How big is God?

I have just read for the second time God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? by Dr John C Lennox and I am more impressed by it than I was the first time, probably because greater familiarity led to greater understanding.  He writes very clearly about semiotics and the human genome (among other things) and what I manage to grasp of it I find most impressive.

Like the formerly enthusiastic atheist Professor Antony Flew in There is a God, he establishes very convincingly  from scientific evidence the  overwhelming likelihood - indeed necessity - of what two scientists Guilliermo Gonzalez and Jay W Richards in their book The Privileged Planet call 'an extra-terrestrial intelligence immeasurably more vast, more ancient, and more magnificent than anything we have been willing to expect or imagine.'

So far so good.  Encouraged by his book  I looked Dr Lennox up on Youtube and found him debating these matters with Professor Richard Dawkins before an audience in the American Bible Belt. Naturally I cheered for Dr Lennox, or at least I did until we came to his closing statement.  Until then he had more or less stuck to the science with excellent effect.  But then he became an enthusiastic spokesman for evangelical Christianity, and in my opinion he did the cause no favours.

That's because preaching the Gospel these days requires an approach in two stages, not one.

Firstly, it should be recognised that theism is not the given that it was two thousand years ago - and for a long time afterwards as well.  Now you have to show that there could indeed be a vast, ancient and magnificent extra-terrestrial intelligence behind reality as we presently experience and understand it.   The title of J B Phillip's book Your God is too Small should be borne in mind here.

The second stage consists of building on the first.  Any suggestion that the Creator is a small-minded chooser of favourites - to give but one example - makes God little better than Woden or Zeus, and to my mind at least, makes atheism seem almost like a moral duty.