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John Lennox on debating Richard Dawkins

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Also on atheism, God, and science:

Prof John Lennox talks to Justin Brierley about the way science and faith fit together in his new book ‘Cosmic Chemistry’. They also talk about the evidence for God and Christianity and about his debates with leading atheists, including Richard Dawkins. Video shared with permission of Lion Hudson.

Hat tip: Ken Francis, co-author with Theodore Dalrymple of The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd.

5 Replies to “John Lennox on debating Richard Dawkins

  1. 1
    bornagain77 says:

    In 2007 John Lennox debated Richard Dawkins on his book “The God Delusion”.

    Richard Dawkins vs John Lennox | The God Delusion Debate
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zF5bPI92-5o

    A book, as the name itself implies, in which Dawkin’s holds that Christians, and Theists in general, are suffering from a delusion.

    de·lu·sion
    a false belief or judgment about external reality, held despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, occurring especially in mental conditions.

    In fact, in a NY Times book review, Dawkins went so far as to state, “It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).”

    “It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).”
    – Richard Dawkins – 2007
    https://www.wired.com/2007/06/dawkins-and-kra/

    Well, to call Christians insane and delusional are obviously some pretty strong words. And seeing that I am a Christian, I was very much interested to see exactly what kind of scientific evidence evolution has going for it that it would make Dawkins so confident as to proclaim all Christians insane and delusional for believing in God.

    My search for scientific evidence supporting Darwinian evolution was in vain. It turned out, after years of searching for evidence, that evolution has ZERO real time empirical evidence going for it.
    In fact, Darwinists can’t even point to the origin of a single protein by unguided Darwinian processes that would substantiate their grandiose claim that life, and all the diversity therein, was arrived at unguided Darwinian processes.
    As the late biochemist Dan S. Tawfik stated, “In fact, to our knowledge, no macromutations … that gave birth to novel proteins have yet been identified.”

    Dan S. Tawfik Group – The New View of Proteins – Tyler Hampton – 2016
    Excerpt: To the extent that Tawfik’s selection experiments were successful, it is because mutations were localized and contextualized. Mutation had a key but confined role. If evolution proceeded, the prevailing architecture of the active sites and protein shapes nonetheless remains intact. Changes were not to central structures, but to peripheral loops. A great deal of flexibility was discovered. Still, it is hard to see how any of this could build proteins—that is, in the sense of building their fundamental shapes, or scaffolds; and build proteins in terms of explaining the key catalytic strategies of each active site. Even in the impressive demonstration of a transition through nine orders of magnitude, in which a full exchange of a promiscuous activity for the primary activity was seen, the overall geometry of the protein was unchanged, and, although substrates had changed, the fundamental active site strategy stayed the same. ,,,
    “Modern neo-Darwinism and neutral evolutionary treatments,” remark Leonard Bogarad and Michael Deem, “fail to explain satisfactorily the generation of the diversity of life found on our planet.” It is not that they did not evolve, they say, but that “… most theoretical treatments of evolution consider only the limited point-mutation events that form the basis of these theories.” Their sober conclusion is that “point mutation alone is incapable of evolving systems with substantially new protein folds.”60,,,
    “In fact, to our knowledge,” Tawfik and Tóth-Petróczy write, “no macromutations … that gave birth to novel proteins have yet been identified.”69
    The emerging picture, once luminous, has settled to gray. It is not clear how natural selection can operate in the origin of folds or active site architecture (of proteins). It is equally unclear how either micromutations or macromutations could repeatedly and reliably lead to large evolutionary transitions. What remains is a deep, tantalizing, perhaps immovable mystery.
    http://inference-review.com/ar.....f-proteins

    To point out the obvious, and as Ann Gauger succinctly stated, “If enzymes can’t be recruited to genuinely new functions by unguided means, no matter how similar they are, the evolutionary story is false.,,,”

    “Enzyme Families — Shared Evolutionary History or Shared Design?” – Ann Gauger – December 4, 2014
    Excerpt: If enzymes can’t be recruited to genuinely new functions by unguided means, no matter how similar they are, the evolutionary story is false.,,,
    Taken together, since we found no enzyme that was within one mutation of cooption, the total number of mutations needed is at least four: one for duplication, one for over-production, and two or more single base changes. The waiting time required to achieve four mutations is 10^15 years. That’s longer than the age of the universe. The real waiting time is likely to be much greater, since the two most likely candidate enzymes failed to be coopted by double mutations.
    We have now addressed two objections raised by our critics: that we didn’t test the right mutation(s), and that we didn’t use the right starting point. We tested all possible single base changes in nine different enzymes, Those nine enzymes are the most structurally similar of BioF’s entire family We also tested 70 percent of double mutations in the two closest enzymes of those nine.
    Finally, some have said we should have used the ancestral enzyme as our starting point, because they believe modern enzymes are somehow different from ancient ones. Why do they think that? It’s because modern enzymes can’t be coopted to anything except trivial changes in function. In other words, they don’t evolve!
    That is precisely the point we are making.
    http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....91701.html

    In fact, besides having no real time empirical evidence, Darwinian evolution also fails to qualify a testable ‘hard’ science in the first place since it has no realistic mathematical model that it is based upon. As Robert Marks stated, “Those hoping to establish Darwinian evolution as a hard science with a (mathematical) model have either failed or inadvertently cheated.”

    Top Ten Questions and Objections to ‘Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics’ – Robert J. Marks II – June 12, 2017
    Excerpt: “There exists no model successfully describing undirected Darwinian evolution. Hard sciences are built on foundations of mathematics or definitive simulations. Examples include electromagnetics, Newtonian mechanics, geophysics, relativity, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, optics, and many areas in biology. Those hoping to establish Darwinian evolution as a hard science with a (mathematical) model have either failed or inadvertently cheated. These models contain guidance mechanisms to land the airplane squarely on the target runway despite stochastic wind gusts. Not only can the guiding assistance be specifically identified in each proposed evolution model, its contribution to the success can be measured, in bits, as active information.,,,”,,, “there exists no model successfully describing undirected Darwinian evolution. According to our current understanding, there never will be.,,,”
    https://evolutionnews.org/2017/06/top-ten-questions-and-objections-to-introduction-to-evolutionary-informatics/
    Robert Jackson Marks II is an American electrical engineer. His contributions include the Zhao-Atlas-Marks (ZAM) time-frequency distribution in the field of signal processing,[1] the Cheung–Marks theorem[2] in Shannon sampling theory and the Papoulis-Marks-Cheung (PMC) approach in multidimensional sampling.[3] He was instrumental in the defining of the field of computational intelligence and co-edited the first book using computational intelligence in the title.[4][5]
    – per wikipedia

  2. 2
    bornagain77 says:

    Moreover, Dawkins’ claim that Christians are delusional and insane is a claim that turns out to be much more appropriately applied to Darwinian atheists themselves rather than being applied to Christians.

    In short, if God is not held to be real and true, (i.e. to be ‘certain’), then nothing else can be held to real and true, (i.e. to be certain’) for the Darwinian atheist.

    First off, if God does not really exist as a real person, but is merely an illusion as Darwinian materialists hold, then we ourselves do not really exist as real persons, but our sense of self is merely a ‘neuronal illusion’ that is somehow, inexplicably, generated by, and/or emergent from, the unconscious material particles of the brain.

    Sam Harris: “The self is an illusion.”
    – Michael Egnor Demolishes the Myth of Materialism (Science Uprising EP1)
    https://youtu.be/Fv3c7DWuqpM?t=267

    The Brain: The Mystery of Consciousness – Steven Pinker – Monday, Jan. 29, 2007
    Part II The Illusion Of Control
    Another startling conclusion from the science of consciousness is that the intuitive feeling we have that there’s an executive “I” that sits in a control room of our brain, scanning the screens of the senses and pushing the buttons of the muscles, is an illusion.
    http://www.academia.edu/279485.....sciousness

    The Confidence of Jerry Coyne – Ross Douthat – January 6, 2014
    Excerpt: But then halfway through this peroration, we have as an aside the confession (by Coyne) that yes, okay, it’s quite possible given materialist premises that “our sense of self is a neuronal illusion.” At which point the entire edifice suddenly looks terribly wobbly — because who, exactly, is doing all of this forging and shaping and purpose-creating if Jerry Coyne, as I understand him (and I assume he understands himself) quite possibly does not actually exist at all? The theme of his argument is the crucial importance of human agency under eliminative materialism, but if under materialist premises the actual agent is quite possibly a fiction, then who exactly is this I who “reads” and “learns” and “teaches,” and why in the universe’s name should my illusory self believe Coyne’s bold proclamation that his illusory self’s purposes are somehow “real” and worthy of devotion and pursuit? (Let alone that they’re morally significant: But more on that below.) Prometheus cannot be at once unbound and unreal; the human will cannot be simultaneously triumphant and imaginary.
    https://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/06/the-confidence-of-jerry-coyne/?mcubz=3

    “There is no self in, around, or as part of anyone’s body. There can’t be. So there really isn’t any enduring self that ever could wake up morning after morning worrying about why it should bother getting out of bed. The self is just another illusion, like the illusion that thought is about stuff or that we carry around plans and purposes that give meaning to what our body does. Every morning’s introspectively fantasized self is a new one, remarkably similar to the one that consciousness ceased fantasizing when we fell sleep sometime the night before. Whatever purpose yesterday’s self thought it contrived to set the alarm last night, today’s newly fictionalized self is not identical to yesterday’s. It’s on its own, having to deal with the whole problem of why to bother getting out of bed all over again.,,,
    – A.Rosenberg, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, ch.10

    In fact, Dawkins himself agrees with materialistic philosophers who claim that “consciousness is an illusion”.

    At the 23:33 minute mark of the following video, Richard Dawkins agrees with materialistic philosophers who say that:
    “consciousness is an illusion”
    A few minutes later Rowan Williams asks Dawkins ”If consciousness is an illusion…what isn’t?”.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWN4cfh1Fac&t=22m57s

    The claim that consciousness, i.e. our sense of self, is a ‘neuronal illusion’, since it denies the objective reality of ‘self’, is, (to use Dawkins adjective for Christians), insane. As brain surgeon, and professor of brain surgery, Michael Egnor pointed out, “Materialist theories of the mind border on the insane. If a man walks into a doctor’s office and says “I never have direct access to my thoughts and I have no first person point of view,” the man will be referred to a psychiatrist and may be involuntarily hospitalized until it is established that he is not a danger to himself or others. If the same guy walks into the philosophy department at Duke University, he gets tenure.”

    Atheist Philosopher Thinks “We Never Have Direct Access To Our Thoughts”
    Michael Egnor – July 20, 2016
    Excerpt: Materialist theories of the mind border on the insane. If a man walks into a doctor’s office and says “I never have direct access to my thoughts and I have no first person point of view,” the man will be referred to a psychiatrist and may be involuntarily hospitalized until it is established that he is not a danger to himself or others.
    If the same guy walks into the philosophy department at Duke University, he gets tenure.
    https://evolutionnews.org/2016/07/atheist_philoso/

    Moreover, the claim that consciousness, i.e. our sense of self, is a ‘neuronal illusion’, is self refuting in the most fundamental way possible. This is because it claims that the one thing by which we judge everything else to either be real of illusory, i.e. consciousness, is itself an illusion.

    As David Bentley Hart succinctly stated, “Simply enough, you cannot suffer the illusion that you are conscious because illusions are possible only for conscious minds. This is so incandescently obvious that it is almost embarrassing to have to state it.”

    The Illusionist – Daniel Dennett’s latest book marks five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness. – 2017
    Excerpt: “Simply enough, you cannot suffer the illusion that you are conscious because illusions are possible only for conscious minds. This is so incandescently obvious that it is almost embarrassing to have to state it.”
    – David Bentley Hart
    https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-illusionist

    And the ‘delusional insanity’ for Darwinian atheists in their rejection of God does not stop there.,

    Jan. 2023 – For the Darwinian atheist, free will also becomes illusory. Beliefs about reality become unreliable. Perceptions of reality become untrustworthy.
    As well, the Darwinian materialist, since he has no real time experimental evidence substantiating any of his grandiose claims for Darwinian evolution, is also forced to make up illusory “just so stories” with the illusory, and impotent, ‘designer substitute’ of natural selection, so as to ‘explain away’ the overwhelming ‘appearance’ of design, that he himself admits seeing in life.
    The Darwinian materialist also must make up illusory meaning and purposes for his life since the hopelessness inherent in atheistic nihilism is simply too much for anyone to bear. The Darwinian materialist is also forced to hold morality to be subjective and illusory since he has rejected God Who is the source for all real and objective moral standards and truths.
    The Darwinian materialist is also forced to hold, since beauty itself cannot be grounded within his materialistic worldview, that beauty itself must be illusory. In fact, no less than Charles Darwin himself stated that “beauty in the eyes of man”,, “would be absolutely fatal to my theory.”
    https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/is-the-galton-board-evidence-for-intelligent-design-of-the-universe/#comment-774418

    Thus, although Dawkins has called Christians insane and delusional, the fact of the matter is that it would hard to fathom a worldview that is more detached from reality, i.e. more delusional, than Darwinian evolution is.

    Bottom line, without God to ground reality, then nothing turns out to be truly real in the atheist’s worldview. Not even the atheist himself turns out to be real in his materialistic worldview. Much less are beauty, meaning, and purposes for his life to be considered real in his naturalistic worldview. Darwinian atheism is, in fact, detached from reality, i.e. ‘delusional’ and ‘insane’, from top to bottom.

    To call such a worldview ‘impoverished’ is an understatement. It is a vile, putrid, and rotting nihilistic philosophy which can’t even support rational thought, and/or science, in the first place, and which robs man of anything, and everything, that might give any semblance of real beauty, meaning, and purpose to his life. To use Dawkins adjectives, only the insane and delusional would ever hold, and/or hope, such a worldview to be true.

    Thanks be to God that it is found to be an utterly false worldview.

    John 10:10
    The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.

    2 Corinthians 10:5
    Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;

  3. 3
    martin_r says:

    BA,

    have you see this one?
    Noble vs. Dawkins … very new.

    https://evo2.org/denis-noble-debates-richard-dawkins-full-video/

  4. 4
    bornagain77 says:

    Thanks Martin, I will have to watch it later. Much appreciated.

  5. 5
    kairosfocus says:

    Self referentiality gets you every time you appeal to grand delusion and project it to the other.

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