Review: God's Undertaker

God's Undertaker
Has Science Buried God?
John Lennox


This book caught my attention because I heard of a debate some months ago between John Lennox and Richard Dawkins, held in Birmingham, Alabama. I could guess where Dawkins would be coming from, but was fairly sure that Lennox was unlikely to articulate the naive creationism I've come to associate with the rednecks :-). Lennox has spoken at my church before, and having been a member of the same faculty as him, I've met him around the University once or twice. He's one smart guy.

So I was a little baffled when I heard that he was a proponent of Intelligent Design. I confess I've always been rather skepical about that: it just seemed a rather threadbare attempt to make creationism sound slightly more scientifically credible - itself a pretty hard task. What I knew of it was justifiably a stink in the nostrils of any serious-minded scientist.

As a result, I had to read the book.

Wow. Lennox takes no prisoners. From the outset, you get the sense that this man has read and comprehended the canon of literature on the philosophy of science - something almost entirely lacking from Dawkins' book. This book is something of a reply to The God Delusion, but not a surgically-clean refutation in the style of MacGrath. Rather, its an onslaught to the mind "have you thought of..." and "what are the implications of ... " and " doesn't this lead us to say ...", over and over. Not a point-by-point disagreement, but a highly cogent argument of its own, set out in it own terms.

And yet I have to admit that something about the early chapters left me cold. Lennox adequately demonstrates that scientific method doesn't have all the answers, indeed, cannot. [There's one point where the logic seems to fail:an argument about the universe being rationally comprehensible ... without any discussion of what rationality, or indeed consciousness, might be. I suspect one could find others, but I tend to read for the broad brush, not to take every argument apart.] But somehow making those arguments can do no more than give rise to a gap: a gap which might be filled by a creator, but might equally well be filled by something else entirely.

In the later part of the book, Lennox' pedigree as a mathematician shines. The statistical arguments of Climbing Mount Improbable are unpicked and found wanting. What really lit all my buttons at once, though, was an appeal to information theory and the Church-Turing thesis, to show that the initial creation of life itself necessarily breaks everything we know about computability. [This is a point in the book where an undergraduate mathematics degree helps immensely. I suspect there are others. The book would be very hard-going for someone who has not had exposure to some of these ideas, and the philosophy of science in general.] That argument is fascinating, and very, very profound: I fear a gap in it, related to probability/non-determinism, but I'm going to have to read some more there.

Over all, the book is impressive not just for its own arguments and Lennox' own reading, but also for the array of quotes he assembles - from 'believers' and others - to support his arguments. One comes away with an impression that the world of Nobel-Laureate-Nature-Paper-Writing science is far from entirely sold on a Dawkins-esque account of the way the world works. [But we knew that already: so much of the The God Delusion reads like a high school essay...]

I'm still far from convinced about the value of appeals to Intelligent Design (though I'm not sure Lennox ever uses the phrase in the book), but this is easily the most compelling presentation of those ideas I've ever encountered. I would, without fear of embarrassment, give this book to highly-qualified friends (of whom I have a lot! :-) ) of any persuasion.