Summary of God's Undertaker (Has science buried God?) by John C. Lennox

[N.B. I have finally finished the project of summarising this book. My apologies to John Lennox if I have misrepresented his arguments. It is an extremely hard book to digest and chapters don't always build on each other logically. However it contains many gems of logic, reasoning and great quotes from eminent scientists. John Lennox has read widely and has done a great job of being a 'priest' between us and the great minds and ideas of science. My guess is that this book is a response to Richard Dawkin's book 'The God Delusion' and I benefited from reading Dawkins book before this one. Hope the summary helps]

Preface

The question of the book=Which worldview sits comfortably with science – theism or atheism?

Ch 1 – War of the worldviews.

- Dawkins defines scientific belief on publicly checkable evidence and claims that religious faith prides itself on a lack of evidence (blind faith). P.16
- 40% of scientists said in a survey that they believed in a personal God (little change from a similar survey in 1916), another survey though said that among TOP scientists 72% were atheists.
- Some very notable scientists who do believe in God. Eg. Francis Collins (human genome project). p.18.
- also note that statements of scientists are not necessarily statements of science but rather statements of personal belief. P.19.
- naturalist thinkers tell us that science has eliminated God whereas scientists who are theists tell us that science confirms their faith in God. P.20.
- science based on the conviction that the universe is orderly. Comes from the conviction that the universe is governed by a single God and not by the whims of many gods (p.20). Also the medieval insistence on the rationality of God. Many of the fathers of modern science were theists eg. Galileo and Kepler. They expected laws of nature because they believed in a lawgiver. c/c to Chinese thinking. Science freed from Aristotelian method of deducing from fixed principles of how the universe ought to be ie. a priori philosophical principles. Galileo and Kepler went and looked to see what was there. (p.23).
- widespread myth that science has been constantly at war with religion. Eg. Galileo. Many secular philosophers were opposed to Galileo because of his criticism of Aristotle and many religious intellectuals supported him (at least initially). Also politics of catholic v protestant (Catholic church was Aristotelian). P.25.
- the real conflict is not between science and religion but between two diametrically opposed world views: naturalism and theism.
- naturalism c/c super-naturalism. Naturalism says the cosmos is all there is or ever shall be. It is a closed system of cause and effect. Materialists are naturalists but some naturalists hold that mind and consciousness are to be distinguished from matter ie. they are emergent properties. P29-30.

Ch 2 – The scope and limits of science.

- science is international and many desire getting on with discovery away from potential religious division.
- definition of science: that which is repeatable? Doesn’t work in all fields where no repeatable events eg. cosmology or bio-genesis. Better definition: inference to the best explanation. P.32.
- also scientists not all cool, rational and indifferent. They have preconceived ideas and worldviews which they bring to bear on their science. Science inevitably possesses a degree of subjectivity. P.33.
- category mistake made by many because of their apriori philosophical beliefs: natural=rational, supernatural=non-rational. ie. evidence for the supernatural may be rational. Some scientists admit their prior commitment to materialism (blind faith) (p.36).
- most of the time this blind faith doesn’t affect people’s science but sometimes it does eg. bio-genesis.
- can take a long time before an accumulation of evidence favours a new paradigm. Takes a strong person to swim against the tide and risk criticism of peers. P.38.
- scientism=belief that science is the only way to “truth” and can explain everything. But what about philosophy, literature, art, morality. P.40. And how can you tell whether this statement is true?
- Aunt Matilda’s cake. Ie. Science can analyse the ingredients (WHAT) and tell us HOW the cake was made but cannot tell us WHY (purpose). We have to ask her. Ie. personal revelation. P.41.
- Illustration of a Ford motor car engine. Just because an engineer can deduce how the engine works and that Mr Ford is not IN the engine, does not imply that Mr Ford does not exist. P.45.

Ch 3-Reduction, reduction, reduction.

- God of the gaps argument. Eg. God used to explain things that science can’t explain until science comes up with the answer etc. Rather …. God can be used to explain the whole process.
- Ancient Greek thinking of gods controlling the forces of nature. Contrary to Hebrew / biblical thinking of God being outside of creation. But now some naturalists re-deifying nature by endowing matter and energy with creative purposes they cannot be shown to posses (p.51).
- Reductionism (p.52). Split a problem into its separate parts. Till ultimately come up with the Theory of Everything (TOE). But mathematically the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts.
- Epistemological reductionism: higher level phenomena can be explained by processes at a lower level. (p.53). Ultimate goal is to reduce all human behaviour to physics. But doesn’t work in every circumstance. Eg. constructing a building with bricks. The bricks do not self assemble, designing the building. Laws of physics and chemistry govern the raw materials but not the design and building process itself. Ie. higher processes guide lower processes but not vice versa.
- Ontological reductionism: human beings are nothing but atoms and DNA (Dawkins). P56. Love, fear, dreams, ambitions just neural patterns in the brain. But this philosophy gives us no reason to trust our brains that this theory is true (p.57).

Ch 4-Designer Universe

- evidence for design and purpose? =
1. The rational intelligibility of the universe ie. a priori one should expect a chaotic world which cannot be grasped by the mind. The universe is mathematically intelligible, the uniformity in nature.
2. Evidence that the universe had a beginning (Big Bang) which is consistent with the Bible.
3. The fine tuning of the universe .. in order for the earth to be able to sustain life. P.70. eg. Distance from the sun, gravity, temperature, rotation. Atheistic ‘faith’ with no evidence that this is all explained by the multi-verse theory. Ie. there are an infinite number of universes.

Ch 5-Designer biosphere.

- How to explain the amazing complexity in nature. Dawkins: the only watchmaker is the blind watchmaker – the blind forces of physics – an undirected, mindless purposeless process.
- William Paley (18C), theologian and naturalist, Darwin’s boyhood hero with his watchmaker metaphor. P.80.
- evolution does not necessarily lead to atheism. Evolution is just a process which God may have set up and many scientists are theistic evolutionists. P.92.
- P94. Can evolution bear the weight of the claim that it alone accounts for all life’s complexity? There is a taboo in questioning this assertion, a no-go area.
-P.96 Lennox’s view is that natural selection does have an important role in the variations we see in the living world but that it can’t carry all the weight put upon it.
- P.97 the reason why many believe in evolution, is not empirical but metaphysical ie. they want it to prove there is no God. C.S Lewis: The philosophy of evolutionism appeared long before the biological theory of evolution. If we start off with the metaphysical hypothesis that all we have is matter/energy and the forces of physics then evolution is the only option. A rare situation where a scientific theory is closely aligned with a philisophical worldview (p.98). Danger of dismissing or ignoring conflicting evidence because of apriori philisophical pressure (p.99).

Ch 6-The nature and scope of evolution

- Definitions of evolution:

1. Change, development. 
2. Micro-evolution: Change / variation within prescribed limits of complexity. Eg. bacteria, eg. the average length of finch beaks recorded during the drought of 1977 were reversed by the rains of 1983. p.101. 
3. Macro-evolution: large scale innovation. New organs, structures, a marked increase in complexity. Many argue macro-evolution by extrapolating the principles of micro-evolution.
4. Molecular evolution: the emergence of the living cell from non-living materials.- natural selection: Definition: the strain in a population that produces the weaker progeny eventually gets weeded out leaving the stronger to survive. N.B. This process is not creative. Selection is made from already existing entities. Ie. doesn’t describe how those entities got there in the first place. P.104.

- There is an edge to micro-evolution. Paul Wesson: ‘Large evolutionary innovations are not well understood. None has ever been observed, and we have no idea whether any may be in progress. There is no good fossil record of any.’ P.108. Paul Erbrich: ‘..all variations have certainly remained within the confines of basic types.’ (p.109).
- One eminent biologist whose research into fruit fly mutation convinced him that there was a limit to what mutation and natural selection could achieve and led him to reject no-Darwinianism=Pierre Grasse. P.109. Grasse observed that fruit fly remain fruit fly in spite of thousands of generations that have been bred and the mutations that have been induced in them. The capacity for variation in the gene pool seems to run out quite early in the process because of the onset of sterility of the exhaustion of genetic variability. Similar research on E.coli bacteria. P.110.
- Sir Fred Hoyle (astrophysicist and mathematician) did some calculations that led him to doubt the validity of extrapolating from micro to macro evolution (p.112).
- There is no trace of the blind watchmaker.

The fossil record
- p.113. There is no evidence of macro-evolution in the fossil record.
- in 1859 Darwin could not cite one example of evidence in the fossil record of transitional life forms. Since then nothing has changed.
- Stephen Jay Gould: ‘The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of palaeontology’ (p.114)
- p.114. Species appear (and disappear) in the fossil record fully formed with no transitional change. So theory of punctuated equilibrium forwarded. ie. long periods of statis (no change) followed by a sudden large macro evolutionary jump. This is in contrast to the gradualist approach of ultra Darwinists like Richard Dawkins who simply extrapolate current observations backward.

genetic relatedness?
- p.117. The genetic relatedness of all living things proved through molecular biology is often used by the neo Darwinists. But it is no argument for evolution. i.e. may just be evidence of a common designer.
- p.118. In fact molecular biology has also revealed how ‘astonishing’, ‘astounding’, ‘remarkable’ (words used by naturalists) is life able to navigate through biological space. Evidence points to fact that more than blind chance (and natural selection) is needed.
- p.120. ‘evolution of the gaps’ is at least as widespread as ‘God of the gaps’.

Ch 7 The origin of life (bio-genesis)

- the vast complexity of the living cell. Also little evidence of evolution among cells (cells are exactly the same in all biological life forms). P.122.

irreducible complexity
- a single cell is seethingly complex containing maybe 100 million proteins of 20,000 different types. A factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines. P.123.
- Biochemist Michael Behe studies molecular machines argues that the tiny acid driven motor that powers the bacterial flagellum is irreducible complex (ie. take away any one of the protein parts and it ceases to function). P.124.
- Darwin wrote that if it could be proved that any complex organ existed which could not have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications then his theory would break down. Behe claims there are many irreducibly complex molecular machines.
- Also argues that Darwinian molecular evolution is not based on scientific authority, ie. there is no proof (published experiments) of how complex structures came to be.

The building blocks of life
- Molecular machines are made from proteins which in turn are made from amino acids. - the probability of building even a short protein at random is 1 in 10 to the power of 60. P.127.
- but then to get the Amino acids in the right order is 1 in 20 to the power of 100.
- P.129. Sir Fred Hoyle compared the odds of the spontaneous formation of life with the chance of a tornado sweeping through a junk yard and producing a Boeing 747 jet aircraft.

self organisation scenarios
- p.130. eg. scientists arguing that order and organisation can arise spontaneously out of chaos and disorder. But experiments which are created to prove this theory only prove that it can be done by intelligent design. ie. carefully controlled, externally organised experiments.

the core problem
- p132. Living things are instructed (organised) internally, by genetic software called RNA encoded into their DNA

Ch 8 - The genetic code and its origin

- DNA=an information bearing macro-molecule. Contained in a cells nucleus and needed to build the proteins in a functional organism. Much more complex than a protein. This is what lies at the heart of every living thing. P.135.
- for the DNA to get out of the nucleus past the membrane and onto the ‘factory’ floor it needs a molecule called RNA (also amazingly complex).P.139.
- conundrum: DNA holds the recipe for protein construction, but information on DNA cannot be copied or retrieved without the assistance of proteins. Which came first (chicken or the egg)? (also p.144).
- only 30,000 genes in the human genome. Surprising given they produce 100,000 proteins. However, it’s more complex than just a one gene to one protein ratio. Genes can be switched on or off. And some genes appear to be ‘smarter’, building more complex biological machines in more complex organisms. p.141. Also more complex information is added by alternative splicing. p.143.
- also cells seems to protect themselves from accidental genetic change (on which evolutionary theory depends). p.143.
- Why then has the central dogma of a simplistic explanation of heredity continued? P.144=it is heresy to go against this theory punishable by ostracism.
- also the genetic lexicon seems to be extremely ancient “not an iota seems to have changed in over two billion years.”
- where did the extremely complex genetic software DNA come from? How did the mutating replicator (on which Darwinian natural select depends) form from non living matter? P.147.

Ch 9 - Matters of Information

- Note: much of this chapter cannot be understood by the average reader.
- the basic gist of it seems to be: information can be syntactic (information passed on without any supposed meaning) or semantic (meaning dependant upon context). ie. there’s a big difference between having information and interpreting it correctly. There can be a lot of information but it might be explained simply using an algorithm (eg. fractal pictures). ie. there might be a lot of information but it’s not that complex.
- Paul Davies writes (p.157) “biologically relevant macromolecules simultaneously posses two vital properties: randomness [a lot of information which cannot be simplified] and extreme specificity [the kind of complexity associated with languages]. A chaotic process could possibly achieve the former property but would have a negligible probability of achieving the latter.” Then Davies uses ‘evolution of the gaps’ and asserts “Clearly Darwinian evolution by variation and natural selection has what is needed to generate both randomness (information richness) and tightly specified biological functionality in the same system.” ie. too intellectually lazy to propose where this information input comes from and just attributes it to “evolution”.
- p.162. No molecular device (biological machine) is capable of generating any information that does not either belong to its input or its own informational structure.
= informational input is necessary for the origin of life.

Ch 10 - The monkey machine

Richard Dawkins contends that unguided natural processes can account for the origin of biological information - no external source of information is necessary. In the Blind Watchmaker he compares it to the claim that apes typing randomly would eventually type up one of Shakespears poems, by chance = mathematical nonsense. (p.163). eg. to produce Psalm 23 by chance it would take 101017 years. Dawkins himself realises that it is mathematically impossible and tries to solve the difficulty by breaking the problem up into small manageable parts (“going around the back of Mount Improbable and crawling up the gentle slopes, inch by million year inch.”) = even this is mathematically improbable. Even assuming there is a continuous path leading from the origins of life to man. (p.165)
- So in the blind watchmaker Dawkins tries to reduce the improbability by introducing a law likeness into the process ie. a combination of chance and necessity. He changes the monkey illustration by introducing a target phrase. Each time the monkey hits a letter it is compared to it’s target letter. The comparison of course has to be done by some kind of mechanism and in doing so Dawkins has contradicted himself because he previously stated that evolution is blind and without a goal. The argument is circular. The simulation is front loaded with the very information that it was supposed to generate. The argument is fatally flawed as an argument to prove that unguided natural processes can generate information. In fact it proves the opposite.

Ch 11 - The origin of information

- DNA has some similarities to a software program or to a human language (p.174).
- inferences to intelligent agency are made routinely in archaeology, cryptography, computer science and forensic medicine (p.175). Also used in search for extra terrestial intelligence. So why the inconsistency in observing the overwhelming amount of information contained in even the simplest living system (p.176)?
- this inference persuaded Anthony Flew to convert from Atheism to Theism (p.176).
- Where did the information come from? God?=consistent with the claim of John 1:1 “in the beginning was the Word”. And Genesis 1 “.. and God said ..”
- information is invisible (not material) although the carriers of information may well be visible=Hebrews 11:3 (everything made out of the invisible).
- (p177-182). What of Dawkins argument that explaining the complexity of life using God means you have to then explain something even more complex? =but we often use complex theories to explain simple things eg. an apple falling from a tree. The thing that counts is not the simplicity of an argument but its explanatory power.
- so what is the best explanatory power of the 3.5 billion letter sequence of the human genome? An intelligent source or chance and necessity? Also Dawkins use of the Multiverse theory to explain our universe contradicts his argument.
-p182. Conclusion that a priori materialism can produce a profoundly unscientific attitude and an unwillingness to follow evidence.
- But who created God? (p.182f)=Christians, Muslims and Jews believe that no-one created God. He is eternal. And God is independent of the created order. Dawkins has more of a Greek philosophical view of God and matter ie. that matter is eternal, emanates out of God and in some sense everything is God. Then where did eternal energy and matter come from? (touche)
- p185. Dawkins hopes that physics will discover the final theory of everything (TOE). But logically chains of cause and effect either go back eternally in an infinite regression, or there is some point where we stop at an ultimate reality (p.186).
- It is not wrong to want an answer to the ultimate question bur rather what fact is ultimate: ‘God’ or ‘The Universe’. Did matter come before mind or the other way around?
- NB. Theism is not an argument of the God of the gaps (in science) but rather what is the best explanation for information rich DNA? ‘God’ or ‘Chance and necessity’?
- p191. The detail behind biology points towards a Logos (Word) behind life.

Ch 12 - Violating nature? The legacy of David Hume

- Conclusion (p.206) that there is no scientific, in principle objection to the possibility of miracles. Debunks philosopher David Hume's arguments against miracles (quotes Anthony Flew). Can’t define what is possible from experience coz may have happened outside of our experience. Debunks argument that people in the first century were primitives and therefore credulous (p.199). The fact that the laws of nature have been ‘broken’ simply points to the fact that there might be someone outside of nature who made those laws and can control them (p.201). Even in science the discovery of an exception to the fact is crucial to the discovery of new things. And ironically it only belief in a Creator which gives basis for the ‘laws of nature’ in the first place (p.205). If there is a God, miracles are possible.

Epilogue: Beyond Science but not beyond reason

Science cannot answer Why we are here (only its materials and processes). However the universe is rationally intelligible and provides some clues that there is a Mind behind it. Has this mind ever spoken? Claim of John 1 that “the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us”. = the Bible gives us this information.

Science has not buried God but points towards his existence and the scientific enterprise is itself validated by his existence.