Debate Teacher Reacts: John Lennox vs. Richard Dawkins

Too bad. That doesn't make it true, just because God would make us feel good.

Opening Reactions to Dawkins and the Debate Format

The old too-bad-so-sad rejoinder. The old suck-it-up-buttercup retort. There goes Dawkins, coming hard with the pathos. Welcome back to another episode of Debate Teacher Reacts. I am so glad that you are with us.

If you are brand new to this series, then a special welcome goes out to you. My name is Nate Sala. I'm the president of a Christian apologetics ministry called A Clear Lens. And our design at this ministry is to transform your Christian faith into effective communication.

Well, part of that actually trades on the principles of debate. Now, why is that the case? Well, because before I jumped into ministry, I actually taught debate. So, I'm looking forward to getting into this specific apologetics debate.

It's John Lennox versus Richard Dawkins. Now, this particular debate is really more informal. It was more them sitting down in a museum talking about specific topics like science, evolution, justice, meaning.

And so, it really doesn't track or follow the format of a formal debate. In which case, there is no cross-examination, which, as you know, just gets me all tingly on the inside. So, instead, I've chosen a few selective representative clips.

And I'm just going to watch them and break them down, talk about who actually did a better job and why. So, without further ado, let's jump right into it.

Dawkins on Truth, Natural Selection, and Verificationism

It seems to me that your atheism undermines the very rationality that I assume and you assume when we go to study the universe. So, that's the first point I would make.

Let me answer that. It seems to me a quite absurd thing to say that because we are saying that our minds are produced by brains, and brains evolve by evolution, by natural selection. Therefore, that somehow undermines our ability to understand anything.

Why on earth should that be? I mean, natural selection builds brains, which are good at surviving. And brains that are good at surviving are brains that are surviving in the world.

But where does the concept of truth, how do they come to recognize things like truth? If those thoughts are simply reducible to physics and chemistry and neurophysiology, how do they serve truth?

Truth is what happens. An animal that was attempting to survive and that didn't recognize truth or falsehood in some sense, at whatever level is appropriate for the kind of survival that it has, it wouldn't survive.

I mean, truth just means that you're living in the real world and you behave in the real world in such a way as things make sense in the real world. When you see a rock in your way, you don't go charging into it.

You'd die if you did that. If you jumped over a cliff, you'd die. That's truth. It's perfectly obvious that natural selection would favor in any animal a brain that behaves in a way that recognizes truth.

Hold on.

Hold on, okay, okay.

That does not adequately describe truth. What Dawkins has just said reveals a reductionistic view of truth. As a matter of fact, Dawkins is characterizing an old-school view of truth called verificationism.

Verificationism fell apart in the latter half of, I think, the 20th century. Verificationism is the idea that only things that are true are what can be empirically verified. But the problem with that is not all things that are true are what can be empirically verified, including the idea that only what is true can be empirically verified.

That statement in itself cannot be tested in the lab. So, if Dawkins holds to verificationism, which this statement appears to show, then Dawkins' own view cannot be proved to be true. So, Dawkins has not responded well here, but the question is, will Lennox call him out on it?

Let's go ahead and see.

I can't help—I can't resist a little quip, but I notice many of my fellow human beings doing very well through telling lies. I can't for the life of me say—.

Well, that's a separate point.

It's a separate point, but I can't see how natural selection would produce this truth. But coming back to that in itself—.

Okay, okay, okay.

This wasn't the best response someone could have given. Lennox should have identified the mistake that Dawkins made with his reductionistic definition of truth. He shouldn't have let Dawkins get away with it.

He should have instead helped the audience, or if there was a judge in the crowd, helped them to understand the philosophy underlying Dawkins' comment there about truth. Instead, he said something about people lying, which kind of undercuts Dawkins' comment, but it also gives Dawkins whittle room to get out from being pressed.

And so, for the audience member who is perhaps not well-versed in these areas, they might not see this important point. It's just a missed opportunity with Lennox here. He should have done something a bit different.

Natural Selection, Design, and the Absence of Guidance

I mean, if this mechanism that you talk about, which doesn't account for the origin of life at all, but let's leave that aside, if it is so phenomenally clever, then it itself is giving evidence that there's a mind behind it.

The whole point of Darwinian natural selection is that it works without design, without foresight, without guidance.

But that's an assumption.

No, it's not an assumption. That is exactly how it works. Before Darwin came along, it looked perfectly obvious that even if evolution happened, there must be some guiding force to tell animals or plants how they ought to evolve.

Natural selection is a blind force. The things that survive, survive. With hindsight, we can see that the ones that survive are the ones that are good at surviving. They have the genes that make them survive.

Simon Conway Morris would not deny that. He's got some kind of... Well, actually, I'd rather share his view of convergent evolution. We both of us are perhaps on the extreme end of Darwinians in that we emphasize the power of natural selection to home in on particular ends, particularly if you look around the museum, you'll see marsupial animals from Australia that uncannily resemble non-marsupial animals.

Simon and I are both extremely keen on that. But that's produced by natural selection, as he would say. Natural selection is a mechanical, blind, automatic force. I can't say it's not guided, but there's no need for it to be guided.

The whole point is that it works without guidance.

Right.

Look, Dawkins has the upper hand here. Again, this is a missed opportunity by Lennox. I mean, this was not the best argument that Lennox could have made, because at the end of the day, Dawkins is correct.

Natural selection is understood to be blind and to be unguided. So if an opponent simply tries to suggest that the cleverness of natural selection is evidence for design, all the atheist has to do is just fall back on the definition of natural selection.

There are other ways to approach the design inference or the design argument, so to speak, and Lennox should have used another route. I think at this point, Dawkins has the upper hand, and I wonder if Lennox can pull out of it and get some ground here.

Justice, Ultimate Justice, and the Resurrection

In your world, where is justice to be found?

Well, justice is a human construct of great importance in human affairs, and it's something that most of us have a sense of, which I think probably can be given some sort of Darwinian explanation. But I don't see where you're taking this.

Well, my question is, is there any ultimate justice?

Good question.

You see, you say this is petty. I'm saying I find myself in a world which is a broken world. I find myself in a world where there's massive injustice, where many people won't get it. We're so privileged.

We live in Oxford and so on. We've got enough money to live on, et cetera, et cetera. But if there is no God, then there's no ultimate justice. And one of the things that the resurrection transforms, for me, from pettiness right into center stage, is if this is true, then there's real hope that there'd be a rational evaluation and fair justice at the end of the world.

But atheism doesn't give you that.

Okay, suppose there is no hope. Suppose there is no justice. Suppose there is nothing but misery and darkness and bleakness. Suppose there is nothing that we would wish for, nothing that we would hope for.

Too bad. That doesn't make it true just because God would make us feel good.

Well, of course you'd better.

Okay. The old, you know, the old too bad, so sad rejoinder, you know. The old suck it up buttercup retort, you know. There goes Dawkins coming hard with the pathos. But certainly if Dawkins is correct on his views, that is what someone ultimately has to say to a world that is filled with injustice.

I think both a believer in God and nonbeliever in God are looking at the world and they're seeing that there is something wrong, okay? But the atheist must say, at the end of the day, too bad, so sad.

Because whatever metric one uses to adjudicate justice or injustice, that metric cannot apply objectively to every single person if atheism is true. The best you could do is find people who agree with your own subjective sense or your own subjective metric of justice or injustice and then just go live with them.

But you certainly can't say that actions in and of themselves are right and wrong. Because in a world with no God, there is no transcendent justice that applies to every single person objectively speaking.

Justice amounts to a group of people who agree with their own subjective feelings. And that does not match up with, I think, our intuitive sense of injustice and morality. And we understand and we treat actions in and of themselves as right and wrong.

That is how we live our lives. And that tells us something, morality is objective. But let's hope Lennox hits back on that particular, or from that vantage point.

Evidence for the Resurrection, God, and Personal Revelation

Well, then why do you make that argument up?

Because I believe that there is evidence that it is true. I don't believe in the resurrection just like that. Because faith is based on evidence.

What is the evidence?

Again, what you said before was that there is no hope without God.

Well, that's true. That's absolutely true. You just admitted it.

I haven't admitted it. I said, if that's true, so what? I didn't say it was true. But anyway, if that's true, so what?

But the question to be decided then is, is there a God? And has he revealed himself? And that's where, again, I think this pettiness needs to be pushed aside. Because I can't get to know you as a person.

You're not just a scientific object. I can look at you through a telescope or a magnifying glass. I could even dissect you and so on and so forth. But because you are a person, I cannot get to know you unless you're prepared to reveal yourself to me.

So, the fact that the claim of Christ to be the truth, to be God incarnate, that makes perfect sense to me. Because if there is a God who invented this wonderful, marvellous universe with all its science and all the rest, then he has taken the initiative in getting to know us and revealing himself to us.

And he's revealed himself to us at the level we can understand. We're persons. He's a person. That at least makes sense. So, one of the very important questions to ask is, is that really true? Or is this simply myth and fantasy?

Well, myth and fantasy for me.

What was the point of that whole exercise? I mean, Lennox is really just taking a very long time to get to the point that he wants to make. And the problem is, you have to presuppose that Lennox is correcting his views first, in order for Lennox's point to have any impact.

But isn't that what he's supposed to be doing in a debate? Shouldn't he be proving that justice is an objective feature of the world, and that God is the source of justice, of that objective feature that we find in the world?

There is a way to make that philosophical argument, and I would say it's a very strong case. But Dr. Lennox is just not doing it here. And to me, this is just another missed opportunity by Lennox. And of course, what's Dawkins going to do?

He's going to sit there, he's going to sit back, and at the end of it, he's going to say, well, it's myth and fantasy for me. Well, of course, Lennox set Dawkins up to spike that ball. And that's on Lennox.

So, advantage to Dawkins at this particular point.

Meaning, Consciousness, and the Source of Ultimate Reality

And meaning is something that scientists appreciate in a more sophisticated way.

So what is the ultimate meaning of life for you?

That's a good question.

The ultimate meaning of life depends on what you mean by it, obviously. Each one of us can make an ultimate meaning. Each one of us can have a private meaning, a purpose in our life, what we hope to achieve in our life.

Or a biologist might say the ultimate meaning of life is the propagation of genes. That would be a very different kind of meaning. They're both true.

I suppose the basic question for me here is, what is the nature of ultimate reality? If ultimate reality is simply the universe, in some sense, or multiverse, that's one thing. And I am at a loss to understand how you get from simple atoms, elementary particles, and so on, to a brain, let alone a mind, the I, the person.

And we don't understand what consciousness is, and so on. I don't begin to see, and I don't think scientists begin to see, how you can get to something that even understands the concept of meaning. But I can understand it if behind the universe, the ultimate reality is not impersonal matter and energy that somehow has produced all this stuff bottom-up.

I can understand it if it's top-down as well as partly bottom-up. And that is that there is a God who is personal, who is good, who is the source of life and meaning, and who reaches out to me as a person, and who, in fact, far from stopping me doing science, encourages the development of the mind that he has given me.

Lennox is saying things I completely agree with. But he's just positioning himself in a very unhelpful way. All he's doing at the end of the day is, with lots and lots of words, is he's just narrating his own claim again.

So what he just did in a couple of paragraphs here was simply to say that God is the source of meaning. The problem is, again, where is the evidence? Where is the philosophical argument for this? It's there, friends!

The Christian apologist can make that argument. Many have. Maybe even Dr. Lennox has made this in a different context or in a different venue, as opposed to this particular video. But for some reason, Lennox does not make it here.

And this really hurts him in terms of debate. I wonder if what he's trying to do is to appeal to Dawkins on a very cordial, conversational, personal level. But I would argue you can also maintain all of those things and still challenge.

Dawkins made a couple of claims about meaning. Every person can make their own ultimate meaning. What does that mean? How did he come to that conclusion? Is there even scientific evidence that what Dawkins is saying is true?

Remember, earlier, Dawkins was giving his own standard of truth, which aligns with verificationism. It's only true if it can be scientifically tested. So how did Dawkins scientifically test what he said about meaning?

He didn't.

This is, once again, a missed opportunity. This was a performance that could have been a lot better. Dawkins, at the end of this, really held his own. It's not like what he said was error-free on his own side.

But in terms of holding his own, providing sufficient answers, trying to frame the conversation in a better light on his position, I think Dawkins actually did a better job than Dr. John Lennox in this debate.

Final Verdict and Closing Thoughts

This debate was really interesting, probably because it really didn't track the format of a formal debate. It was much more an interpersonal exchange. I mean, John Lennox and Richard Dawkins could have been having this conversation at the dinner table at Thanksgiving.

And in that sense, it was really interesting to watch these two. They have a really great way of narrating what they want to say, of sort of giving some background information, and really conversationally explaining and articulating their viewpoints.

For me, I think there were just a lot of missed opportunities on Dr. Lennox's side where he could have been saying things, but he chose not to. And so, I think Dr. Lennox, because of those mistakes, ultimately let Dr. Dawkins best him in this particular debate.

Of course, this was only on these specific clips. If you want to watch the full debate and make up your own minds, I encourage you to. It's a really great, fascinating discussion. It's about an hour and 20 minutes long.

What did you guys think about the exchange? Who do you think actually won? I'd love to get your comments down below. And then, of course, if you have an idea for me about an apologetics debate coming up in the future, feel free to let me know in the comments as well.

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode, and I'll see you on the next one.