Why does it feel like every scientific breakthrough pushes God further into the shadows, and what if that feeling is based on a complete misunderstanding? John C. Lennox’s Can Science Explain Everything? explains why our misunderstanding of science and scripture is the reason behind that feeling.
Overview
John C. Lennox, an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University, tackles perhaps the most pressing intellectual question of our time in Can Science Explain Everything?
Can Science Explain Everything? delivers a concise but powerful argument that science and Christian faith are not enemies but allies. Lennox draws on his decades of experience debating leading atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, as well as his personal journey from growing up in Northern Ireland during “The Troubles” to becoming a world-class mathematician.
Can Science Explain Everything? systematically dismantles the popular notion that science has rendered God obsolete. Lennox shows that this conflict narrative is historically inaccurate, logically flawed, and scientifically unsupportable. He argues that the very foundations of modern science—the belief in a rational, orderly universe comprehensible to the human mind—are rooted in the biblical worldview.
Rather than science explaining God away, Lennox contends that science actually points toward God, and that atheism, not Christianity, struggles to provide a rational basis for scientific inquiry itself.
Table of Contents
Reader recommendation
Can Science Explain Everything? is a perfect read for:
- Scientists, students, and academics wrestling with the relationship between their professional work and personal faith
- Curious skeptics who want a thoughtful, evidence-based exploration of the science-God question
- Christians seeking intellectual confidence in their faith without abandoning scientific rigor
- Anyone who has ever felt pressured to choose between being intelligent and being religious
- Readers who appreciate logical arguments presented with clarity and humility
I would not recommend Can Science Explain Everything? to:
- Those looking for a deeply technical, academic treatise on philosophy of science
- Readers who prefer emotional or experiential approaches to faith over rational argument
- People unwilling to engage with the possibility that their assumptions about science and religion might be wrong
- Those seeking a comprehensive, multi-volume treatment of the subject
Introduction
Can Science Explain Everything? by John C. Lennox (published 2019, The Good Book Company, 128 pages, ISBN: 9781784984113) presents one of the most accessible and compelling cases for the compatibility of science and Christian faith available today.
Lennox brings extraordinary credentials to this discussion. He is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, a Fellow in Mathematics and Philosophy of Science at Green Templeton College, and has spent decades engaging in public debates with the world’s leading atheists.
His previous works include God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (2009) and Gunning for God: A Critique of the New Atheism (2011). What makes Lennox uniquely qualified is his ability to navigate both the rigorous world of academic mathematics and the deeply personal realm of faith.
Context of Can Science Explain Everything?
Can Science Explain Everything? emerges from a cultural moment where the “New Atheism” movement—championed by figures like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris—had popularized the idea that science and religion are locked in mortal combat.
Lennox writes in response to “many young people and adults who have asked for an introduction to the ‘Science and God debate’ that would be more accessible than my book God’s Undertaker”.
He specifically addresses those who wanted him to “deal more specifically with the relationship between Christianity and science as distinct from restricting myself to evidence for the existence of God”.
Purpose of Can Science Explain Everything?
The book’s central thesis is that “the popular idea that science and God do not mix is simply not true”. Lennox aims to “examine many of the misconceptions people have, not just about faith and belief in God but about science itself”.
He proposes that “a different kind of cosmic chemistry is possible: that there is a different kind of reaction between science and religion that is truer to the spirit and essence of both”.
The book’s title itself poses the question it systematically answers: science cannot explain everything, and its limitations actually point toward the reality of God.
Background
Lennox opens by describing the intellectual landscape as a “war zone”. In comment threads on everything “from bioethics and psychology to geology and cosmology—you will find hostile exchanges and name calling”.
He identifies two camps: the “science side” that views themselves as “the voice of reason” working to “roll back the tide of ignorance and superstition” , and the “God side” that sees “a divine intelligence is behind everything there is”.
What makes Lennox’s perspective unique is his personal background.
He grew up in Northern Ireland “during the Troubles,” where he witnessed firsthand the destructive consequences of sectarian conflict. His father’s store was bombed for employing people from across the religious divide, and his brother was seriously injured. This experience shaped his commitment to respectful dialogue and his refusal to treat intellectual opponents as enemies.
Lennox recounts a pivotal moment at Cambridge University in 1962 when a Nobel Prize-winning scientist tried to bully him into abandoning his Christian faith, warning that it would “cripple you intellectually and you will suffer by comparison with your peers”.
Rather than capitulate, Lennox resolved to “be as good a scientist as I could” and to “encourage people to think about the big questions of God and science and make up their own minds without being bullied or pressured”.
Can Science Explain Everything? Summary
Chapter 1: Can You Be a Scientist and Believe in God?
Lennox tackles the foundational question head-on. He notes that many people assume “science has given us such marvelous explanations of the universe and demonstrates that God is just not necessary”. But he points to a simple, devastating counterargument: Nobel Prize winners.
According to Lennox, “between 1901 and 2000 over 60% of Nobel Laureates were Christians”.This statistic—which aligns with research by Baruch Aba Shalev showing that 65.4% of Nobel Prize recipients identified as Christian —demonstrates that “there cannot be an essential conflict between being a scientist and having faith in God”.
Lennox distinguishes between the conflict between science and faith versus the conflict between worldviews:
“There is a very real conflict between the worldviews held by these two brilliant men: atheism and theism.”
He defines atheism not merely as “lack of belief in God” but as a comprehensive worldview called naturalism, which holds that “this universe/multiverse is all that exists”. By contrast, Christian theism maintains that “there is an intelligent God who created, ordered and upholds the universe”.
Chapter 2: How Did We Get Here: From Newton to Hawking
Perhaps the most striking historical observation in the book is the contrast between Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking. Newton, who held the same Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge that Hawking would later occupy, “was a firm and passionate believer in God and saw no conflict between his faith and the pursuit of science”.
Hawking, by contrast, “declared himself to be an atheist and said that we have to choose between science and God”.
Lennox argues this shift wasn’t driven by scientific advance but by confusion about two things:
First, confusion about the nature of God. Many people mistakenly think of God as a “god of the gaps”—”a god we invent as an explanation for the blanks in our understanding”. Lennox points out that “if you define God to be a god of the gaps… then of course you have to choose between science and God”. But “the God of the Bible is not a god of the gaps. He is the God of the whole show”.
Second, confusion about the nature of scientific explanation. Lennox uses the analogy of Aunt Matilda’s cake: scientists can analyze its chemical composition, structure, and physical properties, but “the best scientists in the world will not be able to tell us from their investigations why she made it”. Science deals with “how” questions but cannot answer “why” questions of purpose.
Lennox systematically dismantles Hawking’s claim that “because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing”. He identifies three fatal flaws:
- Self-contradiction: “Hawking assumes that the law of gravity exists. That is not nothing”.
- Laws do not create: “Newton’s celebrated laws of motion never caused a single snooker ball to race across a table”. Laws describe patterns but cannot produce events.
- Self-creation is incoherent: To say “X creates X” presupposes the existence of X to account for its own existence.
As C.S. Lewis put it, “They produce no events: they state the pattern to which every event… must conform”.
Chapter 3: Mythbusters I: Religion Depends on Faith but Science Doesn’t
Lennox addresses one of the most persistent misconceptions: that science is based on evidence while religion is based on blind faith.
He recounts a debate with philosopher Peter Singer in Melbourne, Australia. When Singer objected that religion is “simply a matter of heredity and environment,” Lennox turned the tables:
“Peter, can I ask you—were your parents atheists?”
“My mother was certainly an atheist. My father was maybe more agnostic,” he replied.
“So you’re perpetuating the faith of your parents too, like I am,” I said.
Lennox explains that the word “faith” comes from the Latin fides, meaning “loyalty or trust”. In everyday life, “we don’t normally trust facts or people without evidence”. Blind faith—believing without evidence—is dangerous, but “the faith expected on the part of Christians is certainly not blind”.
Physicist Paul Davies, though not a Christian, acknowledges that “science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview” because “even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith… a law-like order in nature that is at least in part comprehensible to us”.
Albert Einstein famously wrote:
“science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration towards truth and understanding… I cannot conceive a genuine man of science without that profound faith… science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”
Perhaps most devastatingly, Lennox turns Charles Darwin’s own words against atheistic naturalism. Darwin wrote:
“…with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.”
As physicist John Polkinghorne explains, if you reduce mental events to “electrochemical neural events… Two such events cannot confront each other in rational discourse. They are neither right nor wrong—they simply happen”. Atheistic naturalism, Lennox argues, “undermines the foundations of the very rationality that is needed to construct or understand or believe in any kind of argument whatsoever”.
Chapter 4: Mythbusters II: Science Depends on Reason but Christianity Doesn’t
Lennox shows that biblical Christianity is profoundly rational. Jesus himself commanded followers to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Mark 12:30).
The Bible contains numerous examples of scientific thinking. In the book of Job, God challenges Job with questions about the cosmos and animal behavior—”the sort of questions that scientists ask”. The book of Daniel records what may be the first controlled trial in literature: Daniel proposed a ten-day test comparing vegetarian food against the king’s meat.
Lennox also addresses the distinction between natural and supernatural explanations. When the Philistines returned the Ark of the Covenant, they used a clever experiment: they harnessed two cows that had just calved to a cart and observed whether they would abandon their calves. They reasoned that if the cows acted against their powerful maternal instincts, “it would be reasonable to draw the conclusion that supernatural power must be involved”.
Chapter 5: Can We Really Take the Bible Seriously in a Scientifically Literate World?
Lennox addresses the supposed conflict between the Bible and science regarding the age of the earth. He points to Francis Bacon’s concept of “God’s two books”: Scripture and creation.
He argues that the Bible should not be read “literalistically”—a wooden literalism that ignores metaphor. Jesus said “I am the door” (John 10:9), but “we know from our experience of the world… what doors of wood, metal and other materials are like, and it is obvious Jesus is not one of those”.
Regarding the age of the earth, Lennox notes that Genesis 1:1 (“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”) uses the perfect tense, denoting “an event that took place before the storyline got going”. Therefore, “the initial creation could have been an event that took place before Day 1—but Genesis does not tell us how long before”. This allows for the current scientific dating of 13.8 billion years without contradicting Scripture.
Lennox quotes Galileo’s famous saying that “the Bible teaches us how to go to heaven and not how the heavens go”. While we don’t learn science from the Bible, it does make claims about the physical universe that science has confirmed—notably that the universe had a beginning, a fact astrophysics only discovered in the 20th century.
Chapter 6: Miracles: A Step Too Far?
Lennox tackles the objection that miracles violate the laws of nature. He points out that “in order to recognise some event as a miracle, there must be some perceived regularity to which that event is an apparent exception”. The ancient world knew “that dead bodies do not get up out of graves”.
He offers a powerful analogy. If you put £10 in a drawer, then £20, then another £10, the laws of arithmetic predict you’ll find £40. If you find only £10, you don’t conclude the laws of arithmetic have been broken—you conclude a thief intervened. Similarly, “the laws of nature predict what is bound to happen if God does not intervene”.
Lennox quotes Francis Collins, former director of the Human Genome Project, who cautions that “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”.
Chapter 7: Can You Trust What You Read?
Lennox presents overwhelming evidence for the reliability of the New Testament text. There are “nearly 6,000 partial or complete manuscripts of the New Testament in the original Greek language… and over 18,000 in early translations”.
By comparison, the Roman historian Tacitus wrote “The Annals of Imperial Rome” around AD 116, but the first six books survive in only one manuscript copied around AD 850. Homer’s Iliad has over 1,900 manuscript copies, with a gap of about 400 years between original and earliest surviving text.
The New Testament, by contrast, has papyrus fragments dating as early as AD 200. Sir Frederic Kenyon, director of the British Museum, concluded that “the number of manuscripts of the New Testament… is so large that it is practically certain that the true reading of every doubtful passage is preserved in some one or other of these ancient authorities. This can be said of no other ancient book in the world”.
Chapter 8: How to Disprove Christianity
Lennox argues that Christianity is uniquely falsifiable: “disprove the resurrection, and the whole of Christianity would disappear in a puff of smoke”. The apostle Paul himself wrote: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17).
Lennox examines four lines of evidence:
1. The death of Jesus: Roman soldiers, experts in execution, confirmed Jesus was dead. John’s eyewitness account records that a spear-thrust produced “blood and water,” indicating “massive blood-clotting had taken place in the main arteries”—a detail John “could not have known the pathological significance of”.
2. The burial of Jesus: Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus buried Jesus in a new tomb with about 35kg of spices. The tomb was sealed and guarded.
3. The empty tomb: The Gospels unanimously testify that the tomb was empty. Even the Jewish authorities admitted the tomb was empty, claiming the disciples had stolen the body. As historian Michael Grant concluded, “the evidence is firm and plausible enough to necessitate the conclusion that the tomb was, indeed, found empty”.
4. Eyewitness appearances: The disciples met the risen Christ over forty days. Even atheist scholar Gerd Lüdemann concedes: “It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’ death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ”.
Lennox addresses the hallucination theory by noting: “I have surveyed the professional literature… during the past two decades and have yet to find a single documented case of a group hallucination”.
Chapter 9: The Personal Dimension
Lennox shifts from historical evidence to personal application. He emphasizes that Christianity is not about following a religious code but about a relationship with a person, Jesus Christ.
He recounts a remarkable conversation with two senior international lawyers on a train in Hungary. He drew a diagram in the dust showing the common view of religion as a path of merit—initiation, following rules, and final judgment based on good deeds outweighing bad. He then drew a cross at the beginning of the path, explaining that Christianity teaches acceptance through faith in Christ’s completed work, not through human merit.
Lennox quotes Jesus’ words: “whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life” (John 5:24).
Chapter 10: Entering the Laboratory: Testing the Truth of Christianity
Lennox argues that Christianity is testable at the personal level. He tells the story of a Chinese student who stood up in a university lecture and shouted, “Look at me!” Six months earlier his life was in chaos; after hearing Lennox speak, he gave his life to Christ and was transformed.
Lennox concludes: “Can science explain everything? I think it is abundantly clear that it cannot”. Science and Christianity mix very well, and the ultimate experiment is personal: to repent and trust Christ.
Can Science Explain Everything? Analysis
Reading Can Science Explain Everything? felt like finally finding a clear voice in a conversation I’d been hearing my entire life but could never fully participate in. Lennox doesn’t just argue—he illuminates. His background as a mathematician gives him a precision that cuts through the fog of popular misconceptions.
What struck me most was his handling of the faith vs. science false dichotomy. The way he turns the tables on atheism, showing that it too requires faith commitments, is genuinely eye-opening. When he cites Darwin’s own doubts about whether we can trust minds evolved from lower animals, I felt the weight of that question in a way I never had before.
The historical chapters are particularly valuable.
Learning that over 60% of Nobel Laureates were Christians isn’t just interesting trivia—it fundamentally undermines the assumption that faith and scientific excellence are incompatible. And the contrast between Newton and Hawking illustrates how worldview, not evidence, drives belief or unbelief.
Lennox’s treatment of the resurrection is compelling without being sensational. He treats it as a historian would treat any ancient event—examining sources, weighing evidence, considering alternative explanations.
His point that Christianity is uniquely falsifiable is powerful: if you could disprove the resurrection, Christianity would collapse. That’s not the mark of a faith afraid of scrutiny.
The personal dimension in the final chapters gives Can Science Explain Everything? its heart. The train conversation with the two lawyers is a masterclass in clear communication. Lennox doesn’t preach—he explains, illustrates, and invites. The Chinese student’s testimony demonstrates that Christianity isn’t just intellectually credible but personally transformative.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths
Accessibility: Lennox writes with remarkable clarity, making complex philosophical and scientific concepts understandable to general readers. He doesn’t dumb down but he doesn’t show off either.
Personal credibility: His Oxford professorship and decades of public debate give him authority that’s hard to dismiss. When he quotes Einstein or cites Nobel Prize statistics, readers know he’s not cherry-picking.
Balanced tone: Despite his convictions, Lennox treats opponents with respect. He acknowledges when atheists make valid points and doesn’t resort to caricature.
Historical grounding: TCan Science Explain Everything?‘s treatment of Galileo, Newton, and the rise of modern science corrects widespread historical misinformation.
Logical rigor: Lennox’s mathematical training shows in his careful argumentation. His dismantling of Hawking’s “universe creates itself” claim is a model of clear thinking.
Weaknesses
Brevity: At 120 pages, the book sometimes feels like a summary rather than a full treatment. Readers wanting deeper exploration of certain topics may need to consult Lennox’s longer works.
Limited engagement with non-Western perspectives: The book focuses almost exclusively on Western science and Christianity, with little attention to how other cultures or religions approach these questions.
Assumes a certain biblical interpretation: While Lennox is more flexible than some on issues like the age of the earth, he still operates within a broadly evangelical framework that may not persuade readers with different presuppositions.
Skipping the problem of evil: Lennox acknowledges that suffering is “one of the deepest questions” but refers readers to another book rather than engaging deeply. This feels like a significant omission given how central the problem of evil is to many people’s rejection of God.
Comparison with Similar Works
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
While Dawkins argues that science disproves God, Lennox shows that Dawkins’ case depends on misunderstandings of both science and religion. Lennox directly engages Dawkins’ claims and offers a more nuanced perspective.
Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
Lennox’s book operates in a similar tradition to Lewis—intellectual, accessible, and personally engaging. However, Lennox brings scientific expertise that Lewis lacked, making his arguments particularly relevant to contemporary debates.
The Language of God by Francis Collins
Collins, a geneticist and former director of the Human Genome Project, similarly argues for the compatibility of science and faith. Lennox covers some of the same ground but with greater philosophical depth and a more explicitly apologetic purpose.
Conclusion
Can Science Explain Everything? is a remarkable achievement—a short book that manages to be both intellectually substantial and personally engaging. John Lennox demonstrates that the supposed war between science and religion is based on historical ignorance and logical confusion.
He shows that Christianity, far from being the enemy of science, provided the intellectual foundation for modern scientific inquiry.
What makes the book truly valuable is its invitation. Lennox doesn’t just want readers to agree with his arguments—he wants them to test Christianity for themselves. The final chapter’s challenge is genuine: if Christianity is true, it should be personally transformative. And if it’s not, it should be rejected.
For anyone who has ever felt torn between intellectual integrity and religious faith, or who has wondered whether science has made God obsolete, this book offers a way forward. It’s not a comfortable read if you’ve already made up your mind—but it is an honest one.
I finished the book feeling not just better informed but personally challenged. Lennox has done what all great teachers do: he’s made me think more clearly and question my assumptions more honestly. Whether you ultimately agree with him or not, Can Science Explain Everything? is a book that deserves a careful reading.
