The Faith Delusion

In a previous post, I looked at the widespread view that religious faith and science are opposed to each other – that they are two utterly different ways of forming a concept of reality. And furthermore, many will add, science has won the argument about which of them better uncovers truth.

A major failing of that theory is that it ignores the evidence; historically, it is a fact that the theistic worldview underpinned the whole scientific enterprise. If you believe in an intelligent creator God (like the God of the Bible), you expect a universe which is ordered, consistent and comprehensible to us, because we are made like it’s designer, and part of his design for us it to understand and to comprehend truth. Science has to assume those things; but many generations of scientists had no problem with that assumption, because their faith explained why it was so. Theism is the best explanation of why science is possible.

How ironic, then, that the assertion is made by such distinguished figures as Richard Dawkins that “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”

John Lennox, also a Professor (of Mathematics) at Oxford University, quashes this claim in the audio clip.

(1) Taken from ‘The Keswick Lecture (2013) – Gunning for God‘