Anticipating the release of The Story of Everything, Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution talked with Stephen Meyer, James Tour, and John Lennox about “the origin of everything.” Robinson ends the excellent discussion with a poignant question. He asks how these three scientists would respond to a young person enthralled by the atheism of Bertrand Russell, expressed in the philosopher’s 1927 book Why I Am Not a Christian.
It’s a famous and chilling passage about how “the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.” Russell asserts that “only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”
It’s strange that Russell speaks there of the “soul.” Maybe there is no other way to phrase it, even if you don’t believe in a soul. Lennox calls the citation from Russell “sheer self-contradictory nonsense” and offers a personal memory from his own university training:
When I was in Cambridge, I saw in the window a book, Why I Am Not a Christian, by Bertrand Russell. I walked up and down. Dare I read it? I read it and it confirmed my Christianity because it seemed to me he had never begun to understand what the message of Christianity or indeed biblical theism was.
Or, you might say, what biblical monotheism is. Something I’d like to highlight that strikes me about this subject is the language of singularity. There is the singularity with which the universe began to exist, as Stephen Hawking showed, at the Big Bang. But more, in this discussion, the four participants speak repeatedly of “a beginning” and “a beginning point,” “a big bang.” Says Lennox, “Whether you think in terms of multiverses or not, there was an absolute beginning.”
Emphatically in the Singular
The indefinite article is emphatically in the singular. In all those statements, there was only one beginning, which is why Professor Lennox describes it as “absolute.”
Whatever else we may say of the creator, there is only one designer of the cosmos. The universe did not begin multiple times over, with multiple big bangs, which would allow for multiple creators. It is singular, in a way that, taken together with the rest of the scientific evidence so beautifully presented in The Story of Everything, calls not just for theism but, with a bit more specificity, for monotheism. Dr. Meyer, Dr. Lennox, and Dr. Tour all feature in the documentary, which will be in theaters starting Thursday, April 30. Find tickets here.