Westminster
Conference on Science and Faith - Saturday (4/6/2013) Morning General Session 1
Speaker: John Lennox – “The Origin of
Life”
This is not
a question of biology, but of mathematics, physics and cosmology.
Biological
arguments are more aligned with naturalistic philosophy.
Is the world
view (i.e. neo-Darwinism) driving the science?
Lucretius
(“On the Nature of the Physical World) was the first Darwinian. His philosophy
formed the heart of the Renaissance.
There’s a
clash between empirical evidence and the naturalistic paradigm.
The
ingrained idea of scientism is that science and rationalism overlap.
On the other
hand, Thomas Nagle said science can produce evidence that there can be
intervention.
Naturalistic
presuppositions influence science. Dawkins and others make the statement that
there is strong scientific evidence for atheism, but do not allow the opposite.
Suppose
Craig Venters (who is actually working on this now) created a species that
could reproduce itself, and then it was fossilized. It would wrongly be
concluded by naturalistic philosopher/scientists, that this species had
evolved.
We must
strongly distinguish between origin of life and evolution of life.
The main
design arguments for the origin of life, in physics and cosmology, are based on
sound science and mesh with the Biblical account.
The big bang
is a discontinuity in physics and cosmology. Physicists are comfortable with
that. But biologists are not comfortable with discontinuity.
Theoretical
computer science is pointing away from naturalistic processes.
The Turing
machine cannot generate any information that is not part of its input or that
input’s code.
No machine
can produce any information by itself, but only transforms valuable
information.
Sir Peter
Medowar wondered if there is a law of conservation of energy. ..Speaker said
that people are wasting their time looking for a perpetual motion machine. (i.e. runs on its own energy)
Bricks don’t
determine the shape of a building. Causation is not “bottom-up” but “top-down”.
Naturalism
has tried to crowd out the immaterial but informational input can move atoms.
E.g. If the speaker shouted, “Fire!”, a lot of atoms would move.
We have
failed to recognize this when we do science.
Alvin
Plantinga's evolutionary argument against
naturalism, argues that since human cognitive faculties are tuned to
survival rather than truth in the naturalism-evolution model, there is reason
to doubt the veracity of the products of those same faculties, including
naturalism and evolution themselves. On the other hand, if God created man
"in
his image" by way of an evolutionary process (or any other means),
then Plantinga argues our faculties would probably be reliable.
Speaker went
on to say…You cannot extrapolate from things going on today, about the totality
of things that happened in the past. In
Genesis chapter 1, after six days, God stopped. (i.e. discontinuity). What is
the a priori difficulty with accepting that there might be a few more
discontinuity intelligent inputs.
The
existence of God is evidenced by conscience. You can’t get from “is” to “ought”
without God. Knowledge of God depends not only on the intellect, but on the
will.
Be prepared
to act on what you learn.
God is a
person, not a theory.
How do I
know human beings are unique? Because God became one.
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