Belief in God is foundational to the development of modern science, ethics, and human reason. Faith in God and scientific rationality go hand in hand, explaining nature and creation.
Belief in God is rationally defensible and historically grounded. Science and faith address different, but complementary aspects of reality.
The universe’s fine-tuning, the rationality of human cognition and our moral values all point to a personal, intelligent Creator. The rise of modern science was motivated by the expectation of lawfulness in nature, which presupposes a lawgiver (God).
Scientific explanations of natural phenomena do not replace or exclude the agency of God. The question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is best answered by positing a Creator rather than self-creation, which is deemed a logical impossibility. The fine-tuning of the universe’s fundamental forces and the evidence from cosmology point toward a supernatural design or plan.
“I believe in God. I believe in the supernatural God who created the heavens and the earth. I believe in a God who holds the heavens and the earth in existence. I believe that on the basis of rational evidence similar to the beliefs held by the founders of this house (Oxford University) who gave this university the motto dominos Illuminatio mea. They saw no contradiction between faith in God and the utmost excellence in rational inquiry.”
This is pointed out by professor John Carson Lennox, a Northern Irish mathematician, bioethicist, and Christian apologist, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow in Mathematics and Philosophy of Science at Green Templeton College.
As a specialist in group theory, he has published over 70 mathematical papers, co-authored major monographs, debated leading atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, and authored books on science, faith, ethics, and artificial intelligence.
Read below the argumentation of professor John Lennox as to why he finds belief in God the most rational choice.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Y7ZATMal_XQ&si=9hjjyGj3PRjuAPkA
Ethical behaviour does not require religious belief but is best explained as moral persons created in God’s image. The Judeo-Christian tradition gave rise to universal concepts of human equality, rights, democracy, and conscience, acknowledged even by atheist intellectuals like Jürgen Habermas. Attempts to abolish God historically resulted in catastrophic loss of human value and mass suffering (e.g., Soviet atrocities), illustrating the moral vacuum left by atheism.
Christianity also gives a rational explanation to the suffering that the world contains, by offering hope by affirming that God entered human suffering (the cross) and promises ultimate justice through the resurrection and future judgment.
Science analyses the universe but cannot reveal ultimate purpose; this knowledge comes only through the Creator’s self-revelation in Scripture. The Bible presents a diagnosis of humanity’s problem as a fractured relationship with God, not merely social or ethical failings. The solution is found in Jesus Christ, whose life, teachings, and resurrection provide forgiveness, peace, and ethical empowerment.
Christianity, centred on Jesus Christ and his resurrection, offers a uniquely logical solution to human problems of the meaning of life, why it benefits us to be moral individuals with compassion with others.
While atheism in essence is a nihilist world view that preaches an ultimate hopelessness for human kind, it also struggles to explain the origin and reliability of reason. Atheism fails to explain ultimate justice, and it cannot give any hope beyond death. Atheism is thus a remarkably materialistic world view, which completely denies large elements of reality in this world. It renders mankind in a state of hopelessness as its sole reliance is on materialism.
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Professor John Lennox, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow in Mathematics and Philosophy of Science at Green Templeton College explains why he came to the conclusion that belief in God is the most rational choice: “If I dare mention my alma matter of Cambridge, I would remind you that on the door of the Caendish laboratory in Cambridge are written the words, “Great are the works of the Lord studied by all who delight in them.” As we look at at the rise of science in the 16th and 17th centuries, Alfred North Whitehead and many others commented that men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in the lawgiver. So ladies and gentlemen, I’m not ashamed of being both a scientist and a Christian because arguably Christianity gave my subject.
What I am amazed at is that serious thinkers today continue to ask us to choose between God and science. That’s like asking people to choose between Henry Ford and engineering as an explanation of the motor car.
When Newton discovered his law of gravity, he didn’t say, “I’ve got a law. I don’t need God.” No, he wrote the Pipia Mathematica, arguably the greatest work in the whole history of science because he saw that God is not the same kind of explanation as a scientific explanation. God doesn’t compete. Agency does not compete with mechanism and law.
Why is there something rather than nothing? Alan Sandage, the brilliant cosmologist who became a Christian in his 50s, said God is the answer to that question. But people are now so desperate to show that the universe created itself from nothing, which seems to me to be an immediate oxymoron. If I say X created Y, I’m assuming the existence of X to explain the existence of Y. If I say X created X, I’m assuming the existence of X to explain the existence of X, which simply shows that nonsense remains nonsense even if high-powered scientists utter it.
It reminds me a little bit of GK Chesteron who said, “It is absurd to complain that it is unthinkable for an unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing and then to pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.” The heavens declare the glory of God, says the ancient psalm. And we’ve unraveled a bit of that, seeing the finetuning of the fundamental forces of nature. It’s something that’s so striking to scientists that it demands explanation.
And it seems to me that Arnold Pensas hit it right. He is the Nobel Prize winner who discovered the microwave background on which a lot of the evidence for the Big Bang is based. He said, “Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the right conditions required to permit life and one which has an underlying, one might say supernatural plan. But I want to come to what I think is one of the fundamental arguments for theism. I take it this house believes in reason. That’s why we’re all here. And as a scientist, I believe that the universe is rationally intelligible.
That is something that has struck some of the geniuses of science as demanding an explanation. Einstein said, The only incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it’s comprehensible.” And he talked about the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. How is it that a mathematician thinking in her head in here can come up with equations that seem to fit the universe out there? Well, how is it indeed? Because the irony of the atheist position here is evident.
My atheist friends, and I have many of them, tell me that the driving force of evolution which eventually produced our human cognitive faculties, reason included, was not primarily concerned with truth at all, but with survival. And we all know ladies and gentlemen what has often happened and still happens to truth when individuals or commercial enterprises or nations feel themselves threatened and struggle for survival.
A leading philosopher Alvin Planting of Notre Dame says if atheists are right that we are the product of mindless unguided natural processes then they have given us strong reason to doubt the reliability of human cognitive faculties and therefore inevitably to doubt the validity of any belief that they produce including their atheism.
Their biology and their belief in naturalism would therefore appear to be at war with each other in a conflict that is nothing at all to do with God. Yet my atheist friends still insist that it is rational for them to believe that the evolution of human reason was not directed for the purpose of discovering truth.
And yet it is irrational for me to believe that human reason was designed and created by God to enable us to understand and believe the truth. Curious logic. By contrast with that, biblical theism asserts that ultimate reality is personal and intelligent. And the reason science works and this was the motivating force that drove the great pioneers of science is that the universe out there and the human mind in here that does the science are ultimately the product of the same intelligent divine mind.
Human beings are made we are told in God’s image and that means that science can be done. That makes infinitely more sense to me as a scientist than atheism does. Now let me come briefly to ethics. Ethical behavior like rational behavior of course does not itself require religious belief. This is consistent with the fact that humans are created in God’s image as rational moral persons.
But just as I suggest that rationality cannot be explained without the existence of God, so I dare to suggest that the existence of morality cannot be explained either. As modern science sprang from Judeo-Christian sources, so did the concept of human equality, listen to atheist Jorgen Habermas, arguably one of Germany’s leading intellectuals. He said that universalistic egalitarianism, for which sprang the ideals of freedom, and a collective life and solidarity, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy is the direct legacy of the Judeaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day, there’s no alternative to it.
Everything else is just idle post-modern talk. And it seems to me he’s hitting the core of something important because the value of a human being on which sits egalitarians is based not on what the human being can do, but what she’s made of or how she’s made in God’s image.
I never forget speaking on one of my many visits to Russia to a colleague in the Academy of Sciences, said we thought we could abolish God and retain the value for human beings. We found we couldn’t. And we murdered millions of them. Alexander Solzhenitsyn has said why is it that 60 million of my fellow countrymen were sacrificed, the answer is we have forgotten God.
Science, of course, marvellous as it is, is limited. Even a Nobel Prize winner by analysing a cake cannot tell why it was made. But Aunt Matilda, who made it, can tell you. She can reveal it to you, but if she doesn’t reveal it to you, you’ll never know. And that brings me to be my next evidence. It’s the same with the universe. We can analyse it magnificently, but ultimately, if it has a maker, and I believe it has, only he can tell us what it’s all about.
And he’s done so in the powerful narrative of the Bible, in particular in its analysis of the problem with humanity, not simply in terms of behavioral breakdown between people, but a vertical breakdown of trust between us and the creator. The unique solution to that problem is not simply in terms of human ethical development, although that’s very important, but in terms of something far deeper altogether, the restoration of the fractured relationship with God through the salvation he has brought through Jesus Christ. A radical relationship that empowers us to live ethically from God.
And here we reach what for me is the chief evidence not only for the existence but the nature of God. It is Jesus Christ. He it was who not only taught the golden rule, but embodied it, fed the hungry, healed the sick and suffering, and welcomed society’s outcasts, brought honor and respect to the marginalized and ashamed, and he’s brought forgiveness and peace to multi-millions uh around the world.
He’s able to do this, of course, because though he was a man, he uniquely never was only a man, but God become human. The central evidence for this startling claim is of course his historical resurrection from the dead that launched Christianity in the world. This is of course ladies and gentlemen a crunch issue. If Jesus rose from the dead, death is not the end and atheism is false. If Jesus did not rise from the dead, Christianity is false.
And I remember at Cambridge as a student listening to the brilliant Sir Norman Anderson, a legal expert, going through forensically the evidence from his legal perspective as a a brilliant lawyer. He said at the end of it, “The empty tomb of Jesus forms a veritable rock on which all rationalistic theories of the resurrection dash themselves in vain.”
As I read the Bible, I do not only find intellectual satisfaction, but I find a great deal of that. I sense the voice of God speaking to me. You see, that’s intensely personal. I want to strongly emphasize that God is not a theory. He’s a person.
And if the origination of me qua person is a personal God, then the most exciting thing really is, is there a possibility of getting to know God? And so I don’t simply believe there is a God. I’ve come to know him and trust him. And I have strong reasons for doing so because of Christ dying and rising again for me. And that has generated in me a sense of utterly unmerited forgiveness, acceptance, and peace.”
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