Using their own weapons against them

Science is challenged as the last word on intelligent design in these two different books on the existence of God and the validity of religion

GOD'S UNDERTAKER
John C.Lennox
Lion, pbk, $28

BLACK MASS
John Gray
Penguin, pbk, $30

Reviews by Geoffrey Vine

During a recent examination by a specialist at Dunedin Public Hospital, I was asked to list the prescription medications I take.

As I finished, I remembered the Montmorency cherry juice I take daily to alleviate gout symptoms and added, "I do take a homoeopathic remedy . . ."

I got no further because the doctor clapped her hands over her ears and, literally, screamed: "Don't tell me. I don't want to know. Don't tell me."

Bizarre as it may sound, that head-in-the-sand attitude is common in the scientific community and never more so than when it comes to religious belief.

Science has elected itself the final arbiter of whether the universe is the product of intelligent design - and the answer is "No".

In recent years, populist authors such as Richard Dawkins, Peter Atkins and Daniel Dennett have propelled the post-Christian bandwagon to new heights, reading the Last Rites over the theist corpse and prompting John Lennox, a mathematician and philosopher at Oxford University, to ask: "Has science buried God?"

Lennox's approach is to deconstruct the atheists' claims by turning their own weapon - science - against them.

Stating the case for neo-Darwinism, Dawkins has said that information lies at the heart of every living thing.

Lennox counters by pointing out the DNA in the human genome contains 7 billion "bits" of information and it has to be in an exact order to work.

He does the maths to show that the possibility of this happening by random chance is absurdly low.

The Bible, too, sees information as primal, he notes, recalling St John's words, "In the beginning was the Word . . ."

At times, Lennox's sarcasm is heavy-handed but Dawkins does invite ridicule by advancing the notion that an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite supply of paper and typewriters could, using one random keystroke at a time, eventually reproduce the works of Shakespeare.

Lennox points out the ways in which Dawkins "cheats" by presupposing an intelligent editor to choose which simian efforts to retain.

Lennox makes the claim that accepted scientific methodology can be used to state the case of God's existence.

He uses the scientific standard of "inference to the best explanation". When we see handwriting, we infer the existence of an intelligent author.

Similarly, science accepts that if an information-rich message is received from outer space, the scientific inference would be of an intelligent source.

Lennox applies this to the proven existence of information-rich DNA messages and infers the existence of an intelligent source for Creation.

John Gray, a political philosopher at the London School of Economics, comes at the problem from a different perspective but, if anything, damns Dawkins et al in stronger terms.

Gray argues that the utopian ideologies of recent times, far from following the Enlightenment's rejection of religion, are actually shaped by apocalyptic religious ideas (the Iraq invasion, he avers, was the first utopian experiment of the 21st century, the product of a foreign policy wedded to fundamentalist Christian thinking).

The atheism and humanism that have been merged in neo-Darwinism are based, Gray argues, on Christian concepts and have produced a Christian heresy differing only from earlier ones in its "intellectual crudity".

The authors differ in emphasis and while Lennox argues for the validity of religion, Gray prefers to see a diversity of religions.

If religion is a primary human need, it should not be suppressed or relegated to private life, Gray says, but rather integrated into the public as science has been.

While Lennox lauds God's creation, Gray warns that mixing science and religious philosophy will produce "designer religions" capable of destroying a society made increasingly insecure by the apocalyptism of climate change.

So take your pick: the triumph of Creation or its end.

- Geoffrey Vine is a Dunedin journalist and Presbyterian minister.