Human Well-Being: Dr. John Lennox

Dr Lennox thanks for sitting down with us for a few moments president Brown and I are teaching an honors seminar entitled measuring the good life and we would appreciate your willingness to respond to some questions about this idea of human well-being and as a backdrop let me just provide a quote from the American politician Bobby Kennedy he says yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children the quality of their education or the joy of their play it does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages the intelligence of our public debate or the Integrity of our public officials it measures neither our wit nor our courage neither our wisdom nor our learning neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country it measures everything in short except that which makes life worthwhile unquote um to get us started what would you say would be an Orthodox Christian way of defining or thinking about the good life well first of all let me say I like that quote and it shows and I'm a mathematician it shows that you can't get meaning out of numbers in mathematics and that is a sadly all too common in our society if you can't measure it it doesn't exist and therefore it is important that we ask this kind of question now let's let's come to your question because from a Christian perspective I just find it impossible to think about the good life without putting it into the context of the Christian view of human flourishing now that means human flourishing that is not selfish or individualistic but promotes the flourishing of our fellow human beings and especially those of us who belong to the body of Christ now we use the word good you're talking about the good life in different ways you asked me when we met this morning how are you today and I said I'm good which isn't americanism but leave it after that over here now what does that mean it's a simple expression of feeling that indicated that I had a sense of feeling that life is going pretty well in terms of health and Circumstance this morning we we feel right and most of us think that life has meaning when we say I'm I'm good at least for the moment and of course that sense of feeling good can be enhanced if we're involved in seeking the good of others and they're flourishing and that brings into the moral sense although we might not claim to be particularly moral Christianity though injects a very strong moral Dimension into the idea of what is good building on the fact that all of us are moral beings made in the image of God and I think that's where I would start the Genesis statement where it says God made human beings in his own image male and female he created them so both men and women of equal value given that an infinite immeasurable dignity because we're made in the image of God it's very interesting watching Jordan Peterson not long ago in his lectures on Genesis which are fascinating and he came across this statement were made in the image of God and he said man that's the Cornerstone of our civilization and we ignore it at our Peril and I think this is important because goodness starts in the Christian sense with God of course if we want to spell that out there's a very interesting article by New York Times writer David Brooks and a book He's written called the road to character and then it he discusses a series of individuals that he thinks exemplify the good life and he demonstrates that their concept of the good life arose from Deep commitment to a vacation as well as to a faith or philosophy to community now he's writing from a more secular perspective and this is important because you've asked me about the Christian Perspective the Christian Perspective starts with all human beings made in the image of God and one aspect of that is that they are moral beings so that all people whether they believed in God or not have got a moral sense that means they've got a hardwired sense of goodness otherwise society would collapse and that's what Jordan Peterson is pointing out and I was interested in reading books because he outlines four qualities that leads to a life that is in his sense good and full of meaning firstly the experience of great love the overcoming of hardship or suffering suffering he says introduces yourself to yourself and my is he right and a deep involvement and act of service to others without a desire for validation and then he points out how we can learn about this by reading the great books of Western Civilization which no doubt you promote in your course and I was impressed as a Christian by the fact that Brooks from a more secular perspective said he wished to introduce issues of morality into conversations about the good life and the secular sphere including this was the interesting thing the concept of sin because he said one way to achieve a flourishing life is quote to identify your sins and try to stab them out this he said is what humility is the ability to see one's strengths and weaknesses and then to confront one's broken nature now that's all very well and good as advice but the Christian message comes in here and it not only identifies the issue of our sins and failures to be good head on but in order to lead us to the right concept of goodness it faces us with a radical diagnosis that we are not good by Nature so that our basic need is forgiveness and salvation but then this is where Christianity differs from all other religions or philosophies it offers a source of power to live the good life the problem is that compare Socrates with Aristotle or contrast them Socrates thought the way to live a good life is knowledge education well it's important Aristotle said the problem with me is and he was a bright chap he was well educated was I told her the power to live the good life so Christianity in its definition of the good life not only defines it and gives us moral principles it tells us that there is an available power through Christ and through his Spirit to live the good life and if we just talk about the principles of morality and not the power that leads into what I call the bondage of religion that puts people into a straight jacket and they give up very interesting um I would love to just keep spinning riffing off of that but let me push on um to the issue of Happiness yes what's the relationship between being good living the good life and this Fascination we have with being happy yes happy is a very interesting word yeah many people don't realize where it comes from it comes from happen and therefore that indicates that it tends to be superficial in the moment it just happens how do you happen to be today well I happen to feel good it's at that level it conveys the idea using an Old English word hap of having a good hap or fortune in other words being lucky so that's the level at which many people appreciate this so it's an emotion of the moment it doesn't necessarily go very deep and more widely if we want to push into some kind of definition and it's difficult to Define one might say it's a positive emotional state characterized by various feelings satisfaction contentment fulfillment joy and pleasure being in a good mood in other words now psychologists I understand tend to call it subjective well-being and distinguishing between two aspects one the balance of emotions in my life and personality and more objective life satisfaction that's where it goes deeper in terms of work relationships and achievements I'm always interested in the ancient writers of course who come to Aristotle who they've already mentioned he distinguished between two different kinds of Happiness headonia from which we get Hedonism and eudemonia now hedonia hedonic happiness is derived from pleasure so doing what feels good self-care fulfilling desires experiencing enjoyment and feeling a sense of satisfaction feeling cruel I believe this is the word but eudemonia is a deeper thing that type of happiness is derived from seeking virtue and meaning so it involves a new idea here fulfilling a responsibility investing in a long-term goal concerned for the welfare of other people and living up to personal ideals and I would want to contrast happiness in The Superficial sense with joy which is a much deeper experience and about which the Bible has a great deal to say because the Christian message is that Jesus came to give us joy much more than superficial happiness a joy that we can experience even in the context of sadness and pain for example in a few minutes I'm going to have to speak at a funeral service but it's a Thanksgiving service celebrating the life of a Christian woman who died prematurely of pancreatic cancer and her husband who's devastated nevertheless tells me that today is tinged with joy that's not that he's feeling h-a-p-p-y he's got a deep Joy because he knows that his wife is with Christ in glory so he can celebrate that and therefore Joy goes much deeper than happiness and it is a Biblical virtue much more than superficial happiness thank you um can we so circling back to the good life yes can we quantif quantify quantify in any way can we measure it is it does it does our pension for self-reporting or gathering data help us in any way um whether we're talking about GDP or crime rates is there any portal into this question from our ways of gathering data well clearly there is I don't decry quantification it's just as Bobby Kennedy says it doesn't give us the meaning but nevertheless it's quite obvious from common human experience that if we don't have enough to live on we're not going to be particularly happy although we may find contentment of some kind and and joy for example in our Christian faith if we're living in a neighborhood where crime is rampant we might feel very insecure and unhappy as many people do around the world and if our institutions our Democratic institutions are crumbling we're not going to be very happy and that's why there's so many unhappy people and many even of the major wealthy Western countries today so these kind of things are very important that we do something about them now quantification is difficult but in terms of your general question I think many of the things you mentioned do track with the idea of they do contribute something to happiness if I lose my job and had to go home and face my wife for the fact and children that we'd offered enough money to put bread on the table that's not going to make me very happy so they Prime index though from the Christian Perspective that I would bring to bear is what is the quality and the level of my life with Christ as a Christian my experience of his love others guidance my depth of encounter with him uh as a person who accompanies me as a friend and you know when you raise the word happy I I suppose they all do I was the Negro song I'm not sure but it immediately came to mind oh happy day that fixed my choice and be my savior and my god well made this glowing heart rejoice and tell its raptures all abroad and in the little refrain which we all know at least I do from childhood happy day happy day When Jesus washed my sins away he taught me how to watch and pray and live rejoicing every day happy day happy day When Jesus washed my sins away there's great truth in that that we need to remind ourselves of that the vertical relationship with God is the primary relationship now all the indices that you were mentioning their GDP and all those are horizontal indices they're important they deal with our relationships with our fellow human and beings and also with our environment and our relationship with things we know that people matter more than things but things do matter because they do feed into our perception of Happiness so I would want to say that it's not either or it's both and and we see that in the way Christ dealt with people he had unhappy crowds sitting in front of them whose stomachs were empty and he didn't just preach to them he fed them and I think that's a very important index always for him the relationship of God was primary but he knew that we are physical beings we need certain basic things food and so on so it's important that we remember both of these indices and are very careful that we don't simply emphasize the spiritual Dimension and forget the very practical Dimension that is it's summed up in the Commandments isn't it love the Lord your God with all your heart that's the vertical Dimension and love your neighbor as yourself that's a horizontal Dimension and I think that as Torah as teaching is a very good index for promoting happiness and it's very interesting that the New Testament quotes all the Old Testament Commandments except one for Christians hmm what is that one that doesn't I thought that that would get you yes it's the Sabbath and the reason for that Paul is very interesting the Sabbath is not a moral commandment the others are and you can see that in the New Testament from Jesus own lips he said the priests in the temple break the Sabbath under guilt us you cannot break a moral command wouldn't be Guiltless just imagine the priests in the temple commit adultery and are guilters that makes nonsense now the Sabbath has a meaning in the New Testament but I'm not going into that but it has to do with well-being so it's not bad that you picked that up because the idea of having one day and seven to rest our world needs to hear that now for the Christian that's not in a sense a law that if you fail to keep it you're a sinner and it's interesting my my brother's a pastor his Sabbath his day of rest was usually a Monday I'm fortunate I usually take the Jewish sabbath which is Sabbath it's still Saturday Sunday is the Lord's day it's not the Sabbath peace be to many people but that's that's a whole other deal for the Christian as Paul says one person uh values all days I like one another person that seems one day above the others but his point is that we should raise the level of all day so that we live them all for the Lord but having said all that it seems to me it's very important that we actually physically take a Sabbath and one of the best people to read on the Sabbath is Lord Jonathan sacks the late ex-chief chief Rabbi of the UK and he pointed out just how important that rhythm is for our well-being and experience with a good life and we live some of us in an environment where people tend to overwork they burn out and we need to really explore the need and Lord Sac says and it's so obvious he says we need a day in the week when we realize that we didn't create this stuff that God did and we are doing something and resting He commands us to rest because look we're so weak I'm very weak I need to be put in a shelf for at least nine hours every night I mean it's absolutely incredible I also need to take a day this country gives me two days a week now I should add since you've put me on to this that what the New Testament does with Sabbath is interpret it for Christians there remains of Sabbath rest for the people of God and what is that all about you see one of the very interesting things is some branches of Christianity have made the Sabbath into a law that is exactly the opposite of what the server speaks of the Sabbath speaks of God created and he rested now what's the Sabbath rest for Christians it's that we rest from our works and Trust the work of another that's the principle of Salvation and the sad thing is that we even today in the 21st century have professing Christians saying unless you keep the Sabbath you can't be saved that's the exact opposite of what it's meant to say but I've got diversity thank you no but that's actually Sabbath rest is an important part of well-being and some of us who are Workaholics need to be told to stop um keeping faith with time I I want to spend a few moments um on perhaps the history of ways we have tried to manage uh the Improvement of the good life some name of science have been involved with attempting to bring about the good life or increase overall happiness in a population by well by quantification of different aspects of people and then to be quite Frank calling the herd would you like to comment on sort of the history of the way in which we've sort of uh interjected ourselves into this oh sure you need to be ashamed about bringing that question up because it's hugely important because we're on the cusp of doing the same thing again and it was horrific in Nazi Germany for example and unfortunately in some of the countries that ought to have known better in this country and in the in the United States there was essentially a Eugenics program to create a better kind of human being by interfering in those days it was crude just in the breeding process call out the weak and braid strong people with strong people and produce the perfect Aryan as the Nazis tried to do and the blood ran millions of people died in that and then the Soviets tried the same thing to create a new man by using the best technology they had but they didn't have the technology and those experiments didn't work but again millions of people died as a result of an attempt to create the perfect human being I'm afraid we're there again and we need to take that seriously one of the people that's influencing What's called the transhumanist movement and the argument is well Evolution has brought us this far but now we can get engaged and we can change the whole course of human nature for the better her C.S Lewis warned of this in 1940 when he wrote his book the abolition of man he said if we allow a group of scientists to intervene and the intervention now we would understand would be in the germline to re-specify human beings he said it won't be human beings they're produced it'll be artifacts so that the final Triumph of humanity would be the abolition of man and we need to listen to that voice because we have another voice and that of the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harare particularly in this book homodeus The God man and their idea is absolutely open it is where on the cusp we have now got the technology to turn I quote Harare humans into Gods that's what his Gods with a small G but the point is they are racing experimentally to try to create what's called artificial general intelligence a super intelligence uh a transhuman that can do much more than current man can do they say well man as we have him and her currently is just one stage in a process that's going on and on and on so we're going to now intervene and get that process really geared up so what we're going to do we're going to implant technology now some technology is good I'm wearing glasses to speak to you but we're talking about all kinds of enhancements to our brains to our physiology we're talking about drugs and all this kind of thing to turn us into super humans or trans humans now that agenda is fearful it seems to me because it is an attempt and the Bible is a great deal to say about it of humans trying to turn themselves into gods and that reminds me of the very way in which disaster hit the human race when the Temptation occurred in the Garden of Eden if you eat this tree you shall be as Gods now that brings us back to the basic morality of human beings and it's defined in the Garden of Eden one thing forbidden but freedom to eat it and they ate it because they were tempted and they gained not knowledge it wasn't knowledge that was forbidden peace be to the many um people have suggested it was the knowledge of Good and Evil not the knowledge you don't want and it provided it brought into human beings through the Rebellion a huge alienation from God himself another's trickled down through to us today but we are constantly reaching up to be Gods because the LIE has been spread around that God is if he exists at all he's against us he's against us having well-being and flourishing and that is a massive lie and we can see that because let me put it this way when the whole question of this transhuman Vision comes to me and the two ingredients that Harari mentioned specifically are one the abolition of physical death deaths of physical problems so we'll Solve IT technologically and secondly which relates to our topic dead on in his words is the increase of quote human Happiness by using all these Technologies producing cyborgs drugs all this kind of thing so solve the Tactical problem of death so that people don't have to die they may die but they'll live forever if they want to and enhance their happiness and when people come along to me with that agenda I say you're too late and they say don't be ridiculous we haven't got going out I said but look there is very powerful evidence that the problem of physical death was solved 20 centuries ago when Jesus rose from the dead that's a shock to the system of many people that I as a scientist would believe in the resurrection and I think they're strong reasons scientific historical and experiential for believing in it but that's a topic for another time and I said what Christ offers to those who repent and trust him here's the marvelous thing is that he gives them not after death but in this life what the New Testament calls eternal life a new life a new power to live the good life but that's not all because God raised him from the dead the promise is that all those that trust Christ he will raise from the dead and that's the biggest upload that's ever going to happen in history and it's wonderful so I say to these people who are wanting to freeze their bodies and their brains in the hope that we've solve this problem look you can have certainty today and hope in the future that you'll be raised from the dead and I'm going to say that in the sermon I'm going to preach in 15 minutes that that hope exists for all who trust Christ now that's not transhumanism because what I want to emphasize is this God made us in His image we Tinker with that image by genetic engineering or Eugenics at our Peril and the most important thing and I'm going to finish where I started humans made in the image of God the transhumanist project the Eugenics project before it was humans reaching for the Gods but the Christian answer is not man becoming God but God becoming man the word became flesh and dwelt Among Us and to as many as believed on him he gave the right to become what they were not before by Nature children of God even to those that believe in his name that is the true way of becoming a fulfilled human whose good life does not end the death but ends in the resurrection Christ raising from the dead and that brings them to a new beginning of a life that will never end thank you John you've given us a lot to think about my pleasure

Channel: Asbury University

Views: 29,757

Keywords: Asbury, Asbury University, Asbury College

Id: 4St_G-_FtcA

Length: 30min 20sec (1820 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 15 2022