A crucial turning point in your life came when you encountered a Nobel Prize winner as an undergraduate student. Tell us that story.
I always played Socrates, and still do, asking people questions. So I plunged in and asked this person about the research that he’d done to win the Nobel Prize. Then I said: “Did it ever occur to you when you discovered the intricacies of these processes that there was a mind behind the universe?” He stiffened and said: “No.” The conversation finished – he wasn’t going there. But at the end of the meal, he said: “Lennox, come to my room,” which was not an invitation, but a command.
To my surprise, he’d invited several other senior people. He sat me down and said: “If you want a career in science, you need to give up this naive faith in God, because it will cripple you intellectually. You’ll never make it. So, give it up now, in front of witnesses.” It was an enormous pressure.
I said: “Tell me, what have you to offer me that’s better than what I have in Christ?” He said: “There’s the philosophy of Henri Bergson.” It was a very bad choice, because Bergson actually thought of converting to Catholicism at one stage. I said: “If that’s all you’ve got, I’ll take the risk. I’ll stay with Christ.” I got up and walked out.
That moment changed many things for me. It taught me a lot about the unacceptable face of academia and the misuse of authority. I made up my mind that if ever I got to the kind of position I’m in today, as a professor at Oxford, I would never use my position to abuse anybody intellectually. And it did occur to me that if he’d been a Christian and I’d been an atheist, he’d probably have lost his job for doing what he did – such is the non-level playing field.
I resolved, as best as I could, to put arguments for God and Christ into the public space, give them the evidence and let people judge for themselves. And that’s what I’ve been doing for the rest of my life. I suppose it was a preparation for meeting lesser intellects, like that of Richard Dawkins.
Read it all.
