Is There Evidence of Something Beyond Nature? | John Lennox 

John Lennox has turned my life around. I was agnostic, but now I am a full on believer. THANK YOU JOHN LENNOX! I encourage everyone else to become a Christian, best decision I've ever made. It gives so much peace & joy.

I love John, he's such a sweet, humble and gentle man. His personality alone is a great asset to leading someone to Christ.

Ireland has produced some great thinkers and teachers. "Land of saints and scholars". The contrast between John Lennox and Dawkins is vast . What ever you believe you can't deny that John Lennox is a great personality full of conviction and integrity and shares his ideas and beliefs in a way ordinary people can understand and relate to. His non condescending style is both humorous and entertaining and equally educational. Even Christopher Hitchens liked and respected him after admitting to being beaten by him in one particular debate lol. You can imagine yourself sitting up all night with a drink listening to John Lennox skilled storytelling. He reminds me a lot of my own father, also an Irish man, full of comedy, awe and wonder and joy for the mystery of life.

I find it hysterical how many people think they have figured out this dilemma. I bet none of the people leaving comments here are published or even known in the scientific or intellectual community. I would love for just once, people to sit back, listen humbly and not act like a know it all.

the answer is simple enough: nature is the evidence of something beyond it.

Thank you so much John for your defence of the Christian faith and especially for your incredible sense of humour. I have learned so much listening to you speak.

Brilliant. I am a believer delving deeper into my faith. This notion of information transfer is astounding to me. Not a complete proof of God per se, but a fatal cut at randomness as an explanation. To my mind, at least.

John Lennox is so incredibly intelligent! I appreciate his ability to break down such complex and deep questions with his unique insight and the clarity of his explanation.

The point that Lennox is trying to make can be illustrated like so, suppose several thousand years ago a group of primitive individuals came across a leather bound book filled with letters and symbols the likes of which they had never seen before. If the individuals were reductionist they would only try and explain the nature of the book and its symbols in its pure material nature. Though the specific semantics of the symbols might not be deducible, we certainly do as rational and logical creatures have the capacity to recognize the product of other minds. Of course the symbols are abstract but we still have the capacity to infer intelligent causation. This can also be referred to as logical syntax, where we recognize the ordered structure of things as meaningful, again this is part of being a rational and logical human being. In fact the scriptures tell us that all of creation - the sun, moon and stars - are symbols with a semiotic dimension, they are a universal language that denote the existence of a creator. Psalms 19 The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament shows His handiwork. 2 Day unto day utters speech, And night unto night reveals knowledge. 3 There is no speech nor language Where their voice is not heard. 4 Their line[a] has gone out through all the earth, And their words to the end of the world. I understand most of you don't believe in the Bible, I'm just saying that as Christians we hold that there is a semiotic dimension to the world around us where we can reasonably infer intelligent design, in the same that primitive individuals finding a leather bound book with mysterious and foreign symbols inside of it

Thank you John for making us approach these subjects with our God given logic. Glory to Jesus our Saviour.

To my mind Lennox is saying that information i.e. words, programs, the DNA sequence etc. is always the result of an intelligent mind and cannot result from chance chemical interactions. It does not take a genius to figure that out. It takes a belligerent atheist to say it is nonsense.

Amazing man! Brilliant! i Love Professor Lennox!!

Whether you agree with John Lennox or strongly disagree, at least represent what he said accurately. I do not intend condescension, because i'm pretty certain that many of you have an IQ that is well beyond mine. However, i do know enough to understand John's point and to see that many of the comments below have either misunderstood what John said or have misrepresented what he said. Since there are many on this post who said they have no idea what Mr. Lennox is talking about, please bear with this summary. Key points to understand are, he's talking with a biochemist who claims to be a reductionist. A reductionist is one who holds "the theory that every complex phenomenon, especially in biology or psychology, can be explained by analyzing the simplest, most basic physical mechanisms that are in operation during the phenomenon." Furthermore, this biochemist also claims that everything (literally every phenomenon with no exceptions) can be explained in terms of (or reduced to) physics and chemistry. At this point, John asks if they can try his theory out in terms of semiotics. Semiotics is "the study of signs and symbols as elements of communicative behavior." To try his theory out they pick up a menu and see "Roast Chicken." The biochemist basically asked what the problem was. Sure, it says Roast Chicken. So what? John makes the point that the biochemist claims that everything can be explained by physics and chemistry. Physics and chemistry will explain things like how the ink and paper react with one another, how they hold the image that is made, and how they hold the color of the ink, etc. However, the question he asked the biochemist was, can mere physics and chemistry explain "the meaning" that is being communicated by the letters r-o-a-s-t (he just stopped at r-o rather than spelling out the entire word). Of course the answer is, "No, they cannot." Even the biochemist's wife caught the point. Physics and chemistry are beautiful within their limited area. A video that has no audio can capture 2 people sitting at a table talking, but without the verbal communication, it will lack the ability to capture the meaning of their discussion. Physics and chemistry have this same limitation when it comes to capturing any meaning that is being communicated. There's far more to life as human's know it and experience it than pure physics and chemistry. Physics and chemistry do not explain intangibles like love, patience, gentleness, sacrifice, forgiveness, vision, creativity, etc and yet each of these communicates something beyond the mere form or action they may take. Even the biochemist said you cannot explain the semiotics (of anything that has a meaning beyond its own physical properties) from the bottom up, but you have to introduce an intelligence, something that would provide the intended meaning. Mere physics and chemistry will never give you that. And yes, there's the case of the human genome. Regardless of a person's beliefs, I don't see how anyone can consider the meticulous genetic coding that literally carries the instructions for how each human is to be built, and there are billions of these code instructions, in precisely the right order, and then still turn from that and say, "It still looks random to me. Mere chance at work." No, there's nothing random about them. They are instructions, very precise instructions that carry "communicated meaning," something physics and chemistry simply cannot do.

God bless you Dr. Lennox!

Great insight! (I had to Google semiotics, though)

Really love Dr Lennox

JOHN I think you're marvelous

3:20 Which Nobel Prize Winner???

“Denial ain’t just a ‘river’ in Egypt.” ~ Mark Twain ~~~ :)

satan cannot deny Jesus, HE a living God. Those beliefs in Him have eternal life.

Nature is the evidence of the brilliant mind of the creator

That's true, people don't understand how powerful we are, we aren't even using the full capacity of our mind and brain

The real question is, is there anything past the spiritual.

I think you raise a very salient point here. Hope is vitally important to people. You will notice that i'm an epistemological nihilist, holding the only defensible, non paradoxical position extenuating from sound existential, non-presuppositional foundations. Genuine hope, i posit, must be derived in a phenomenological, subjective, personal values based reality and be therefore limited and not absolute. So, yes, i say hope is important. But, need it be absolute to be relevant personally?

John lennox never cease to amaze..Love from muslim for love of god

God gives hope.

se·mi·ot·ics /ˌsemēˈädiks/ noun the study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation.

That’s brilliant

God bless you, John Lennox!

As much as I appreciate the persuasive power of the arguments of Lennox, Behe, Meyer et al, accepting intelligent design does not necessarily entail a committment to theism.

Semiotics is the study of "signs" and their intended meaning. Contrary to Lennox's proposal that semiotics can't be explained materialistically it can. Take as one example the color black. It has a spectrum of various shades of a particular part of 'light' which consists of electromagnetic wave lengths. So 'black' and its various shades can be compared to measurable real-world phenomenon. Take Lennox's menu example with written symbols. Use the symbol E as just one example. That symbol has been assigned to a variety of vocal utterances and those utterances can are assigned to certain sound frequencies. Put those utterances together with other utterances, vocal tones, and they can be directly connected to real-world phenomena that is common to entire civilizations. I suspect Lennox counts on the inability of others to draw connections between causal relationships. And as a result are incapable of or unaware of the fact they could make those causal relationships if they merely understood how to go about that process. Lennox's humor aside, which is really a distraction from the thought process at hand, doesn't add any knowledge to the subject being discussed.

Good old John ,,, very wise ,the man to represent Jesus ,,,

It's still a possibility that cannot be ignored.

brilliant

Genious

Lennox says he got this argument from a Nobel Prize winner. Who was it?

Wow!

we all see and hear what we want to see and hear.

The semiotic we use is arbitrary, unlike the physics of the universe. Nothing about physics is arbitrary, it exist because it can, whereas texts can exist even when it doesn't make sense. It doesn't seem like a big problem, or I might be way off.

Genius

Professor? Brian Cox And Professor JOHN Lennox should “entangle” because one of these professors is profoundly connected to veritas. I know who it is..Do You? Very well put into perspective, John, Thank you for the clarifying concepts on my Awareness journeys. RDR

Why is John Lennox not on the TV world wide?

3:11 "you cannot explain the semiotics bottom up" - yes, you certainly can.

pure logic

Absolutely brilliant. Information is the key evidence for a mind beyond matter. Not only Gods, but our own. We can't be reduced to our brains. Our brains contain information which can not be explained through physics and chemistry. You can explain how that information is stored and acted upon, but you can't explain the information itself, at least when it comes to preexisting information such as instinct, conscience, etc...

which nobel prize winner is he referring to?

Religion has to do with faith, the unseen and the unproven. Science focuses on empirical evidence and testable knowledge.

Define “nature.”

Absolute brilliance. I am proud to be a Bible believing Christian :)

Evidence based on sensory facilities is not the only evidence which all of us rely on . Intellectual and conciousness based evidence should be applied.

Who engineered the very basic process for thinking?

In the video 'DAWKINS PUBLICLY SPANKED!!! (1 of 3) Who Designed the Designer?' Lennox mentions Roger Sperry @4:53 using a similar argument.

Who is the one he referred to that is a Nobel prize winner at 3:27?

It breaks my heart to see so many people taken in by such nonsense, they obviously need to believe because they are so afraid of dying, I don't know why, because dying is the easiest thing we will ever do, there's no darkness, there is nothing to fear because there is nothing there to fear, there are no memories because where we store our memories will be gone, we will be gone just like every other living thing on the planet, we will be no more and we won't know it, it will be exactly as it was before we were born, remember? you don't because you didn't exist. But it's OK, we understand you're afraid.

I AM. Therefore, You think

The unchanging Consciousness is beyond nature

Some of it I agree with, but some I do not. His demeanor makes me have hope, that there are some decent Christians. I am not a Christian, but I do enjoy jumping into these videos occasionally. Thanks.

❤️

When science runs into a miracle. . . . . .the images on the Holy Shroud .. . . . . .

I agree, every debate I get into with an atheist, they always say "DNA is NOT a code". When you do your research on this, it is interesting they use famous WW2 code breakers to help "decipher" the code within DNA. Why would they use code breakers if it is NOT a code? Scientist call it "genetic code". It is extremely intelligent formation in code form that needs to be deciphered. There is deciphering machines within the cell that their only job is to decipher and put the code together.

First a mind evolves. Then information can exist within that mind. And nowhere else. A book is not information without a mind and it is only information to the right kind of mind.

"I believe in the God of Spinoza," Albert Einstein said in his famous phrase. He said this because he realized - like many of us - that the part of our world that we can explain scientifically is extremely small compared to the reality of our entire universe. Nevertheless, Einstein would never claim that there is evidence that there are things beyond nature. This is about believing not knowing. God is all of nature.

Lennox delivers in delightful style. He stimulates the minds he touches. That said, I find he makes great and wonderous leaps, desperately wedging the god hypothesis in where there isn't a need for it. Our receptiveness to semiotics interpretations is easily explained as an affect of our long, gradual evolution. Randomizing influences, selection pressures within complex environments over long time periods... Simply put, change, aka evolution, is enough to explain everything - sans deism.

Atheists will ask you to to describe who created God, and then the atheist will claim that nature was always here. By saying this, the atheist is attempting to replace the creator with something that he has already admitted that he can't ever really know. In other words, when they attempt to figure out what was before everything and you reply with God, they will reply with the same question they just asked. They are, in a sense, refusing to acknowledge what you say.

I just like the way this fella talks. I may not understand him him but it sounds great...hahaha

The WORD became flesh

The issue is how can a spiritual force orchestrate the physical one.....it can't.

..I would have asked, '. what's an impure mathematician '? ...🤔

What Nobel Prize winner is he talking about?

What's the first letter of the English alphabet? A pyramid and Capstone

As an atheist and a humanist I actually think Lennox is one of the most likable and sophisticated christian debaters. I certainly don't claim to be able to solve the hard problem of consciousness, but it seems to me that trying to solve it with a supernatural (i.e. magical) explanation is a God of the gaps fallacy from the viewpoint of the reductionist. To my mind, because the supernatural can solve anything and everything it is unfalsifiable and therefore unverifiable, making it unbelievable to the rational person. You can argue and say that I'm wrong, but even if we admit to the premise that Lennox presents, it's certainly not unthinkable or less likely to be the result of an undiscovered force of nature. So let's not assume that we know the unknown, or that mysteries can be uncovered by resorting to magical explanations and traditional religious beliefs. It seems to be the honest thing to do regardless of where we stand on the topic of naturalism or deism.

Pilate asked the same question to Jesus. Jesus said, " I am the way, the truth and the life" In that regard truth can be known, because He is knowable. Many trip over the simplicity of the gospel.

If one guy can't come up with an answer, there -must- be no answer.

Possibly but that doesn’t mean there is even a shred of evidence of a celestial wizard who shook the universe out of his sleeve

I don’t know if I’m understanding the question correctly. Explain the chemistry and physics of paper and ink? Paper and ink are made of chemicals aren’t they?

Subhan'Allah !!

Can someone help me understand this?

Well, phooey. Now I am wondering why there are only 4 fundamental components of DNA.

No. And thats that.

Who's the Nobel winner?

What is the truth that you know?

John Lennox is good evidence that one can make a lot of money with woo. :-)

Supernatural is just nature we haven't understood yet......over a mere 10k years so much of supernatural is understood as just nature. ..in the course of millenniums to come(if mankind hasn't erased itself )more will become nature....a god is not necessary to explain the gap ....searching for that ever increasing understanding is all the spirituality we need....and not some biblical fables

as a freethinker, i agree that there may possibly be something transcending physics and chemistry, in terms of design. however, since there is no evidence for it, i don't commit to it. and if there is that transcendence, what assurance do we have that the christian account was responsible for it? there have been many hundreds of belief systems in history. they can either all be wrong, or one can be right. why assume christianity is the correct one?

But there was no evidential point made here Dr Lenn, or I might have missed it. The complexity of our genome and our ability to produce "texts" as u say it, is not evidence of something beyond nature

Neuroscience study how to explain semiotics scientifically

In what way can "it' be any kind of plausible possibility? Neither imagining something nor imagining a role for a postulated something can make that imagined something a real something. The arguments here do not demonstrate even possibility. Not within the context of reality, or correspondent to anything observed in our shared reality, or in so far as any of us can rationally entertain, can the Abrahamic god (God) that Lennox argues for be actually real. i

I didn't understand a word he said -

Lennox's brain got affected from all the punching to the head... Oh, wait..

Again, Lennox presents pleasantly and entertains so well. Even so, this simple god of the gaps style rationalization, seasoned with the argument from ignorance, and presented on the table in the form of a friendly social narrative, is still a failure in that it does not present the god ingredient as ether necessary or even possible or falsifiable. It's a digestible argument, and pleasing to the predisposed to believe, but it offers nothing of nutritional value in support of his implied thesis.

Nope !

💜♾️👑🙏👑♾️💜

Interesting little story. Pity it didn't take place in a Chinese establishment, where, despite the marks on the menu, it probably wasn't chicken. Starlight reaches us across the universe, carrying information about recession, chemical composition, true motion, dark matter, and all without any mind at all.

Basically, just the same old arguments from incredulity

The word "nature" refers to everything that happens, so by definition if something is really happening it is part of nature. All kinds of fantsy characters have emerged from human cultures and the myths they create, and this too is part of nature, but that doesn't mean gods and devils are real in the same sense that electricity and gravity is.

You want me to explain "ro" in the terms of ink and paper? We can explain it in the terms of the chemicals that both are made of. However in of itself they do not mean anything, as stated properly, the marks do not have any special properties beyond that. They require a mind to assign meaning to the symbols. However, a mind is a word that describes a very complicated program. We know the mind exists in the brain, because affecting the brain of a person will affect the mind. So, it follows that a mindis a thing that has not simply been reduced to its basic parts yet. That doesn't require any sort of supernatural transcendence. To put it in terms of another complicated machine: We can't infer much of anything about how an i7 computer processor works by looking at a byte of hex picked randomly from this RU-vid video. The roast chicken argument is one from ignorance. In order to explain the meaning of the markings, we have to understand the brain. I think reductionalism is quite safe as a result.

NATURE IS SIN JESUS IS LOVE ❤

If religious fairy tales can fool an educated Prof Lennox, imagine what it could do to ordinary folks.

Not that I would expect Dr. Lennox to comprehend (since he isn't a working physicist) but actually, information in this universe is indeed physical! This fact plays a huge role in quantum thermodynamics. In fact, this feature of reality can be and is currently being explored in order to exploit quantum mechanics to devise topological and possibly universal quantum computers, amongst other technologies. So, sorry John, you'll have to look for material evidence of the immaterial elsewhere (a bit oxymoronic, no?). Furthermore, to apply semiotics to any object or structure that isn't knowingly man-made (and claim any sort of conclusion) is to blatantly put the cart before the horse and commit a Type I error - unless you have an actual method of testing such a hypothesis other than "it looks complicated and beyond the scope of my intuition and/or imagination...hence, intelligence!". Also, really Dr. Lennox? Really? Your sheer awe and amazement at the complexity of DNA seems to betray your inability to comprehend evolutionary timescales, let alone your ignorance of complex systems in general. I'm not saying that one shouldn't necessarily be awed by emergent phenomena (such as protein formation or consciousness - in general, anything in relatively young fields of research), just that one (especially a researcher in STEM) should not default to incredulity and automatically (and in this case, unnecessarily) confer [rather imperfect] design upon perfectly natural phenomena in a teleological sense. Anytime humans have done so, it has *always* been the case that the underlying mechanisms were ultimately mechanistic/naturalistic. The sun and moon aren't sentient, and we aren't the center of the universe. Simply because some constituents of this universe lie farther along the spectrum of complexity than others does not mean they are inherently more 'sacred', 'immaterial', or 'magical'. Learn from history, for Christ's sake. Finally, while reductionism (as opposed to alternative mathematical and graphical approaches utilized in systems biology, for example) is not necessarily useful in studying and quantifying larger, more complex physical systems (when compared to, say, high-energy physics), this does not automatically imply that we should throw our arms up in the air and default to the belief that we are and always will be incapable of understanding such phenomena (not to say Dr. Lennox is doing this - it's just worth mentioning given the context). Otherwise, we'd still be believing that electricity and magnetism, or that space and time for that matter, were unrelated. No computers, internet, or GPS for the world.

It's intellectually lazy to claim there is a personal god because science can't explain something. A bad answer is worse than no answer.