I received John Lennox’s God’s Undertaker as a
Christmas present, and I thought it would be a nice idea to share my study of
that book here. The book’s goal is to evaluate the claim that science has
buried belief in God, that, at least if we extend scientific thinking as far as
it will go, we get to the end of religion.
The
discussion begins with a quote from atheist Peter Atkins.
Science,
the system of belief founded securely on publicly shared reproducible
knowledge, emerged from religion. As science discarded its chrysalis to become
its present butterfly, it took over the heath. There is no reason to suppose
that science cannot deal with every aspect of existence. Only the
religious---among whom I include not only the prejudiced but the underinformed,
hope there is a dark corner of the physical universe, or of the universe of
experience, that science can never hope to illuminate. But science has never
encountered such a barrier, and the only grounds for supposing that such
reductionism will fail are pessimism on the part of scientists of fear the minds of the
religious.
Peter Atkins, “The Limitless Power of Science,”
In
"Nature's Imagination - The Frontiers of Scientific Vision, Ed. John
Cornwell, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995.
Lennox replies:
And yet, and yet… Is this really true? Are all religious people to be written off as prejudiced and underinformed? After all,
some of them are scientists who have won the Nobel Prize. Are they really
pinning their hopes
on finding a dark corner of the universe that science can never hope to illuminate? Certainly
that is scarcely a fair or true description of most of the early pioneers in science who, like Kepler,
claimed that it was
precisely their conviction that there was a Creator that inspired their science to ever greater
heights. For them it was the dark corners of the universe that science did illuminate that provided
ample evidence of the ingenuity of God.
God’s Undertaker, (Lion-Hudson),
2007.
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