John Lennox: On the firing line against the new atheists

Richard Dawkins

  • Debate 2007 Birmingham "The God Delusion"
  • 2008 Oxford "Has Science Buried God?"

Christopher Hitchens

  • 2008 Edinburgh "The new Europe should prefer the new atheism"
  • 2009 Birmingham "Is God great?"

Victor Stenger

  • 2008 Australia "The world would be better off without religion"

Michael Schermer

  • 2008 Australia "Does God exist?"

Peter Atkins

  • 2009 Oxford
Resources
God and Stephen Hawking
Index

References
  Book of Nature Go Back





John Lennox: On the firing line against the new atheists

Professor of Mathematics and the Philosophy of Science at the University of Oxford. He speaks English, Russian, French, German and Spanish and has been much in demand as a teacher and speaker in eastern Europe and Russia. He is married to Sally and has three children and five grandchildren.

Resources

  • Alister and Joanna McGrath: The Dawkins Delusion
  • Keith Ward: Why There is Almost Certainly Is a God
  • David Bentley Hart: Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies
  • David Berlinski: The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions
  • Rabbi Moshe Averick: Nonsense of a High Order: The Confused and Illusory World of the Atheist
Introduction
Faithpath
Index

References
  Book of Nature Go Back







John Lennox: God and Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow published the book "The Grand Design" in 2010 and John Lennox replied with the short book "God and Stephen Hawking" in 2011.

"It certainly is a grandiose claim to have banished God. .. With such a lot at stake we surely need to ask Hawking to produce evidence to establish his claim. Do his arguments really stand up to close scrutiny? I think we have a right to know. But we shall never know unless we look and see. So, let us do just that .."

" Those statements "excite the imagination with the anticipation of hearing a world-class scientist give his insights on some of the profoundest questions of metaphysics." "If that is what we expect we are in for a shock; for in his very next words, Hawking dismisses philosophy."

".. philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics." p5, Grand Design

"For any scientist, let alone a science superstar, to disparage philosophy on the one hand, and then at once to adopt a self-contradictory philosophical stance on the other, is not the wisest thing to do - especially at the beginning of a book that is designed to be convincing." p19, God and Stephen Hawking

"because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself out of nothing" and "Spontaneous creation is the reason why there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."p180, Grand Design

"It is seldom that one finds in a single statement two distinct levels of contradiction, but Hawking seems to have constructed such a statement. He says the universe comes from a nothing that turns out to be a something (self-contradiction number one), and then says the universe creates itself (self-contradiction number two). But that is not all. His notion that a law of nature (gravity) explains the existence of the universe is also self-contradictory, since a law of nature, by definition, surely depends for its own existence on the prior existence of the nature it purports to describe." "So that is what comes out of saying philosophy is dead!" p31, God and Stephen Hawking
Introduction
Faithpath
Index

References
  Book of Nature Go Back