John Lennox takes on Stephen Hawking after God denial

Science is no obstacle to faith for John Lennox, the Christian mathematician who is about to release a new book challenging Stephen Hawking’s recent assertion that the creation of the universe happened without God.

Physicist Hawking made headlines in the summer when he claimed in his new book, The Grand Design, that the law of gravity means it was not necessary for God to cause the Big Bang which led to the formation of the universe.

Now Lennox has written his own book challenging Hawking’s assumptions, God and Stephen Hawking: Whose Design is it Anyway?, out in January.

In an interview with The Times, Lennox argued that it was possible to believe in the creation of the universe, and multiuniverses as Hawking believes in, and still believe in God.

“You can have both,” he said. “What’s to stop God creating a multiverse?”

Rather than rendering God obsolete, Lennox suggested that the Big Bang was a “singularity”, or a moment in time when “God did something special”.

As for intelligent design, he suggested that the Book of Genesis offers an explanation of God’s involvement in the creation process in “very simple language”.

He told of how, while studying at Cambridge University, he had sought out students with perspectives that differed from the Christian beliefs handed to him by his parents and that despite looking at the works of atheists such as Bertrand Russell and Camus, he still came to conclude that the beliefs he had been raised with were true.

“I believed then, and I still do believe, that Christianity is falsifiable. It’s not believing in spite of the evidence; it’s believing because of it. In fact, what I discovered at Cambridge was the more I exposed my faith to the opposition, the stronger it held up.”

In the interview, Lennox cautioned against too readily accepting propositions on the basis of mathematical equations, saying that they were not necessarily true.

Equally, he inferred that science would still not help people to understand God as a being of love.

“God is a person, not a theory,” he said.