John Lennox answers your questions on AI, science, atheism & faith

[Music] well hello and uh welcome along uh i'm justin braley this is lucy briley and john lennox is joining us as well on the line now uh i'm really really pleased to say that we're bringing you john lennox tonight on a special live stream edition of unbelievable a q a um and uh yes uh we're really excited we're really excited um and the technology again all seems to be working which is really which is wonderful we're actually broadcasting across several facebook pages tonight simultaneously so a very big thank you to everyone who is hosting this and uh we want to hear from as many people as possible this evening as well uh so wherever you are whichever time zone you're in please do send your questions in in the comments wherever you're watching this facebook live video well john lennox hardly needs any introduction but he is professor emeritus of mathematics and philosophy of science at the university of oxford and a renowned christian thinker speaker and author and he's been a frequent guest on the unbelievable show over the years so john welcome along to the program thank you for joining us how how are things with you at the moment very good thanks but i'm always delighted to be involved with unbelievable in many of its different aspects it's great to have you back on the show um this time very much taking questions from viewers and listeners but um i know you've probably been asked this question over 100 times already but but how have you and sally coped with the lockdown thus far well extraordinary well really we're elderly as anyone can see and we're in that vulnerable class and so for the last three or four months we have been locked down and just going out when we need to having groceries delivered and so on but what has happened is this i'm doing very much less travel and so i can concentrate on writing and it's been an extremely productive time because i've been able to use the day times and sometimes part of the night time to update books write new ones and all this kind of stuff so from a very selfish perspective it has been extremely productive well it's great to have you with us we're going to talk about some of the recent books that you've been uh writing and publishing um but first a quick introduction to us for those who perhaps are not familiar i'm justin i host the unbelievable show it's a weekly sort of dialogue and debate show that goes out on podcast video and radio lucy is my wife she's the minister of the church uh here in surrey where we live yes um so it's great this is maybe the second or third time i've had you on the show now yes i've never been so involved with your work before but now we're doing everything from home everything is kind of merged together we're doing church family work everything in one small space absolutely um now um just a quick advert um i'm gonna actually share a screen uh so that you can see this as well um unbelievable um if you've never come across the show and you want to find out more about it and perhaps um you've actually um have come across the show but you've never subscribed to our newsletter um then can i encourage you to do so um we've got a special offer right now in fact if you subscribe to our newsletter you'll obviously get the latest news and content from the show but we'll also send you my free ebook it's called in conversation with you should be able to see it on the screen there in which i share some of the interviews and encounters i've had with people like jordan peterson tim keller richard dawkins and many other significant thinkers so there's a link in the description of this facebook video where you can sign up for the newsletter you'll get that free ebook and of course you'll get notified of events like this and lots of other good stuff on a fortnightly basis um now uh lucy and i are going to be talking as well with john about some of his recent books um he's got some great new books out uh firstly where is god in a coronavirus world and his most recent book 2084 artificial intelligence and the future of humanity again there's a link to that in the description of this video where you can get a copy in the info so do go and get hold of that book i've got a special connection which i'll reveal in a moment with the book as well myself um lucy and i are going to begin by talking to john a little bit about these two most recent books but we want to pretty much quickly move to your questions as well and and this is very much an open forum as far as we see it uh whether you consider yourself a christian or a skeptic or a seeker or something else you are welcome to ask a question it could be theological scientific something about the pandemic about doubts about atheism christianity the bible the future of technology and ai um all questions are welcome basically and john will do his very best um coming to them completely blind to to answer them um so again just do that by simply leaving a question in the comments wherever you're watching this video and my very helpful assistant again peter byrum will be compiling and sending those questions through for lucy and i to fire at john so um try to keep them short and sweet would be my only suggestion and you you might have more luck um getting yours asked um so let's let's talk about um some of what you've been writing and publishing recently john i mean again where is god in a coronavirus world that came out very promptly um not long after lockdown had begun really how did it come together so fast could you remind us about that when the coronavirus pandemic started the mathematician in me saw immediately that it would go global with exponential speed and it simply occurred to me this is going to be very scary it's going to raise the kind of question that earthquakes and catastrophes raise but on a huge scale and i thought here i am a lockdown can i do anything and i believe as a christian that christianity actually has something to say into this kind of situation that's not simplistic that's not trivial and i thought let me try and write something at least that might be an encouragement to my christian friends and also might stimulate thought and discussion among people who may be searching for answers and thinking as we all do about these big questions so i sat down and wrote for a week i sent it to a publisher on a saturday night and by wednesday it was in print and it's now in 27 languages gosh that that is extraordinary i mean i would say our experience has been just just a local level you know with the church and so on having to go online because of the coronavirus pandemic has really changed the way we we think about church and in in as funny ways has opened us up to the realization that there are a lot of people because of this unusual time who are searching for answers and questions and joining us on our facebook feeds for our sunday services people we may never have imagined would actually be turning up on a regular basis like that so it is provoking i think quite deep questions in people isn't it oh that's absolutely right and i think this is when you reflect on what you might expect that things on this scale immediately remind people if they needed reminding that they're vulnerable and then that they're mortal and once you start thinking about death it is inevitable that you think about eternity and god and so on and i suspect you've found as many people have found not only in the uk but elsewhere that the church audience has multiplied greatly because it's gone online so i think your analysis is correct it's acting like c.s lewis said years ago pain is god's megaphone it's it's at least saying to the world look you need to think about the big picture have you got a framework big enough to cope with it yeah and i think um just speaking as a leader of a a church the the very nature of church and what it means and what it looks like has changed so dramatically um because we can no longer gather together physically which is something so very precious to us um and i wonder how how are you finding your um your relationship with god and your spiritual your own personal spiritual growth and development is existing in this this type of isolation that we have where we can't gather physically with our sisters and brothers in christ i haven't sensed the isolation too greatly because first of all i've got good fellowship with my wife here we pray and read together which is always a very solid base for married life but secondly i've had so many interactions around the world i think we're since lockdown this is about the 110th major interview i've had so there's been a great deal of contact with all kinds of groups of people so i haven't felt remote at all but of course it's it's fair to say that since i was very young i was able to cope with my own company and i've just enjoyed all that time for reflection and reading and so in a sense the presence of god has been more real than ever because a lot of the busyness has been taken out of life and on reflection one sees that so many things are just not necessary so it's reorientating an attitude towards life itself yeah let's talk about your latest book john 2084 artificial intelligence and the future of humanity as i mentioned there is a link to it from the description of this video and obviously you you've been working on that book quite a lot longer than you you kind of worked on the coronavirus book um why now what what and tell us about the title as well what does 2084 actually refer to well 2084 is really a take off of the book called 1984 that george orwell wrote and in which he introduced big brother and this kind of thing and artificial intelligence these days is connected with surveillance technologies and they weren't realized in 1984 but they're here with the vengeance today and they've got their upside and their downside and because i have for most of my life been interested in two big questions the first what is the status of this universe is it created or not and what is the status of human life is it made in the image of god or not and what i noticed increasingly was with the rapid development of bioengineering and cybernetic and cyborg technologies there's much more in the thinking spectrum so to speak about what we should do with humanity and we're probably the first generation that is able to think seriously of doing something say by modifying the human constitution by altering the germ line and having read c.s lewis many years ago and he interested me greatly in two of his books the abolition of man and that hideous strength when he talked about the extreme risk associated with allowing a bunch of scientists to try and produce a transhuman in the language we use today and when i read harare's book uh homodeos i thought i need to really get into this and write something because again i feel many atheists are writing about this stuff why don't i as a christian say something about it because we can understand in a sense what the technology does even if we haven't developed it ourselves and we can certainly introduce to a thinking public it's significance what philosophies and worldviews are driving it and being produced by it so all of that went together and i was invited to give a lecture in london to a group of church leaders which seemed to go extraordinarily well and that provided a little bit of an impulse to do it but you're right i've been working very hard on it for quite a while um i i'm more familiar with that book than most i read ahead of a show because i actually had the privilege of being the narrator for the audio book um so thank you very much for doing that so it's my voice you'll hear rather than john's if you choose to download the the audible version of it but um what i really appreciated about the book was that it was such a great overview of the whole area so for people who are perhaps new to all of the issues involved with artificial intelligence and so on it'll be a very helpful primer but also really looks at the spiritual dimension of of what's going on you mentioned already yuval noah harari in his book homo deus that has been a huge bestseller and really sketches out a future where he believes that humans will effectively be replaced or upgraded let's say by technology but i don't think you find his outlook his worldview very appealing do you john i don't find it appealing and i'm not sure that he finds it completely appealing i think he sees difficulty within it himself but i don't find it appealing and i think c.s lewis put his finger on it he said if eventually scientists i'm paraphrasing now produce something like uploading a brain onto silicon what they will produce is not a human but an artifact so that the final triumph of science will be the abolition of man and that's quite a chilling thought and it's even more chilling when you find some of our leading thinkers reflecting that kind of thing lord reece is an example of that and he talks about um he talks about in the future that the intelligences will be so different from what they are today and he comes to the conclusion that we can have zero confidence that the dominant intelligences a few centuries hence will have any emotional resonance with us even though they may have an algorithmic understanding of the way we behaved now when the astronomer royal talks like that that's very different from harare who's a historian talking about it and there are serious thinkers who believe that we're going to go there under warning of the huge dangers of it and it's a big ethical issue and the big problem with both narrow ai of the surveillance technology type and artificial general intelligence is the technology outpaces the ethics john i had an experience recently which unnerved me somewhat we have an alexa in our kitchen and some time ago we had some friends to stay who had a new puppy so all of the conversation was surrounding dogs and puppies and all of the new things they bought for this puppy and then the next minute i find that in my facebook feed i'm seeing adverts for everything puppy related having never searched at all for anything myself this was just what was happening in our in our home and the conversations we were having i mean are they are they listening to us oh yes and this this is a very important element and i discuss it in the book it's called surveillance capitalism and it's the subject of a brilliant book by shujana zhubov who's a an emeritus professor at mit but the point of it is this alexa a smartphone we voluntarily put these things in our homes or in our pockets and what they're doing is harvesting information and some of that we find very useful i have a book here in the history of mathematics i ordered it two days ago and it appeared the next day but what's going to happen in the next few days is there will be pop-ups saying people that bought this book bought that book now what shizana zhubov points out in her book is this that these companies are harvesting a great deal more than the information necessary to send you a book or even recommend another book and they're selling it on and it is a profound exploitation of your personal information and it's making a huge amount of money without your permission and she says that we need to reign this in very rapidly because it's happening now you mentioned alexa i heard of a case where someone bought a robotic vacuum cleaner that roams around the sitting room and a few days later photographs appeared offering the new curtains and material because this thing is guided by pattern recognition cameras it was photographing the inside of their house and sending it to these advertising agencies now the difficulty with that is obvious but it's even more frightening if you read what's happening as we understand it and xinjiang among the uyghur people where this kind of facial recognition technology is being used to suppress control and deculturate an entire minor people's group and that is very frightening and the time magazine article on it which is well worth reading written by a chinese person said at the end look all the technology needed to do this is in the west the only difference is it's not in the hands of a centralizing power but that could happen the very next day i read in the times that some senior person in our police force said this is exactly what we need in london and i think that illustrates the ethical problem beautifully this is useful technology a lot of us use it and are grateful for it but it has a negative side and therefore we have to decide i don't personally have an alexa for the reason that you've just explained because much more is being monitored than we know and i noticed that the next update with apple is going to tell us when things on our smartphones are turned on the camera and the microphone by apps that we don't know are doing it right so we we've got a problem yeah the ethics of it is not clear well look it i mean we're going to move to some questions in just a moment's time but you've painted quite a a worrying picture of what the future might hold what what's your do you have a reason for hope do you do do you believe that there is a sort of a a light at the end of that tunnel that technological tunnel well all technological revolutions have brought problems and they've brought gain and i think christians ought to be involved in this technology actually and i would encourage scientifically minded young people because in the area of medicine for example for example vaccine for covered 19 it's artificial intelligence is going through all kinds of combinations to determine that and diagnostics has been hugely successful x-rays and building those narrow artificial intelligence machines but we've got to make it clear another reason i wrote the book was to differentiate between the stuff that works and the stuff that is really still in the realm of science fiction and narrow ai is very simple to define it's one computer large computer with a large database and a program that recognized patterns and it does one single thing that normally requires human intelligence and we must remember this is artificial intelligence that is when we look at the diagnosis of an x-ray with an ai system then it looks as if it's been done by an intelligent human but the intelligence lies in the humans who programmed it and built the system the system itself is not intelligent it's not even conscious and it's important to bear that in mind yeah ultimately an algorithm however clever does not equate to what is a human mind and a human no it's about as conscious as microsoft word well look um it's great to have your thoughts on this and there may well be questions that come up that relate to the issues you've raised in the book 2084. well could i say that there's a website 2084book.com great absolutely 2084book.com if you want to find out more and do check out the link to the book as well from from the info with today's show as well um so we're going to go to some questions now john and they've been coming in thick and fast while we've been speaking um let me just say again very quick advert that if you would like to um hear more on a regular basis from unbelievable don't forget you can find it um wherever you are via the podcast via the youtube channel and if you sign up to the newsletter you'll get a free ebook thrown in as well so there are links from the uh from the description if you want to get hold of that free ebook okay um let's go to some questions what should we start with yeah i think i think a theme that's coming up a lot um for people at the moment is you know what going back to the pandemic and where we find god in the midst of it all um and we've had a question that's come in from india um this is someone called samuel paul david who says faith is being shaken in this pandemic how can one remain strong in such ins in such a long prevailing set of uncertainties i'm from india after this pandemic there is a sudden uprising of people to denounce god because their loved ones and jobs are lost what comfort can be given to such people and how hard is it going to be to preach the gospel after this pandemic gosh there's a lot in there yes there are at least three questions and they're all very valid questions and i think as we look at the pandemic there are two perspectives on it there's a perspective of people asking questions because they're fit and well and they see what's happening but then there is the perspective of people who are suffering or who have been involved with family members and friends who are suffering and we need to remember both of those the first questions are intellectual second or pastoral and people need comfort but just let's look at some of your questions people denouncing god well that's an apparently easy solution what i mean by that is the atheist way out just says well this is how the world is it's hard luck if you suffer and somebody else doesn't this is the kind of dawkins view that uh the world as we see it there's just what you'd expect that there's no good no evil and no purpose but if that's true of course it's very odd to speak of the the problem of evil what i would say about that briefly is this that it seems to be a way out but actually it only removes at one level an intellectual problem it certainly doesn't remove the suffering but what it does remove is all possible hope because the atheist view ends with death by definition so you've got no hope now i think christianity has something to say you mentioned in your question quite rightly so that people's faith gets shaken and they get wobbly and uncertain well what the christian message has to say to that into that situation is that the specter behind all of this is death and the central christian claim is that jesus christ has conquered death he has risen from the dead and not only that the christian message is that whoever trusts him even if they die yet they will live as he told mary and marth at the gravesite of their brother lazarus and that is what i cling onto i do believe as a scientist that there's strong evidence that jesus rose i also believe it because it makes sense of my experience it has made sense all of my life now if we can face this kind of thing with the knowledge that through trusting christ even if we die of covered 19 we will one day be raised our life is not gone we have an eternal dimension to life to look forward to and that gives huge hope and i find that a major stabilizing factor so don't let yourself wobble too much i think what's important is that you remind yourself and read in the gospels the central truths of christianity and compare them with the super official the understandable reactions of people who deny scotland and so on in this way got another question here from wesley santos who says hi john how should you approach today's high school kids with little or no basic knowledge of the bible but loads of atheistic and naturalistic assumptions obtained through school and the internet how how do we begin speaking to our young people who in a sense have so little biblical knowledge or awareness of christianity but an awful lot of naturalistic assumptions going on well i'm very glad that the questioner is thinking of doing this because it's enormously important there's not a level playing field and it's not only true of high school kids it's true of adults as well i beat many people very highly educated but they've only heard naturalism they've only listened to people like kitchens and so on and i think the best way to start is where you are with those young people that you can get to this is one of those questions that in a sense is unanswerable we'd love to be able to deal with the whole world at once but we can't so what can we do individually we can try to think through and grasp some of the answers to these questions many young people you put your finger on it yourself actually in your question they simply don't know now the word agnostic actually means that i don't know and a lot of agnosticism can be removed by bringing new knowledge and that is why many christians are so aware of what's in the bible and all the rest of it but they don't realize that these ideas and truths people have never heard them so start to explain them and you'll have to do some work at this but i'm glad you're thinking of it and that is to try and find literature that you can pass on credibly so you've got to read it yourself and understand it two young people point them to discussions and i'm going to say something now that justin didn't ask me to do but the unbelievable show is a wonderful place to guide thinking young people it is in my estimation one of the best radio shows not only in the uk but world around on bringing differing world views to together so that you hear both sides and if you get a young person to listen to both sides of a discussion then they'll talk to you about it and you can educate them you can give them more information you can help them to better literature but don't try and do it all at once try and answer one question at a time i'm very pleased to say that we've got questions coming in from people of lots of different world views on on the comments um there's uh one here from someone who describes himself as an atheist leaning agnostic and in a moment i'm we'll read you one from someone who's jewish as well but jamie first of all says i am an atheist leaning agnostic i watch loads of debates with intelligent atheists versus intelligent believers daily and i always come out thinking the atheist has easily won the debate i would love there to be a god but i cannot do it any advice on how i open my mind up to the possibility of god the easy answer to that is to watch unbelievable you you think i was paying you for this john no not at all but you see if you think the atheists always come out best you're obviously not watching unbelievable so i would encourage you to do that and it's not a question of persuading yourself i'm a believer in god for several different reasons i grew up in a christian family i first saw christianity credible in my parents because they lived it but then of course as i went through school and university i faced all the questions and i my conviction of the truth of christianity has been based on realizing that i started being agnostic about many things i didn't know so i wanted to find out and i spent my entire life up until this point making myself open and vulnerable to questioning sometimes very hostile questioning from people who don't share my world view now saying that you'd like there to be a god is very interesting because that doesn't prove there isn't a god and it doesn't prove there is a god but there's a reaction in you that actually it supports one of the things i was reading yesterday in the bible god has set eternity in their hearts there's a desire for something more and of course i don't know your situation and i can't give a generic answer that will answer this question i think you know that as well as i do but what i would encourage you to do if you haven't already done it is to befriend some christians who you respect and talk to them and ask your questions of them because it's often a personal conversation because not all the evidence for christianity comes from arguing a case or answering difficult questions because if christianity is true it has got to have an effect on our lives at all levels morally ethically and all the rest of it it's got to produce peace a sense of forgiveness and all of that and so if we simply are searching in one dimension we might need to wake up to the fact that we're living in a three-dimensional or four-dimensional universe um i'm currently working on a book on conversion john adult conversion and um what's interesting to me in so many of the cases is that there's there's a number of different elements that come together when someone changes their mind and has a radical change of world view from atheism to christianity and it's frequently it is an intellectual journey but it might be married with some kind of potentially an emotional crisis or some sort of uh event at least that sort of causes the different paths to come together and forces this change and um or even an experience indeed and and to some extent it's it would be wrong to simply categorize that process as just an intellectual thing if i just watch more debates and just become convinced that the christians have the better arguments there's a lot more going on inevitably when someone changes their mind towards god rather than away from god isn't that there is and one of the reasons for that is god is a person not a theory and it's a bit like marriage it's not a purely intellectual thing although it involves that it's relating to a person and if we just go about it as a purely rational endeavor it's going to be very thin and therefore it may even support atheism in the sense that it doesn't feel real and i'm all against emotionalism but i'm all for genuine emotion which is a response to facts and as a person responding to god and one of the reasons the christian faith deals with that uniquely is that its central claim is god has become human in the person of jesus christ and we can see how he lived and what he did and his death and resurrection and so on and we can relate to him we've got another question here um do you want to yes do you want to ask this one there we go oh it's a bit further down hang on sorry here we go yes we've had a question um from someone called howard he says being jewish i thought i could go directly to god for forgiveness as in yom kippur for example i've heard from christian friends that god is holy and cannot interact with sin if that is the case how it case how is it that christ could do i need christ or god to forgive my sins i'm glad you're answering this one john well it's it's a lovely question really and my heart goes out to the questioner because yom kippur was such a meaningful festival for the jewish people and it still is very meaningful and it was a time when when the temple was operating it was a time when the high priest got nearer to god than ever been before in the sense that god had chosen that place to put his name there and the high priest would make a sacrifice and then he'd go in into the immediate presence of god behind the big curtain in the temple and for a few brief seconds he stood there and the people were praying outside and then he came outside and if he was still alive they recognized that god had accepted him now what is so interesting is that the new testament in a letter written particularly to people from jewish background which is called hebrews discusses all this and uses it as a very powerful thought model because the high priest was only able to stay in the presence of god for such a short time as you say because of sin he brought an animal sacrifice but the problem isn't between animals and god is between humans and god and the christian claim at least is that jesus took upon himself the role of the sacrifice that pays for sin and enables god to accept people like ourselves you and me who are sinners now this is a spectacular thing and it goes beyond all our thinking and yet i am convinced it's true because in the end it really does work so that when that high priest took an animal killed it and then appeared before god that becomes a thought model for us and when john the baptist announced jesus he said look there's the lamb of god who takes away the sin of the world and jesus was crucified at passover time and the new testament makes it clear that he fulfilled the role of the passover lamb in judaism that is it had been pointing forward for centuries to the reality that was in himself so i would say to you have a careful read at the book of hebrews and ask your questions as you go through because it deals very carefully and precisely with those questions why because the people to whom this book was written were asking exactly the same questions that you're asking and therefore i think you'll find answers there another question here from david uh david tucson he says i like to believe that jesus knew each of us personally when he died on the cross for us do you think that's possible it's an interesting question we are limited by the capacity of our own minds and yet there are occasions particularly in mathematics where there's an absolute genius who seems to remember every mathematical thing and can do calculations that he or she doesn't even understand how they do them when we try to get our head around the idea that god became human i think we begin to see that this there's a huge mystery about the nature of the lord jesus but he gave hints of it for example when he met nathanael at the beginning of john's gospel he said something to him and nathaniel said how do you know me and he said well i saw you sitting under your fig tree well how did that happen and i do think there's a very real sense in which the lord knows all of us indeed he said so he said he calls his sheep by name i am the good shepherd and all this kind of thing so that however difficult it is for us to comprehend that although we're beginning to understand computers with very large memories that can remember the whole population of the world essentially i don't think we need to put that beyond god so when you say you like to think he knows you personally the answer to it is he does and he loves you personally and individually and so you can talk to him in prayer and know that you're being heard as an individual and that's wonderful you see even in a time of pandemic and people will read psalm 23 the lord is my shepherd i shall not want and he walks with us he leads us to green pastures and even in the valley of the shadow of death he's there so he is near to you so don't say i hope or i would like it is the fact that you can reckon on it and you can live according to it fantastic um we have got questions on literally all kinds of different subjects coming in and and just a reminder if you're watching and you'd like to put your question in for submission plenty of time to do that if you want to leave it in the comments wherever you're watching the video from at the moment but teeny collier says um is the book of revelation an encrypted story which part should we take literally if any uh what should we take from it apart from the bits we really like of course now the reason i've selected this question john is partly because i know that 2084 your latest book does deal with questions around the book of revelation and where the world is heading and with technology and so on and and sort of maybe starting to make some suggestions about how we might see some overlap between what's in revelation and what we see happening in the world today so i just thought this was an interesting question for you potentially to take up as you've obviously it's an extremely interesting question how many hours have you got i think i've also written by the way a book on daniel which deals with this kind of question in its own right it's called against the flow but let's have a look at it with any literature we're faced with this question we read in the times say that justin brierly was flying down the road in his car now would you take that literally well i just be careful justin is literal his car is literal but the sentence contains a metaphor in the word flying and at the base level it isn't literal but you would understand it perfectly well you don't need to translate it it means he was driving very fast so it's a metaphor that stands for a reality now i learned that years ago from c s lewis but it's immensely helpful when it comes to the book of revelation and all i can do is give you one or two very brief examples the natural thing to do and the reformers stress this of course is to take things as they strike you at face level so for example when jesus said i am the door you don't take that literally that he was made of metal steel or plastic or wood no you realize that it's a metaphor but again it's a metaphor for something real he's a real door into a spiritual experience of god he's not a liberal door and the problem is with the word literal it's almost useless and let me give you an example of the book of revelation we the vision the very first vision is a vision of seven lamp stands and we're told that the seven lampstands of the seven churches of asia and you say well that's all that that's just a bit of code that now we know that every time we see a lamp stand we read church but you see that is exactly wrong because it's not um who they are they're churches it's what they are what the churches are so john is looking at the churches as lamp stands and what interests him is the way in which they are holding up the light of the christian message so we tend to look at ah it's a code what does it mean ah it's a church and we're finished no we're only started because the metaphor is giving expression to what john wants us to understand and that makes it fascinating you see because we now see that he's interested in increasing the intensity of the light proceeding from churches which is the thing that some churches today ought to think about very seriously so you can go through the book of revelation and you can see this kind of thing now there's only one uh thing in revelation that really looks like a code the number of the beast you've probably heard of it the number is 666 and the attempts to solve what it means have been all too successful all through history it's a gematria that is in the ancient days if a girl fell in love with somebody called jim she would add up the numerical value of the letters um in his name and carve it the tree i love the boy whose number is 25 and everybody else would try and work out what that was but you see here's the interesting thing who that is in the book of revelation we don't know and i don't even speculate but i can tell you what it is because the text tells us what it is and what it is it's the number of a man so it's a symbol for a human being and that of course is the most fascinating and slightly scary thing about it but i'm not going to go into that anymore but what you need to do is always when you think this may be a metaphor then ask yourself the question what reality do i think it stands for and that will help you solve many of these puzzles and it would make the book of revelation absolutely fascinating thank you very much john um so much more that could be said but we'll we'll park that one for the moment um we've got another question here on on ai and that kind of thing um do you want to read that one now is this carla yes um okay so carla perry says um professor lennox does your book discuss the difference between who is human and that which is machine a lot of television shows and movies are creating viewers who are sympathetic to ethics protecting the life of the ai yeah so i suppose a lot of a lot of our sci-fi now is is all concentrated around this very popular idea isn't it john that machine learning and consciousness could somehow have this this moment where it suddenly becomes you know genuinely like a human soul or consciousness and and even as as carla says there this idea that we should actually treat artificial intelligence as having its own rights and and so on um which is all fascinating stuff i mean i've i've watched the series a series called westworld i don't know if you've heard of it but it's it's all set in this theme park whereby these robots that get consciousness and suddenly they rebel against their human masters who are using them for entertainment and so on um i mean a lot of people seem to think that is the direction things are going don't they that that what we're being shown in the sci-fi is effectively what the future will look like in in some form what do you think do you do you think as carla says that there is ultimately a difference between what humanism what machine can ever be i suppose in that way well i suspect that there is but the direct answer to her question is yes i do discuss it in my book because this is in essence what's called the transhumanist project and harare is very clear about it that there are two big goals for the 21st century number one is to abolish physical death as a technical problem so that humans may die but they won't have to and number two is to enhance human happiness by enhancing our life is experienced by biogenetic engineering by drugs by all kinds of things and that is a desire of many people and what we've got to bear in mind and i give you a selection in my book of voices that are for this and voices that are very much against it because if we're going to treat ethically uh robots and that kind of thing we have to re uh go enter into the field and discuss the biggest problem in this area and that is the problem of consciousness because if an artificial general intelligence the idea of that is that it will be something either a machine or enhanced human that can do much and more in every area that a human being can do not just in one area but in every area and if it's going to really seriously uh imitate human intelligence it will have to be conscious and here's the problem no one knows what consciousness even is let alone the capacity to build it so i see a virtually insuperable barrier here and if something isn't conscious then it is a little bit problematic to make any sort of ethical description the difficulty here is we get sentimental about certain things we see these cuddly robotic toys and all the dear little things and this kind of reaction to them you see and people treat them as pets and they don't soil the floor and they they um never answer back and all this kind of stuff and they're alert 24 7. and the danger is that we begin to think of them in anthropomorphic terms we begin to change them into humans in that sense what we need to be very careful of is the language that's being used in the whole field of artificial intelligence and one of the most interesting papers i ever read on a topic and i met the author who's now in his 80s is the word artificial in the phrase artificial intelligence is real and that's a very important thing to realize but once we have the word intelligence in it and as justin has just said machine learning people begin to think well yes it is intelligent because it simulates intelligence but it isn't intelligent and we're nowhere near i have read a vast amount about this and talked to people around the world about it we're nowhere near producing artificial life let alone artificial consciousness whatever that would mean so in one sense i don't think you need worry but in another sense we've already reached the stage with narrow artificial intelligence that's the stuff that actually works where it is having a profound 1984 type influence on our society and it is the tool for repressive states vladimir putin said a year or two ago whoever leads in the ai rules the world and there's a lot of truth in that because this technology is capable of enslaving people and one of the things i address in the book are the various scenarios people have of the future some very serious physicists like max tegmark all these scenarios will a super intelligence if we ever make it be benevolent will it treat human beings as pets or will it simply get rid of them as a nuisance will we be able to control it and all this kind of stuff now if people are thinking that way what i want to say to them is this if we're prepared to entertain that why don't we have a look at the scenario that's described in the book of revelation subject of the previous question but not only there in the letters paul wrote to the thessalonians and also in the book of daniel a scenario there that talks about the future and put it into the mix of our thinking to see whether christianity is talking sense so i devote part of my book in trying to do that but you know when we read about artificial intelligence it's always just round the corner 40 years away and it's been 40 years for as long as i've been thinking about these things it seems to extend into the future because people who know realize that we understand so very little about the life we already possess let alone the consciousness and how the brain links to the mind and all of these kind of things so it's interesting it's important it's important enough that many of the leading thinkers in the world are very concerned about having some kind of international agreement about ethical norms as to what research we should allow because there is a swelling opinion if it can't be done it should be done and the big danger is we start to meddle with the germline of human beings and we alter humanity irrevocably and that could be an absolute catastrophe as c.s lewis predicted but other questions coming in we'll we'll move from the the technological ai stuff to to more of some of the classic questions around um evidence for the existence of god and and those kinds of debates that go on i think you've got one here from phil yeah there's a question here from phil nightingale um who says can you can you help us with the best defense against the atheist claim that i don't need to prove god doesn't exist the burden of proof is on the theist to prove that he does well there's a total misunderstanding lies behind that question and it's that atheism is not a belief system but it is a belief system what has happened is that richard dawkins and hitchens and a number of others have revised in fact they've redefined the concept of belief and they think faith is believing where there's no evidence so they say atheists have no faith and they've come to believe that which is rather oxymoronic and self-contradictory you see in the book where john where dawkins says that atheists have no faith he spends 400 pages explaining what he believes what his faith is because the flip side of atheism and what lies behind your question is people say well i just don't believe there is a god that's not a matter of faith but what they don't tell you is that is part of a whole belief system that we call naturalism or materialism and that's why dawkins book is not one page long i don't believe in god full stop the burden of proof is on you no he doesn't do that because the burden of proof is on both sides we've got to have evidence for what we believe or else we're a little bit gullible and i find somebody said the burden of proof is on you to prove there is a god i'm happy to respond to that by giving evidence but i'm going to ask them what is their evidence for saying that there is no god and if they refuse to answer that they're putting themselves in a very weak intellectual position i have heard it said just to extend this little i i and i'm very much in agreement with with your position there john but sometimes that the way atheism is defined and i don't know if you've heard this is is as i simply lack belief in god therefore there's it's it's not saying it's essentially saying i i don't have a belief and therefore because i i lack this belief i'm just have to wait until someone convinces me otherwise and gives me a belief and in a sense it's i've always found that kind of collapses into a sort of agnosticism oh yes it does that isn't atheism you're absolutely right that's agnosticism i lack belief is essential to say i don't know and when i make agnostics like that and they tell me i'm a i'm an agnostic i like belief so i say to them look i make an agnostic too there are lots of things i don't know so please tell me what you don't know and i might be able to help you and you might be able to help me with what i don't know it's this idea that agnostic is a sort of supreme position that nobody else shares and if a person says i don't know and then moves on to say you can't know i said to them well if you don't know how can you know that i don't know that sounds like a riddle um here's another one um that's come in on um the question of science and the beginning of the universe specifically um greg asks i've heard many prominent atheists say that if we give science more time that a solid explanation for the beginning of the universe will be established what would you say to someone who makes such an assertion but explanations come at different levels the point is science has given us an explanation in the sense of the standard model of physics and it talks about the big bang beginning and what subsequently happened and all that kind of thing science itself at least the current views are that the laws of nature that we observe break down at a singularity at the beginning so you can't have a scientific explanation of that but i think often that question comes from the fact that we don't quite get our head around the fact that explanation doesn't only occur in a scientific sense i i often illustrate that by saying why is the water boiling and people say well it's because the heat is agitating the molecules of water in a kettle and that's why it's boiling well that's a good scientific explanation but it's actually boiling because at this point in this interview i'd love a cup of tea you see now that's an agent explanation in terms of my desire it doesn't conflict with the scientific explanation it doesn't compete with it it complements it and what you're saying is this will science find out more about the beginning highly probably and it'll be fascinating to see it when it does but that's not an argument against the god explanation because the god explanation is not the same kind of explanation i often say to people look science and god no more compete as explanation for the universe than henry ford in the law of internal combustion compete as an explanation for a motor car engine we need to realize that science is powerful because its explanatory power focuses on a certain set a certain kind of questions and the questions it doesn't deal with actually are the most important questions questions of meaning so science will go on and on and we may find out more and more but that doesn't remove god because he's not a god of the gaps i can't explain it therefore god did it not at all god's the god of the whole show the bits we do understand the bits we don't um john we're going to change tactics slightly now um many churches hours included have had to we've had to go online in a much bigger way than we were already um in these last few months and we've certainly experienced that in our church um and there's a question that's coming from mark gilmore who was wondering what your thoughts were on how christians should handle social media youtube and other addictive algorithmic platforms um how can we use these platforms well uh for our purposes because in a way they can suck us in as well can't they you know they're they're there to keep eyeballs on screens essentially and and that's not always very productive or or very healthy for us frankly in the end oh it isn't particularly for young people if you read the works of the psychologists we are in danger of rewiring our brains and developing very short attention spans which some people may even notice in church as a result of this so my response to it if it's sucking you in then practice a good christian virtue which is called electronic fasting and i think it's something that some people need to do because if a person is watching a screen six eight ten hours a day and of course it's doing something to them they'll fail in the end to distinguish between the world they see on the screen and what we would now call the real world although some of them call it the real world as they understand from psychological research so these are tools to be used the danger with anything we use which is fascinating that it becomes not a servant but a master and if it begins to control us so that we got to see the latest youtube video and so on look we all need time for thought and reflection and quiet spaces and in the bible there was a wonderful jewish institution called shabbat taking a day of rest and it's no rest if if you're watching uh something on a screen or all your time we need to give it up start reading a real book if you've seen one in the last one they do still exist and go outside and get a good walk and get involved in nature and so on i mean one could go on and on but there is a very real danger i have found here we are involved with zoom or something like that these are very useful platforms and they're helping many people who are locked in simply to have company and from my perspective as a communicator they are immensely powerful and helpful i've been already today had an interview with america and two more in australia well you can't do that normally but now we've got the technology so it's using it but realizing that if it's beginning to take over and you're not sleeping very well which is a very good indicator then you're probably watching too much of a screen too late at night and of course it's fatal to take it to bed with you but i'm sure you don't want me to become a horrible old uncle and maybe things like that though it's very very wise advice john um i think as parents of teenagers as well absolutely it's you know it's it's a daily concern i mean i'm i'm old enough that i didn't actually grow up with screens constantly around me but my our children have grown up as they call them digital natives and they have never been in a world where they didn't have immediate access to the internet and to screens and so on and i think we're navigating for the first time how we how we parent and how we raise children in a psychologically healthy way when there is a completely new world that they're being injured and it's no easy task but but there are resources out there um just um our time has come almost to a close all too quickly john i want to thank you again for the time you've given us uh today we've got one more question that we'll throw at you in a moment but um just before we do that i just want to remind people that if you want to get hold of john's book 2084 which we've obviously referenced in some of these questions it's available at the website 2084book.com um but you can also find a link from the video here where you can purchase the book and get hold of it for yourself if you get the audible version you'll hear my own voice narrating it so um i don't know if that's uh that's going to make you want to buy it or not but um in any case um that's the place to go and again if you enjoy what you're hearing and watching today on the show do subscribe to the unbelievable podcast and youtube channel and indeed the newsletter and just a reminder uh we've got the the info there on the video if you want to subscribe to the newsletter you'll get a free ebook sent your way as well with some fascinating conversations i've had with some leading thinkers across the atheist and christian divide so we've got a final question we'll go and find a question this is from again who says how do you convince somebody who believes that they are a good person that they still have need for god there were people like that at the time of the new testament and there always will be people like that i think one of the advices that c.s lewis gave on that question was just try hard to live with the servant on the mount for a week and then ask yourself the question again because when we compare ourselves with the stature of jesus christ and his behavior we all fall short now that's not to say we're not good we're not good parents and and good people jesus never stated that we weren't um he pointed out that we do all kinds of things we love our children and all this kind of stuff but when measured by the standard of god all of us surely have to confess because it's not simply how we behave towards others that is the measure of goodness and morality it's how we behave towards god and the number one commandment is to love the lord your god with all your heart soul and strength have you done that because if you haven't you're not perfect there's no question about it and i haven't certainly not and therefore the measure of real goodness because once a youngish person approached jesus and said good teacher and he says good there is no one good but god now you need to think about that in connection with your question do you really think you're as good as god and has your goodness shown itself the point is that god recognizes good deeds there's a famous story in the book of acts of one of the first non-jews who became a christian his name was cornelius he was a a roman citizen and he was very generous before he became a christian and peter was sent to the apostle peter and explaining the christian faith to him in his house he said to canelos your prayers in your arms have come up before god what you're doing really god loves it he thinks it's terrific but during that interview cornelius discovered that he also needed salvation because although he was in that sense a good chap and we would all have been happy to know him and have liked him he wasn't a person that didn't need forgiveness we all need forgiveness and therefore there are two sides to this and perhaps you're reacting and of course i don't know you so i may be wrong but perhaps you're reacting to christians who said that nobody does any good well that isn't true the lord himself recognized cornelius's goodness but compared with god we all have sinned and fall short of the glory of god and in that sense we're not good and we need god's salvation and forgiveness which he freely offers us so i don't think there's a difficulty in reconciling what you're sensing with what the new testament god loves what you do that's good but do remember that will never save you because salvation is not on the basis of merit that's a religious view that's common around the world that salvation like everything else in life depends on merit the wonderful thing about christianity that makes it unique is that salvation is granted to people who cannot merit it like me and that is why one of the main reasons i am a christian because jesus offers me something that no other religion or philosophy offers me that is forgiveness peace with god on the basis not of my merit or goodness but of the fact that christ has done something for me that if i accept it then i receive peace with god forgiveness and eternal life and that is where my hope is placed it would be a very risky thing to place your hope in your own goodness because if god starts assessing me i'll not speak for you you have to answer that for yourself then i would come very far short of his standards funny thing is um john that we we preached on the story of cornelius on sunday in our church in our church service and and we talked about uh well you know some of the things you've just been sharing and about the fact that god loves us so much that he he doesn't want to leave us as we are yes exactly right right closer to him yeah and and uh cornelius was good but but jesus had so much more to offer him that's correct and and if you could see john next door to where we're filming this in our in our sitting room we have a whole puppet stage erected which we use every sunday as part of our family time and we're going through the stories of acts all the way through oh wonderful so we had the whole of the story of cornelius acted out with puppets on sunday as well oh my glad they mentioned that yeah there you go it's been such a pleasure uh to spend some time with you john thank you so much and thank you for the fact that you are just offering yourselves to so many people during this time as well from your study uh connecting with people all over the world uh it's just wonderful to be able to spend some time and and i hope that all the people who've been watching have appreciated it many many more questions here than we obviously were able to ask but thank you everyone who has sent in questions and we we will continue to look at them and perhaps they'll feed into future editions of the show as well um but for now can i remind you again do do check out the links to john's book from the description do feel free to subscribe to the unbelievable newsletter as well you'll get the free ebook and of course listen to the show uh you'll hear many uh episodes with john featured in conversation with lots of interesting people over the last several years so um john uh to you and sally uh thank you very much for the time and god bless you well thanks to both of you very much it's lovely to have been interviewed by such a delightful pair let me just reiterate don't be unbelieving about unbelievable believe in it and watch it thank you very much and good night good night god bless you john god bless you and thank you very much for watching um looking forward to to seeing what goes on in all the comments after this um we will be uh airing the show again on our youtube channel via our podcast and the radio station so you'll be able to watch back at any time as convenient to you but for now thank you very much for being part of our live stream and we'll say goodbye for more conversations between christians and skeptics subscribe to the unbelievable podcast and for more updates and bonus content sign up to the unbelievable newsletter you

Channel: Unbelievable?

Views: 52,717

Rating: 4.8635778 out of 5

Keywords: unbelievable, justin brierley, premier christian radio, christianity, atheism, philosophy, faith, theology, God, apologetics, Jesus, debate, John Lennox, science, artificial intelligence, AI, 2084

Id: wD_G1zaG2TU

Length: 74min 20sec (4460 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 17 2020