THINK ABOUT THIS: Oxford Don Explains Why His Faith Leads Him to Love Science
Oxford University Professor John Lennox explains during a Veritas Forum discussion why he keeps a powerful telescope in an observatory just outside his window and how gazing through that remarkable device at the Andromeda galaxy reinforces his deep faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and his love for and respect of science.
Now, if a guy this smart – he’s a professor of mathematics, bioethicist and Christian apologist, who has debated every major atheist figure you can think of – sees no conflict between being a follower of Jesus Christ, loving the natural world and doing science, why would there continue to be an imagined “gulf between faith and science”?
“Faith in Reason requires Reason in faith.” Not so… Revelation is not a matter of skeptical inquiry but of acceptance. In terms of cultivated refinement, we view “civilization” as a creative tension over generations… whatever form this takes, its absence entails barbarity, an all-too recognizable preference for death-and-destruction over a beneficent polity’s compounding growth-and-change.
Just as Truth transcends Aristotle’s syllogistic rational Proof –like “Love abides,” some things just are– so logicians from 6th Century BC Epimenides of Crete to Kurt Gödel in 1932 discerned the “Paradox of Contradictory Self-Reference” (if Epimenides says, “All Cretans are liars” is he telling the truth?) as a formally undecidable proposition: If Epimenides speaks truth, he lies; nut if he lies, then he speaks truth.
As Gödel proved, for any system more complex than Euclidean geometry “a complete set of axioms is inconsistent, a consistent set of axioms is incomplete.” Beyond semantics, semiotics (symbol vs. sign), axiomatic premises are limited by very nature to their own set terms. Irrefutable logic precludes concluding Rationalist vs. spiritual debate– not due to “mere opinion,” but because from Cambridge savant to veriest Holy Roller, Faith addresses Higher Power, a “destiny that shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we may.” Born in a specific place-and-time, epistemic context-and-perspective transcends material/physical Reality.
In brief, “Being exists in essence as Potential, for not in Being but Becoming lies The Way.” Embracing the Beautiful, the Good, the True on principle, one never will go wrong.
Axiomatic premises are indeed limited because, being temporal creatures, our minds are incapable of seeing reality completely, as God does. Thanks for the thoughtful comment.