the clip that you're about to watch features one of the all-time great moments in the history of debate about God it's Christopher Hitchens with the intellect and with the most penetrating difficult questions and then it's John Lennox putting on a literal master class in his response let's dive into it I hope you enjoy suppose you did believe that everything that had brought us here was by Design uh well we know that 99.9 of all species that have ever existed just on this planet have become extinct so Heaven has already watched almost a hundred percent of
its creation die off and in very unpleasant callous circumstances with folded arms right and that's billions of years of geological time some people say that homo sapiens has been around for a hundred thousand years some for as long as a quarter of a million no one says less than a hundred thousand Frances Collins the great Christian believer who did the Human Genome Project says certainly a hundred thousand I'll take a hundred Richard Dawkins thinks it's more I'll take a hundred what does it mean if we're divinely supervised and divinely created and what looked out for
it means that for 98 or so thousand of those years humans Homo sapiens were being born dying half of them in childbirth I would think life expectancy maybe of 20 years maybe 30 people dying essentially of their teeth out of hideous diseases living in permanent fear where are the earthquakes coming from where the lightning strikes coming from why is all this where what are these diseases that hit us we don't know about microbes we have no idea that's to say nothing about the fights with neighboring tribes over women over land over meat over subsistence the
the torture the the violence the cruelty uh that goes on I don't need to underline all of it I hope you can picture it for yourself 98 000 the first 98 000 years Heaven watches this going on with perfect institutions and something like two to three thousand years ago decides right we have to intervene now we have to do something about this well what would be the best way of intervening to try and redeem this rather Bleak picture what about having somebody tortured to death in an obscure part of the Middle East that ought to
cure it or if you're a Muslim what about getting an illiterate epileptic Shepherd to start babbling and saying that he's been showing to an archangel or what or what about inventing the figure of Moses in the the mountain that's never yet been found by any geographer Mount Sinai that's what you'd have to believe this I've got a minute right that's what you'd have to believe and that's why I ask myself why do the worshipers of this God want to convict him of being such a crummy designer most of his Creations die off and the rest
suffer miserably and and the Redemptive offers just don't somehow take of being cruel and capricious and bungling and and incompetent why and callous as a father and so since this is as far as I can get now I have to tell you why I don't think the idea of an eternal father is a good one in any case when I next get the chance to draw breath but thank you for staying with me this far okay so there's the setup pretty compelling I agree very much with Christopher Hitchens it is repudiation of many of the
evils that he claims have been done in the name of God but I've learned to distinguish between the greatness of God and the inexcusable evil that has been done by those professing his name and so I do not deduce that God Is Not Great and that religion poisons everything after all if I fail to distinguish between the genius of Einstein and the abuse of his science to create weapons of mass destruction I might be tempted to say science is not great and Technology poisons everything [Music] what is more as I look back at the evils
of atheist regimes of the 20th century I might also be tempted ladies and gentlemen to say atheism Is Not Great it has poisoned everything as it is I hold that science shows some of the greatness of God the famous physicist James Clark Maxwell who discovered electromagnetic Theory inscribed above the door in his laboratory in Cambridge University the words greater The Works of the Lord studied by all who Delight in them yet Christopher Hitchens says thanks to the telescope and the microscope religion no longer offers an explanation of anything I find it impossible I find it
impossible as a scientist to take such a statement seriously as if using a microscope and a Rembrandt painting could disprove the existence of Rembrandt himself the idea that God and science are mutually exclusive explanations of the universe is as wrong as saying that internal combustion and Henry Ford are mutually exclusive explanations of the automobile they are complementary explanations one explains how it works the other why it exists to think that as the reach of our instruments increases the greatness of God the Creator somehow diminished is to make the mistake of confusing mechanism with agency when
Newton discovered the law of gravity didn't say now I know how the universe works I don't need God know his Wonder at how it was done increased his admiration for the Creator who'd done it that way and Newton wrote the most famous scientific Treatise of all time the principia Mathematica and the hope that it would persuade the thinking man to believe in the deity telescopes can show us the Wonder of the night sky but science didn't put the stars there nor did the laws of biology and physics ladies and gentlemen they describe what is there
they don't put it there Stephen Hawking says the usual approach of Science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the question why there should be a universe for the model to describe he then asks why does the universe go to all the bother of existing does it need a creator yes it does need a Creator Alan sandidge widely regarded as one of the fathers of modern astronomy discovered quasars said I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos there has to be some organizing principle God to me is a mystery but is
the explanation for the miracle of existence why there is something rather than nothing Einstein had the brilliant Insight that the speed of light was an absolute constant but what shall we say of the creative mind that said let there be light and there was light to measure the speed of light is one thing to create light is another far from science showing God Is Not Great as Christopher Hitchens suggests the very opposite is the case it was belief in God that motivated the advance of Science in the 16th and 17th centuries Galileo Copernicus Kepler Newton
expected to find law in nature because they believed in a great law Giver now so often we hear the new atheists talk about faith and deprecating it but I want to tell you that scientists are all people of faith as Einstein saw they believe that the universe is accessible to the human mind and physics cannot explain that for the simple reason that you can't do physics without believing that the universe is intelligible so scientists required faith and yet I read Christopher Hitchens saying if one must have faith to believe in something then the likelihood of
that something having truth or value is considerably diminished pardon well one must have faith that the universe is intelligible to do science so I'm to deduce am I that the likelihood of science having truth or value is considerably diminished exit science then and I presume that Christopher Hitchens like most of the rest of us believes in his own existence yes am I to take it then that the likelihood he really does exist is considerably diminished his statement is a self-refuting statement and I find it ironical that the so-called new atheists are so passionate about ridding
the world of faith that they appear to be blind to the fact that they them themselves are driven by foul they believe that their minds can grasp truth they believe in science they believe that God Is Not Great yet Mr Hitchens informs us in a classic oxymoron our principles are not a faith our beliefs are not a belief the Mind boggles ladies and gentlemen that is not the only irony for the new atheists offer no ground for the faith that they themselves cannot do without after all of human life has been cobbled together by Mindless
unguided processes why should we trust our cognitive faculties and the validity of any belief that they produce atheism and science included John Gray gets it exactly right modern humanism is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth and so be free but of Darwin's theory of natural selection is true this is impossible the human mind serves evolutionary success not true well this reduces all rationality to zero and far from atheism being great it seems to me that it is irrational anti-scientific and incoherent even though emotionally its proponents seem unable to take this on
board now as the early pioneers of science Soul the rational justification of Sciences provided by the existence of the Creator who created not only the universe but the human mind that studies it in the beginning was the word and the Word was God all things were made by him that makes perfect sense to me as a mathematician science is important but it has its limitations it cannot answer the questions of a child what are we here for what is the meaning of life nor can it tell us whether literature or art is good or bad
hence an atheism that insists that science is the only way to truth diminishes human beings this is very obvious to many of my Russian friends we thought we could abolish God and retain a value for human beings but we found we couldn't do away with the greatness of God ladies and gentlemen and you can do away for the nobility of human beings endowed with all the potential of hearts and Minds made in God's image you also do away with their freedom you are left with a Mindless unguided process that somehow threw humans up at its
endless Lottery to exist without ultimate hope for a tiny moment only to be crushed by the same blind forces that produce them some Freedom that and what about God is he really the despot they may come out to be no there's yet more to his greatness God is not only the great Creator a judge he's a god of Grace and love and the central claim of Christianity is this that as an expression of his love God himself became human the word became flesh Christ chose us as none other the greatness of God he made unique
claims to be the truth to be the Son of God and back them up by a life and teaching without parallel but his moral teaching was not his main message his stated mission was to deal with a moral Chasm that separates us humans from God by taking our sins on himself ladies and gentlemen we scientists cannot even tell you what energy is so don't don't be surprised if I cannot completely explain to you the deepest mystery of our universe's history the death and resurrection of Jesus yet just as we see the effect of and use
energy without completely understanding it what I do observe is the transformation the pace the hope that comes into the lives of ordinary men and women who learn to place their faith their confidence their trust in Christ as Savior and God I see in them and experience in myself a Transcendent sense of purpose that atheism does not have and a hope that atheism does not know it is here ladies and gentlemen I submit to you that the greatness of God is supremely Manifest thank you wow I'll clap along with that I'll clap along with that the
real question beneath the question of does God exist is is God good is God great is God worthy of worship is God knowable in any meaningful way and I love this debate because it gets down to that level which is really that that is that is the the question beneath the question and so and I get it because it when you look exactly like like uh like Christopher Hedges was saying at the start of this conversation the world is full of blood and horror and so is history and so is biology and whether you believe
that the Earth is this age or that age no matter how you slice it we are surrounded by horror there's no doubt about it that that is a fact and it is difficult to make sense of a good God in a world that is filled with evil it is difficult but it's not unanswerable and I think that John Lennox in this begins to pull back some of the layers I also wanted to say this for those who have had personal negative experiences probably by Christian people people probably in the church the the point that Linux
made in this debate on that note as well is so important which is that we so often judge God based on the actions of people and it is true the people of God have pervasively and consistently fallen short of the glory of God since the very first human was created this is this is just a reality and so when you talk about church abuse or religious trauma or you look at things that have been done um by Christian people even throughout history that are that are negative and that are evil the only thing that that
can be said is yes Christians Christians are no different than anybody else in the sense that we're all Sinners that we've all fallen short and that's literally the point the point is literally that people are evil including Christian people and that's why we all need Jesus and so I'm rambling on too long in this video um I clearly cannot articulate myself as well as John Lennox but I just did want to add that personal note that if you listen to to what Linux is saying there and if you're seeing that the fact that atheism cannot
stand on its own two feet that like William Butler Yates said in his famous poem the center cannot hold the center of atheism cannot hold it it literally crumbles on itself when its own logic is applied to itself but this is more than just a debate this is not just about winning an argument this is about is God good I just want you guys to consider that yes we're in the Pains of childbirth yes it's hard to to look at evil and to square that against a loving God I totally get it I've wrestled that
wrestling match myself for a long time but I want you to consider that analogy of of childbirth and of the joy and the goodness and the life that it brings because that is what God is doing he's making all things new that's his promise to us that he is going to make all things new and his hope and his salvation is literally made available to everyone the Bible says that Christ died for all so that all might live so if you're hearing this and if if you are looking for Hope if you have tasted of
the hopelessness and the nihilism that it that that is within atheism Jesus Loves You Jesus died for you Jesus is the real deal I've looked and I've found and there's no one like Jesus direct message me or email me at miningforgod gmail.com if you want to continue the conversation and talk more um about this this is so is so important guys it is literally a matter of life and death it is literally a matter of of Eternity and I have no dog in this race I don't why why would I want to convince anybody of
anything other than that I have tasted and seen that the Lord is good I've I've seen and experienced the greatness of God and I've also been on the other side of being skeptical and doubting and full of anger and hated God and this doesn't make sense that doesn't make sense I've been on both sides of this thing and so I'm making this video just to tell you guys that that that it's all real that God is good and that the the riddles and the Mysteries and the questions and the doubts and the fears and the
concerns and the Sorrows that you have there are answers to them and the more that you lean into God and the more that you cast your cares upon him because he cares for you the more that he will shed light and Revelation and Clarity and and you will soon find yourself being able to say what everyone who has come to Christ can say which is that I once was lost but now I'm found I once was blind but now I see with that being said I hope you guys enjoyed this video I'll see you in
the next one I hope you enjoyed this daily [Music] foreign [Music]
