but would have a negligible probability of achieving the latter.”
John Lennox: “It is also very easy to say ‘evolution did it’ when one has not got the faintest idea how […] Indeed, as we have seen, a materialist has to say that natural processes were solely responsible, since, in his or her book, there is no admissible alternative. As a result it is just as easy to end up with an ‘evolution of the gaps’ as with a ‘God of the gaps’. One might even say that it is easier to end up with an ‘evolution of the gaps’ than a ‘God of the gaps’ since the former suggestion is likely to attract far less criticism than the latter.”
Chapter 10, “The monkey machine,” begins by establishing that there is no question in any camp that “sheer higgledy-piggledy luck” (Richard Dawkins) could not have generated the information in living DNA. Of course, evolutionists have proposed a number of mechanisms or analogies to describe how evolution can do better than bare chance. He looks at some of these proposals, but first discusses the foundational question of whether it is legitimate to assume that a continuous path for evolutionary change exists. Quotes:
Brian Josephson: “In such books as The Blind Watchmaker, a crucial part of the argument concerns whether there exists a continuous path, leading from the origins of life to man, each step of which is both favoured by natural selection, and small enough to have happened by chance. It appears to be presented as a matter of logical necessity that such a path exists, but actually there is no such logical necessity; rather, commonly made assumptions in evolution require the existence of such a path.”
John Lennox, commenting on the analogies examined: “[T]hose 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.” (The crux, according to him, lies therein that all the mechanisms, programs, and analogies come with some knowledge of the final goal – the phrase to be typed, the lock combination, etc. – in order to be able to select better than bare chance.)
Chapter 11, “The origin of information,” discusses primarily whether it is legitimate to infer design from information. Lennox shows two examples in science where this is done, forensics and SETI, and questions why claims of scientific evidence of intelligent causation is perfectly acceptable in these fields, but not in physics or biology. He raises the point that information is immaterial (albeit encoded physically) and asks “[h]ow […] purely material causes [could] account satisfactorily for the immaterial.” Moving on to the objection that a “God is no explanation since, by definition, God is more complex (and therefore less probable) than the thing you are explaining” (Dawkins), Lennox counters that “[w]e regularly make such inferences to complex intelligent sources when we find certain structures or patterns that, although they may be ‘simple’ in themselves, exhibit characteristics that we associate only with intelligent activity.” Lennox claims that the language-like complexity we see in biological information demands an intelligent source, and that this conclusion is rejected by many simply because they don’t like its implications. He concludes the chapter by discussing in some length how certain gaps in knowledge can warrant the conclusion of intelligent agency, provided we know something about the nature of the gaps, and that filling these gaps with an intelligent agent is justified and not mere “God-of-the-gaps.”
Chapter 12, “Violating nature? The legacy of David Hume,” discusses Hume’s well-known arguments against miracles. I’ve read better refutations than Lennox’s, who in one argument seems to imply that because two of Hume’s statements contradict each other, they must both be wrong. But the chapter is short and contains some good quotes:
John Lennox, on the idea that the ancient world was more prone to believe in miracles: “The ancient world knew as well as we do the law of nature that dead bodies do not get up out of graves. Christianity won its way by dint of sheer weight of evidence that one man had actually risen from the dead.”
John Lennox: “When a miracle takes place, it is our knowledge of the laws of nature that alerts us to the fact that it is a miracle.”
C.S. Lewis: “If Naturalism is true we have no reason to trust our conviction that Nature is uniform.”
“God’s Undertaker” closes with an epilogue in which Lennox points out that just because God is beyond the realm of science doesn’t mean he is beyond reason, and encourages the reader to follow the evidence, wherever it leads.
