A couple of weeks ago today, we had the pleasure of meeting John Lennox, author of “God’s Undertaker – has science buried God?”

This was an event we (the University of Southampton Atheist Society), co-organised with Christians in Science. A quick look around their website gives a fairly promising impression – that of Christians with a genuine interest in accepting science rather than running away from it or objecting to it.

Anyhow, CiS organise talks by people like Lennox, and they offered us the chance to meet with Lennox over lunch on the same day as his evening talk. We jumped at the chance, as well as planning to go along to the evening talk as well.

It was always my plan to blog about the days events, but I’ve held off. Firstly because I left the event feeling pretty disappointed and angry, so wanted to put a bit of emotional distance between myself and the events of the day, but also because there really wasn’t that much interesting to say.

Well, here I am writing about it, but you’re not going to get a blow-by-blow account of the two talks, because that would be a waste of your time, and mine. So I’ll just record a few summary observations.

Firstly, I need to point out that our lunch event actually went pretty well, and the format really worked, giving us the opportunity to actually engage with the speaker on a much more informal level. We’ll certainly be trying to set up events like this again in the future.

Secondly, Lennox actually seemed to be quite a nice guy, a very personable and friendly chap, happy to chat away with people about unrelated things before we got started, and certainly didn’t come across as arrogant. Still, that doesn’t excuse everything.

My overwhelming feeling about the experience, however, was disappointment. Not so much with Lennox (I had some idea of what to expect from him), but more with the whole situation, and with CiS.

Lennox pissed me off within minutes of opening his mouth, when he mentioned how he had spent time travelling across countries which had been ’systematically exposed to atheism’, whatever that means. He was at pains to say how many atheists he had spoken to where perfectly nice people, and wanted to make it clear that he didn’t think atheists were immoral. Still, whenever I hear someone talking like that I can’t help but think of this classic sketch…. listen out for the ‘I know a lot of immigrants personally…’ bit and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

And still, of course, while individual atheists aren’t immoral, look at the awful things that happen when society isn’t religious, and we can see that we need religion to be around in order for anyone to be moral. Yeah, that isn’t saying that atheists are immoral, of course not.

To be perfectly honest, I lost interest after that.

The evening talk was far worse. He was really playing to the home crowd, who sycophantically lapped up everything he said. I’m getting angry again now, just writing about it, and in all honesty I really can’t be bothered to go on much longer. Still, here are some highlights

- Atheism undermines rationality

- Atheism isn’t the default starting point for someone not brought up religious (this statement was never explained or justified)

- Of course God of the Gaps is silly, but actually it isn’t, because some of the gaps are opened by science, and let’s call these ’singularities’ and then pretend that basing conclusions on gaps in our knowledge is actually very clever after all.

- Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins (yes, Dawkins was mentioned that often)

- All of science only happened because of Christianity

- The science of taxonomy is based on the Bible – because in Genesis God told Adam to name the animals (seriously…….he actually said this). And of course, before the Bible no-one had ever thought of giving names to things.

- (On how you get from Deism to Christianity) because….Jesus loves me (or something like that, I wasn’t really paying attention by this point)

- “The God Delusion” is the wrong name for the book, because it’s not a delusion if God is real (again, seriously….)

You get the idea.

This is what I have come to call the Great Christian Reassurance Machine (GCRM) – which exists solely to reassure believers that their faith is really sensible and correct, because hey, I’m a really big clever sciency person, and I believe in God, and so did all these other clever people, and anyway isn’t Richard Dawkins a bastard. Therefore God exists. THAT IS ALL THERE IS TO IT.

Lennox, McGrath, Christians in Science….. are all cogs in the GCRM. An organisation such as CiS could be using its position to educate Christians about science, but instead they’re using science as a way to prop up the faith of non-scientifically-literate types and to denigrate those who don’t share their medieval superstitious delusions (mainly Richard Dawkins). Great work, guys.

The answer to the question in the subtitle of Lennox’s book – has science buried God? – is, in case you were wondering, “no, of course not. Science proves God is real”.