Top 40 John C. Lennox Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— John C. Lennox

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

— John C. Lennox

3. “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.”

— John C. Lennox

4. “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?”

— John C. Lennox

5. “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.”

— John C. Lennox

6. “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.”

— John C. Lennox

7. “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.”

— John C. Lennox

8. “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.”

— John C. Lennox

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

— John C. Lennox

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

— John C. Lennox

11. “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.”

— John C. Lennox

12. “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.”

— John C. Lennox

13. “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.”

— John C. Lennox

14. “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.”

— John C. Lennox

15. “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.”

— John C. Lennox

16. “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.”

— John C. Lennox

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

— John C. Lennox

18. “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.”

— John C. Lennox

19. “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.”

— John C. Lennox

20. “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.”

— John C. Lennox

21. “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.”

— John C. Lennox

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

— John C. Lennox

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

— John C. Lennox

24. “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.”

— John C. Lennox

25. “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.”

— John C. Lennox

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

— John C. Lennox

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

— John C. Lennox

28. “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.”

— John C. Lennox

29. “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.”

— John C. Lennox

30. “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.”

— John C. Lennox

31. “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.”

— John C. Lennox

32. “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.”

— John C. Lennox

33. “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.”

— John C. Lennox

34. “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.”

— John C. Lennox

35. “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.”

— John C. Lennox

36. “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.”

— John C. Lennox

37. “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?”

— John C. Lennox

38. “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.”

— John C. Lennox

39. “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.”

— John C. Lennox

40. “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.”

— John C. Lennox

41. “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.”

— John C. Lennox

42. “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.”

— John C. Lennox

43. “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.”

— John C. Lennox

44. “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.”

— John C. Lennox

45. “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?”

— John C. Lennox