John Lennox Quotes

Nonsense remains nonsense, even when talked by world-famous scientists.

It's much easier, after all, to learn mathematics from someone who's made a few mistakes. It's impossible to learn it from someone who always gets it right.

Indeed, faith is a response to evidence, not a rejoicing in the absence of evidence.

The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.

Faith is not a leap in the dark; it’s the exact opposite. It’s a commitment based on evidence… It is irrational to reduce all faith to blind faith and then subject it to ridicule. That provides a very anti-intellectual and convenient way of avoiding intelligent discussion.

God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence – why there is something rather than nothing.

In China we can criticize Darwin, but not the government; in America you can criticize the government, but not Darwin.

Richard Dawkins regards faith as an evil to be eliminated; he takes all religious faith to be blind faith. (Dawkins says) ‘Scientific belief is based on publicly checkable evidence, religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its joy, shouted from the rooftops.’ However, taking Dawkins own advice we ask: where is the evidence that religious faith is not based on evidence? Mainstream Christianity will insist that faith and evidence are inseparable. Indeed, faith is a response to evidence, not a rejoicing in the absence of evidence. The apostle Paul says what many pioneers of modern science believed, that nature itself is part of the evidence for the existence of God ,‘ Since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities- his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made. So that men are without an excuse.’ Dawkins’ definition of faith turns out to be the direct opposite of the biblical one. Curious that he does not seem to be aware of the discrepancy.

To the majority of those who have reflected deeply and written about the origin and nature of the universe, it has seemed that it points beyond itself to a source which is non-physical and of great intelligence and power.

I think that when you consider the beauty of the world and you wonder how it came to be what it is, you are naturally overwhelmed with a feeling of awe, a feeling of admiration and you almost feel a desire to worship something. I feel this, I recognise that other scientists such as Carl Sagan feel this, Einstein felt it. We, all of us, share a kind of religious reverence for the beauties of the universe, for the complexity of life. For the sheer magnitude of the cosmos, the sheer magnitude of geological time. And it’s tempting to translate that feeling of awe and worship into a desire to worship some particular thing, a person, an agent. You want to attribute it to a maker, to a creator. What science has now achieved is an emancipation from that impulse to attribute these things to a creator. -- God Delusion debate Professor Richard Dawkins vs John Lennox

The world of strict naturalism in which clever mathematical laws all by themselves bring the universe and life into existence, is pure (and, one might add, poor) fiction. To call it science-fiction would besmirch the name of science.

But that does not alter the fact that mainstream Christianity will insist that faith and evidence are inseparable. Indeed, faith is a response to evidence, not a rejoicing in the absence of evidence.

Whether you believe in Jesus, Buddha, the Beatles, crystals, mother earth, or anything else that takes your interest, all are held to be on the same footing; all have equal validity for the relativist.

Evreni işleten mekanizmalarla onu var eden ya da idame ettiren sebebi birbirine karıştırmamalıyız

God is not an alternative to science as an explanation, he is not to be understood merely as a God of the gaps, he is the ground of all explanation: it is his existence which gives rise to the very possibility of explanation, scientific or otherwise. It is important to stress this because influential authors such as Richard Dawkins will insist on conceiving of God as an explanatory alternative to science – an idea that is nowhere to be found in theological reflection of any depth. Dawkins is therefore tilting at a windmill - dismissing a concept of God that no serious thinker believes in anyway. Such activity is not necessarily to be regarded as a mark of intellectual sophistication.

It would be a pity if, in a desire (rightly) to treat the Bible as more than a book, we ended up treating it as less than a book by not permitting it the range and use of language, order, and figures of speech that are (or ought to be) familiar to us from our ordinary experience of conversation and reading.

this world is not going to be trampled and smashed by brutal, amoral regimes for ever. A day will come when God will bring to an end the state war-machines, the terrorist bombs, the consummate evil of totalitarian oppression, the gas chambers, death camps, killing fields, and countless other infamous instruments of death. There will be a judgment.

And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way towards him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us. (Acts 17:26

The story of Daniel and his friends is a clarion call to our generation to be courageous; not to lose our nerve and allow the expression of our faith to be diluted and squeezed out of the public space and thus rendered spineless and ineffective. Their story will also tell us that this objective is not likely to be achieved without cost.

To postulate a trillion-trillion other universes, rather than one God, in order to explain the orderliness of our universe, seems the height of irrationality.

There is a real conflict, but it is not science versus religion. It is theism versus atheism, and there are scientists on both sides.

Society tolerates the practice of the Christian faith in private devotions and in church services, but it increasingly deprecates public witness.

Evren, serinkanlılığımızı koruyamayacağımız kadar büyüleyici.

Tabii ki Tanrı, Laplace'nin (eşyanın nasıl işlediğine dair) matematiksel tarifinde yer almaz, tıpkı Bay Ford'un içten yanmalı motorun bilimsel tarifinde yer almadığı gibi.

Darwin'in ifadesiyle:"O korkunç şüpheyi her zaman yaşarım: Daha düşük seviyedeki hayvan zihinlerinden gelişen insan zihninin hükümlerinin herhangi bir değeri var mıdır ve ya güvenilir midir diye

Of course, I reject atheism because I believe Christianity to be true. But I also reject it because I am a scientist. How could I be impressed with a worldview that undermines the very rationality we need to do science? Science and God mix very well. It is science and atheism that do not mix.

I cannot believe that our existence in this universe is a mere quirk of fate, an accident of history, an incidental blip in the great cosmic drama. Our involvement is too intimate… We are truly meant to be here.

But in some quarters the very success of science has also led to the idea that, because we can understand the mechanisms of the universe without bringing in God, we can safely conclude that there was no God who designed and created the universe in the first place.

One of Richard Dawkins’s main God Delusion arguments is that, if God created everything, we would have to ask who created God. But the very asking of this question reveals at once that Dawkins has in mind a created God: “Who created God?” Created gods certainly are a delusion.

It is crucial that a healthy scepticism be applied when interpreting potentially miraculous events, lest the integrity and rationality of the religious perspective be brought into question. The only thing that will kill the possibility of miracles more quickly than a committed materialism is the claiming of miracle status for everyday events for which natural explanations are readily at hand.4

The issue between the atheist and the believer is not whether it makes sense to question ultimate fact, it is rather the question: what fact is ultimate? The atheist’s ultimate fact is the universe; the theist’s ultimate fact is God.”68

For, the statement that only science can lead to truth is not itself deduced from science. It is not a scientific statement but rather a statement about science, that is, it is a metascientific statement. Therefore, if scientism’s basic principle is true, the statement expressing scientism must be false. Scientism refutes itself. Hence it is incoherent.

The heart of monotheism is that God, who is outside history, is the guarantor of meaning.

Man thinks he can become God. But infinitely greater than that is the fact that God thought of becoming human.

We can therefore express the major elements in the New Atheists’ agenda as follows: Religion is a dangerous delusion: it leads to violence and war. We must therefore get rid of religion: science will achieve that. We do not need God to be good: atheism can provide a perfectly adequate base for ethics.

If life is the result of a purely naturalistic process, what then of morality? Has it, too, evolved? And if so, of what significance are our concepts of right and wrong, justice and truth?

It is rather ironical that in the sixteenth century some people resisted advances in science because they seemed to threaten belief in God; whereas in the twentieth century scientific ideas of a beginning have been resisted because they threatened to increase the plausibility of belief in God.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

The existence of laws of physics... strongly implies that there is a God who formulates such laws and ensures that the physical realm conforms to them.

God loves an enquiring mind, a fact that has been a great encouragement to me in my study of mathematics and the history and philosophy of science.

Far from science abolishing God, it would seem that there is a substantial case for asserting that it is the existence of a Creator that gives to science its fundamental intellectual justification.

The more we get to know about our universe, the more the hypothesis that there is a Creator God, who designed the universe for a purpose, gains in credibility as the best explanation of why we are here.

Men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver.’ It was this conviction that led Francis Bacon (1561–1626), regarded by many as the father of modern science, to teach that God has provided us with two books – the book of Nature and the Bible –

If the text means that the sun came into existence on day 4, Origen was asking a very reasonable question: “If the sun is not yet there, how are we to understand the first three days with their ‘evenings and mornings

What is consciousness?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he replied, after a little hesitation. “Never mind,” I said. “Let’s think of something easier. What is energy?” “Well,” he said, “we can measure it and write down the equations governing its conservation.” “Yes, I know, but that was not my question. My question was: what is it?” “We don’t know,” he said with a grin, “and I think you were aware of that.” “Yes, like you I have read Feynman and he says that no one knows what energy is. That brings me to my main point. Would I be right in thinking that you were about to dismiss me (and my belief in God) if I failed to explain the divine and human nature of Christ?” He grinned again, and said nothing. I went on: “Well, by the same token, would you be happy if I now dismiss you and all your knowledge of physics because you cannot explain to me the nature of energy? After all, energy is surely by definition much less complex than the God who created it?” “Please don’t!” he said. “No, I am not going to do that, but I am going to put another question to you: why do you believe in the concepts of consciousness and energy, even though you do not understand them fully? Is it not because of the explanatory power of those concepts?” “I see what you are driving at,” he replied. “You believe that Jesus Christ is both God and man because that is the only explanation that has the power to make sense of what we know of him?” “Exactly.

When Sir Isaac Newton discovered the universal law of gravitation he did not say, ‘I have discovered a mechanism that accounts for planetary motion, therefore there is no agent God who designed it.’ Quite the opposite: precisely because he understood how it worked, he was moved to increased admiration for the God who had designed it that way.

Judah had failed to grasp that God’s loyalty to his own character, and therefore to his own creatures, has serious implications. Some of Judah’s leaders had fallen into thinking that, because their nation had been chosen to play a special role for God in history, it did not really matter how the leaders or the nation behaved. This was dangerously irresponsible and undermined the moral fibre of the people, because it led to the rationalization of corrupt and immoral behaviour that was incompatible with the law of God, albeit widely practised in the surrounding nations.

Johannes Kepler described his motivation thus: ‘The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order which has been imposed on it by God, and which he revealed to us in the language of mathematics.

Both Genesis and science say that the universe is geared to supporting human life. But Genesis says more. It says that you, as a human being, bear the image of God. The starry heavens show the glory of God, yes; but they are not made in God’s image. You are. That makes you unique. It gives you incalculable value. The galaxies are unimaginably large compared with you. However, you know that they exist, but they don’t know that you exist. You are more significant, therefore, than a galaxy.

We shall need all the wisdom from above that God can give us in this AI age in order to fulfil Christ’s directive that we should be salt and light in our society.9 We have often referred to the fact that we live in a surveillance society. Let us therefore live with the myriad cameras and tracers on our lives in such a way that even the monitors can see that we have been with Jesus.

Evrim bir biyolojik mekanizma anlamına gelir ama Tanrı'ya inananlar Tanrı'yı, diğer şeylerin yanında, mekanizmaları tasarlayan ve yaratan bir Zat olarak kabul ederler. Daha önce, Ford arabanın çalışma mekanizmasını anlamanın Bay Ford'u yok kabul etmeye bir kanıt oluşturmadığını görmüştük. Dolayısıyla bir mekanizmanın varlığı o mekanizmayı tasarlayan bir öznenin olmadığını göstermez.

blind faith’ turns out, therefore, to be the exact opposite of the biblical one.

the laws of nature are written by the hand of God in the language of mathematics’ and that the ‘human mind is a work of God and one of the most excellent’.

Men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver.

Just because a religion has supported science does not prove that the religion is true. Quite so – and the same can, of course, be said of atheism.

We are a product of quantum fluctuations in the very early universe.

The very success of science in showing us how deeply ordered the natural world is provides strong grounds for believing that there is an even deeper cause for that order.

Large evolutionary innovations are not well understood. None has ever been observed, and we have no idea whether any may be in progress. There is no good fossil record of any.’23

I have always tried to treat people with different worldviews from my own with respect, and to find out how they arrived at their position, and why they feel so passionately about it.

Czeslaw Milosz, who had reason to know, writes: “A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death — the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged.”54 Thus, if God does exist, atheism can be seen as a psychological escape mechanism to avoid taking ultimate responsibility for one’s own life.

Furthermore, if Dawkins’s question is valid, it can be turned back on him. He believes that the universe created him. Therefore, we are justified in asking him: who created your creator?

What this all goes to show is that nonsense remains nonsense, even when talked by world-famous scientists. What serves to obscure the illogicality of such statements is the fact that they are made by scientists; and the general public, not surprisingly, assumes that they are statements of science and takes them on authority. That is why it is important to point out that they are not statements of science, and any statement, whether made by a scientist or not, should be open to logical analysis. Immense prestige and authority does not compensate for faulty logic.

Richard Feynman emphasized that one should always be careful to record all the evidence against one’s theories; indeed, one should bend over backwards to consider it, since the easiest person to fool is oneself.

The ancient world knew as well as we do the law of nature that dead bodies do not get up out of graves. Christianity won its way by dint of the sheer weight of evidence that one man had actually risen from the dead.

This brings us to a key issue that is very easily overlooked. It is this. Faith in God certainly is a delusion, if God does not exist. But what if God does exist? Then atheism is the delusion. So the real question to ask is: does God exist?

A.W. Tozer captured these ideas very well when he wrote: Here is my view: God sovereignly decreed that man should be free to exercise moral choice, and man from the beginning has fulfilled that decree by making his choice between good and evil. When he chooses to do evil, he does not thereby countervail the sovereign will of God but fulfills it, inasmuch as the eternal decree decided not which choice the man should make but that he should be free to make it. If in His absolute freedom God has willed to give man limited freedom, who is there to stay His hand or say, “What doest thou?” Man’s will is free because God is sovereign. A God less than sovereign could not bestow moral freedom upon His creatures. He would be afraid to do so. 34

Hawking’s inadequate view of God could well be linked with his attitude to philosophy in general. He writes: “Philosophy is dead.”9 But this itself is a philosophical statement. It is manifestly not a statement of science. Therefore, because it says that philosophy is dead, it contradicts itself. It is a classic example of logical incoherence. Not only that: Hawking’s book, insofar as it is interpreting and applying science to ultimate questions like the existence of God, is a book about metaphysics — philosophy par excellence.

when we see some examples of a mechanism… do we doubt that it is the creation of a conscious intelligence? So when we see the movement of the heavenly bodies… how can we doubt that these too are not only the works of reason but of a reason which is perfect and divine?

Faith is not a leap in the dark; it's the exact opposite. it's a commitment based on evidence... it is irrational to reduce all faith to blind faith and then subject it to ridicule. that provides a very anti-intellectual and convenient way of avoiding intelligent discussion.

I am not postulating a “God of the gaps”, a god merely to explain the things that science has not yet explained. I am postulating a God to explain why science explains; I do not deny that science explains, but I postulate God to explain why science explains.’ Richard Swinburne

Beware of anyone who interprets pain caused by natural evil as a divine punishment. But equally, beware also of anyone who says that God has nothing to say through this pandemic, particularly to Western societies that have largely turned their back on him as culturally irrelevant.

Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the right conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say ‘supernatural’) plan.’ Arno Penzias, Physics Nobel Prize-winner

Former Director of Kew Gardens, Sir Ghillean Prance FRS, gives equally clear expression to his faith: ‘For many years I have believed that God is the great designer behind all nature… All my studies in science since then have confirmed my faith. I regard the Bible as my principal source of authority.

The teaching of morality likewise lies outside science. Science can tell you that, if you add strychnine to someone’s drink, it will kill them. But science cannot tell you whether it is morally right or wrong to put strychnine into your grandmother’s tea so that you can get your hands on her property.

The very success of science in showing us how deeply ordered the natural world is provides strong grounds for believing that there is an even deeper cause for that order.’ Swinburne is using inference to the best explanation and saying that God is the best explanation for the explanatory power of science.

Here we have the basic ingredients that define human beings as moral beings. God has given them the ability to say “yes” to him by not eating the prohibited tree, and to say “no” to him by eating it. In this way the Bible introduces us to the idea that the humans are moral beings, with all that this implies.

chimp may share 98 per cent of its DNA with ourselves but it is not 98 per cent human: it is not human at all – it is a chimp. And does the fact that we have genes in common with a mouse, or a banana say anything about human nature? Some claim that genes will tell us what we really are. The idea is absurd.’11

The fact that we understand some of the mechanisms of the working of the universe or of living systems does not preclude the existence of a designer, any more than the possession of insight into the processes by which a watch has been put together, however automatic these processes may appear, implies there can be no watchmaker.’39

THE BOOK OF GENESIS is foundational for the rest of the Bible. Its opening chapter does something of incalculable importance: it lays down the basis of a biblical worldview.1 It gives to us humans a metanarrative, a big story into which our lives can be fitted and from which they can derive meaning, purpose, and value. This chapter is devoted to that big story.

Perhaps there is a subtle danger today that, in their desire to eliminate the concept of a Creator completely, some scientists and philosophers have been led, albeit unwittingly, to re-deify the universe by endowing matter and energy with creative powers that they cannot be convincingly shown to possess. Banishing the One Creator God they would then end up with what has been described as the ultimate in polytheism – a universe in which every particle has god-like capacities.

So, is naturalism actually demanded by science? Or is it just conceivable that naturalism is a philosophy that is brought to science, more than something that is entailed by science? Could it even be, dare one ask, more like an expression of faith, akin to religious faith? One might at least be forgiven for thinking that from the way in which those who dare ask such questions are sometimes treated. Like religious heretics of a former age they may suffer a form of martyrdom by the cutting off of their grants.

In this very brief history of modern cosmological physics, the laws of quantum and relativistic physics represent things to be wondered at but widely accepted: just like biblical miracles. M-theory invokes something different: a prime mover, a begetter, a creative force that is everywhere and nowhere. This force cannot be identified by instruments or examined by comprehensible mathematical prediction, and yet it contains all possibilities. It incorporates omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence, and it’s a big mystery. Remind you of Anybody?49

If science and God do not mix, there would be no Christian Nobel Prize winners. In fact, between 1901 and 2000 over 60% of Nobel Laureates were Christians. According to 100 Years of Nobel Prizes (2005) by Baruch Aba Shalev, a review of Nobel Prizes awarded between 1901 and 2000, 65.4% of Nobel Prize Laureates, have identified Christianity in its various forms as their religious preference (423 prizes). Overall, Christians have won a total of 78.3% of all the Nobel Prizes in Peace, 72.5% in Chemistry, 65.3% in Physics, 62% in Medicine, 54% in Economics and 49.5% of all Literature awards.

For some, the conviction that they “know the truth” produces in them an aggressive attitude that reeks of superiority and is very off-putting. They forget that the One about whom they profess to be witnessing – he who was the truth (John 14:6) – was the most gentle of men. He was gentle and lowly in heart (Matthew 11:29). But this clearly does not mean that he was a soppy, insipid, and spineless pushover. Christ was full of moral courage and authority, and showed (righteous) anger when necessary. But he was always courteous and respectful. Those of us who find it very difficult to respect or be gentle with those who disagree with us need to put a lot of effort into learning how to be like that.

Der wesentliche Punkt ist hier, dass Menschen mit szientistischem Gedankengut wie Atkins oder Dawkins nicht unterscheiden zwischen Mechanismus und Urheberschaft.

Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator.

The common belief that ... the actual relations between religion and science over the last few centuries have been marked by deep and enduring hostility ... is not only historically inaccurate but actually a caricature so grotesque that what needs to be explained is how it could possibly have achieved any degree of respectability.

At the beginning of his famous TV series, Cosmos, the American astronomer and cosmologist Carl Sagan said, “The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be”. That is not a statement of science, to be put in the same category as, for example, the scientific statement that gravity obeys an inverse-square law. Sagan’s statement is simply an expression of his atheistic belief. The problem is, many people give to all statements by scientists the authority rightly due to science, simply because they are stated by a scientist.

Marxism adopted this Freudian view that religion was the opium of the people. But those who experienced the repressions of life under Marxist totalitarian states understood the flip side of the argument. The Polish Nobel Laureate for Literature Czesław Miłosz wrote: A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death—the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged. If God does exist, then, following Freud, atheism can be seen as a psychological escape-mechanism by which we avoid taking ultimate moral responsibility for our own lives. What Freud clearly fails to do is to answer the question of whether God exists or not.

While primitive forms of artificial intelligence developed so far have proved very useful, I fear the consequences of creating something that can match or surpass humans . . . Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded. And in the future AI could develop a will of its own, a will that is in conflict with ours . . . The real risk with AI isn’t malice but competence. A super-intelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours we’re in trouble.12

Nick Bostrom explains that transhumanism is: “the intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.”6 Many people (including Bostrom) believe that the word transhumanism originated with atheist Julian Huxley (1887–1975): “ ‘I believe in transhumanism’: once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Peking man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny.”7 But Huxley was not the first. The origin of the word transhuman is not secular. Historically, it was first used, not by a scientist in connection with science, but regarding the resurrection of the body by Henry Francis Cary in his 1814 translation of Dante’s Paradiso. It occurs in a passage where Dante tries to imagine the resurrection of his own body: “Words may not tell of that transhuman change.”8

La critica mas devastadora que puede hacerse al reduccionismo ontológico es que es autodestructivo, (...) por que relega nuestras experiencias de belleza , obligación moral y vivencia religiosa a un basura epifenomenica. También destruye la racionalidad. El pensamiento se sustituye por eventos electroquímicos de transmisión neuronal. No es posible enfrentar a dos eventos de esta naturaleza en un discurso racional, no se sabría si son correctos o incorrectos, solo tienen lugar... Las propias afirmaciones de un reduccionista no son mas que chispazos en la red neuronal de su cerebro. El mundo del discurso racional se desvanece en un absurdo guirigay de descargas sinápticas, eso no puede ser cierto y nadie cree que lo sea.

…nonsense remains nonsense, even when talked by world-famous scientists.

In fact, Hawking has not only not got rid of God, he has not even got rid of the God of the Gaps in which no sensible person believes.

A category mistake is being committed. Evolution purports to be a biological mechanism, and those who believe in God regard him as a personal Agent who, among other things, designs and creates mechanisms. We observed earlier that the existence of a mechanism is not in itself an argument for the non-existence of an agent who designed the mechanism.

Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator.’ C. S. Lewis

Some will take issue, however, with the idea that the resurrection body of Christ is physical, by pointing out that the New Testament itself speaks of the resurrection body as a “spiritual body”.110 The objection, then, asserts that “spiritual” means “non-physical”. But a moment’s reflection shows that there are other possibilities. When we speak of a “petrol engine”, we do not mean an “engine made of petrol”. No, we mean an engine powered by petrol. Thus the term “spiritual body” could well be referring to the power behind that body’s life, rather than a description of what it is made of.

The existence of a limit to science is, however, made clear by its inability to answer childlike elementary questions having to do with first and last things – questions such as: “How did everything begin?” “What are we all here for?” “What is the point of living?”.

one should always be careful to record all the evidence against one’s theories; indeed, one should bend over backwards to consider it, since the easiest person to fool is oneself.

Is the world divided into mind and matter, and, if so, what is mind, what is matter? Is mind subject to matter, or is it possessed of independent powers? Has the universe any unity or purpose? Is it evolving towards some goal? Are there really laws of nature, or do we believe in them only because of our innate love of order? Is man what he seems to the astronomer, a tiny lump of impure carbon and water impotently crawling on a small and unimportant planet? Or is he what he appears to Hamlet? Is there a way of living that is noble and another that is base, or are all ways of living merely futile? … To such questions no answers can be found in the laboratory.’23