Nuggets from Cosmos, Creator, and Human Destiny—“Aunt Matilda’s” Cake

John Lennox, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, Fellow in Mathematics and Philosophy of Science, and Pastoral Advisor at Green Templeton College, has a very appealing way of explaining the question of a maker and the meaning and purpose upon which that maker alone could decide. He declares that everything that exists either grows or has been made. The purpose of anything that is made (from rocks on Earth to the farthest star or “black hole”) and the use for which he designed them, resides only in the maker’s mind. Without a Maker, the universe itself and everything in it, including man, is without meaning or purpose. Lennox illustrates this fact by proposing a chemical analysis by top scientists of a hypothetical cake that his Aunt Matilda has just made:

“The nutrition scientists can tell…the number of calories…and nutritional effect; the biochemists…the structure of the proteins, fats, etc…; the chemists…the elements involved and their bonding; the physicists…the cake’s…fundamental particles…; the mathematicians…a set of elegant equations to describe the behavior of those particles…an exhaustive description of the cake….

“Suppose I now ask the assembled group of experts…why was the cake made? All the nutrition scientists, biochemists, chemists, physicists and mathematicians in the world will not be able to answer the question…explaining…‘why’ the cake was made.

“In fact, the only way we shall ever get an answer is if Aunt Matilda reveals it to us. But if she does not…no amount of scientific analysis will enlighten us.

“To say with Bertrand Russell that, because science cannot tell us why Aunt Matilda made the cake, we cannot know why she made it, is patently false. All we have to do is ask her. The claim that science is the only way to truth…is unworthy of science itself.”

Everyone would recognize the futility of asking the cake why it exists. But how is that any different from science trying to wring from the universe the reason for its existence? Why not consult its Maker?