John Lennox is emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford. He has also gained fame as a defender of the rational basis of Christian faith. "In his view, religious belief is entirely compatible with the scientific quest."... he argues that the scientist’s confidence in reason ultimately depends on the existence of a rational and purposeful Creator. Otherwise, our thoughts are nothing more than electro-chemical events, the chattering of soul-less synapses. “If you take the atheistic, naturalistic, materialistic view, you’re going to invalidate the reasoning process,” he says, “because in the end you’re going to say that the brain is simply the end product of a blind, unguided process. If that’s the case, why should you trust it?"
The materialist view inevitably gives birth to a form of determinism that appears to mock our essential humanity. Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and atheist, expresses the modern scientific outlook thus: “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good. Nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its tune.”Dawkins routinely falls into confirmation bias: he examines the universe expecting to find purposelessness, and voila! That is indeed what he finds. And he says that his determination is scientific. Yet such a claim is not at all scientific because there is no "scientific" proof of any kind that the universe is purposeless.
To claim, as Dawkins does (along with other atheists) that there is no God is to claim, really, that one possesses infinite knowledge - enough to claim that no being exists that has infinite knowledge! But this kind of militant atheism is not a rational stance, it is a rebellious, emotion-based stance, as openly admitted by atheist Thomas Nagel, professor of philosophy and law at New York University:
I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about human life, including everything about the human mind… This is a somewhat ridiculous situation… [I]t is just as irrational to be influenced in one’s beliefs by the hope that God does not exist as by the hope that God does exist. (The Last Word, pp. 130-131, quoted by fellow philosopher Edward Feser.)Personally, I do not insist that atheism is either irrational or non-rational, though as Nagel points out, that is a very common stance among self-described atheists. I do say, however, that atheism is very unwise, as mathematician Blaise Pascal rather decisively demonstrated.
