Deb's Digest
Debbie Atkinson’s family life column, as featured in the Southport Visiter.

Wednesday 26 January 2011

GOD & STEPHEN HAWKING

John C. Lennox

Richard Dawkins and now Stephen Hawking annoy me no end with their aetheist proclamations and rallying cries. Each to his own, and if people are aetheists good luck to them, but I get tired of reading from people who should know better,  that science has replaced God. From a newspaper review I'd read, a professor of mathematics at Oxford felt the same so I ordered his book "God and Stephen Hawking" and now, having devoured it, I feel much better. John C. Lennox MA PhD DPhil Dsc is no lightweight and has debated Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and lectured all over the world. He says in an erudite and often amusing way, that offering people the choice between God and science is illogical - it isn't a question of either/or. We need both levels of explanation to give a complete description. The two complement each other. God is the cause in the first place of there being a world for the laws of physics to describe.
I feel happier today knowing that someone is answering the dogmatic aetheists back. And it makes me laugh when I think of the slogan on London's bendy buses that "there is PROBABLY no God so go and enjoy your life" - nothing like sitting on the fence!

3 comments:

  1. Hi Deb,

    Thanks for the visit to my page and the follow. Good to be here and i visited some of your blogs and it made an interesting and informative read. I just joined in. The people like RDs' and SHs' said so many things against God and His existence, such people are come and gone and the God and His Name last forever.
    so sad are their findings. I have written a knol on Hawking's recent comment about God. pl. read it here. under the title: "God did not ...
    God did not create the universe, says Hawking: A Yahoo Story and My Response:"http://knol.google.com/k/p-v-ariel/god-did-not-create-the-universe-says/12c8mwhnhltu7/62

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  2. Andrew McLauchlin23 May 2011 at 07:44

    Both Dawkings and Hawking are so consumed with their own vast and obscure areas of science that their attacks on the concept of God are similarly complex and obscure. If geophysicists were to try to dispel the notion of a flat earth by similarly complex and scientifically obscure arguments they would be ignored and rightly so. RD and SH have forgotten the basic principle of scientific enquiry (even though SH alluded to it in his famous book). That inviolable principle says that any theory, whether it's the assertion that the earth is flat or the assertion of the existence of a loving, all powerful creator God, must fail, and fail absolutely, if there is even a single piece of irrefutable contradictory evidence. The photographs from space of a spherical earth annihilates the theory of a flat earth. Who could dispute that? But unfortunately the events of millions of totally innocent men, women and children perishing in the most unimaginably horrific fashion in earthquakes, tsunamis, floods and other natural disasters throughout the ages similarly renders the assertion of a loving all-powerful God irrefutably untenable. The notion that any reasonable person could believe that such a God might perform some miniscule healing miracle whilst doing nothing about 250,000 innocents dying in the recent Asian tsunami beggars belief. So whilst it is futile to use evolutionary or cosmological science to argue against belief in God, as I have shown, there is really no need!

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  3. But many people who have God in their lives don't seek to provide proof. They have their own proof and just get on with living quietly. I am not an academic and when put on the spot by someone who demands proof of the God I love, I can't give that proof. But I don't have to. It's enough for me that my faith gives me comfort, pleasure and a real certainty that I need not fear death. And I'd far rather be with it than without it.

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