Renowned Christian mathematician, John Lennox, has taken issue with Stephen Hawking’s recent assertion that the creation of the universe happened without God and has released a book challenging him. Lennox is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and Fellow in Mathematics and Philosophy of Science, and also Pastoral Advisor at Green Templeton College.
Hawking renewed the science versus faith debate a few months ago when he asserted in his book, The Grand Design, that the law of gravity proves it is unnecessary for a Being to be the cause behind the Big Bang which led to the formation of the universe.
Lennox’s book, God and Stephen Hawking: Whose Design is it Anyway?, challenges Hawking’s viewpoints on a number of different fronts.
Lennox is convinced that it is possible to believe in the creation of the universe, and multiuniverses as Hawking believes in, and still believe in God, as he states in an interview with The Times.
“You can have both,” he said. “What’s to stop God creating a multiverse?”
Nor does Lennox believe the Big Bang renders God obsolete but rather that it was a “singularity,” or a moment in time when “God did something special.”
Lennox also related to The Times of his student years at Cambridge University, where he actively sought out students with differing perspectives from the Christian belief his parents taught him and that despite reading carefully 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.”
Lennox also stressed that science would never be able to help people to understand God as a being of love.
“God is a person, not a theory,” he concluded.