Prof. John Lennox | The Logic of Christianity

[Music] it's a great honour and privilege today to be able to talk to john lennox a man i've admired for his sharp intellect and clarity and breadth of knowledge as well as courage uh in the public square for a very long time he's a very interesting and a very astute public intellectual he's also a defender of what the remarkable c.s lewis once termed mere christianity and is an amateuritis professor of mathematics at the university of oxford he's no stranger to australia he's been here quite a few times he's been on shows such as q and a where he consistently displayed not only the qualities that i've also mentioned already but great civility and great good humor and great patience and great understanding he's published extensively on the interface of science philosophy and theology he's engaged in numerous public debates defending the christian faith against well-known atheists including richard dawkins the late christopher hitchens and peter singer he's the author of quite a number of books including can science explain everything and most recently where is god in a coronavirus world so john thank you so much for your time it's really good of you to come to us all the way from oxford it's wonderful to be back in australia albeit virtually well to kick off i understand that uh back when you were very young in cambridge at cambridge university you were actually able to sit in on some of cs lewis's last formal lectures many would say that he was the greatest christian apologist of the 20th century the remarkable little uh factoid i suppose that i came across the other day was that the bbc commissioned him to do a series of broadcasts to boost morale during the darkest days of that struggle for civilization called the second world war and only one has survived but a remarkable man not only for his books for his speeches but also for the narnia series that have been made into well-known movies did he have anything about him in particular that inspires you today john and did he have any impact on the way you think about truth and indeed about faith i remember his lectures extremely vividly because it was in 1962 and i had read most of his books before i left school and i knew he was at cambridge i didn't know he was dying and that he'd refused any lecturing in the previous term but in the michaelmas term in 62 he was back in the faculty of english lecturing on john dunn's poetry and since that was just across the road from the math department i sneaked out a few times skipped the maths lectures and listened to lewis and i'm very glad i did the main impact was not only the brilliance of his delivery and the cleverness with which he wove in gentle comments on his christian commitment but the physical situation because it was very cold and the room was completely packed with students all over the floor sitting in the windows no health and safety of course in those days and he came in he's quite a heavily built chap with a thick coat on and a long scarf and a hat and he started lecturing the moment he burst through the double door and as he picked his way through the crowd he was still lecturing as he took off his scarf and his hat this coat slowly so that by the time he was at the podium you'd had three or four minutes of an absolutely brilliant lecture and that went on for about 50 minutes and then he reversed the process he kept lecturing while he put on his ass wound up his scarf put on his coat and the last few words were brilliantly calculated to coincide precisely with his bursting out through the double doors there was no q and a so that's my memory of him and in fact i just um uh film a documentary film with kevin sorbo who's a hollywood actor on my apologetic activity and we reenact that scene in that lecture room as part of the film it's called against the tide and it's to be released in america on the 19th of november did he even impacted me he had a colossal impact on me my father discovered him and gave me mere christianity when i was about 13 and i devoured it because he introduced me to the logic of christianity that was the first thing the clarity of his arguments and i learned a great deal from that but lewis beyond that he was no mathematician uh we nearly lost lewis because he failed the algebra paper and he didn't have to reset it because the world war intervened which is a great thing otherwise he'd never got to oxford but he had a very good geometric intuition and he used his reason and imagination to provide illustrations of the more complex aspects of christian thinking and i find it was very helpful but his major contribution to my thinking which is very active today was his unpacking and deconstruction of naturalistic philosophy and he showed me very clearly because of his deep grasp of the philosophy of science which is one reason many scientists don't like him he understood exactly what was going on that he could see that naturalism undermined not only science but rationality itself and that is a central argument even today in my view now that is extremely interesting can we just explore that for a moment many people would be surprised to learn and i'm convinced by this case uh but uh others might not that christianity had a major and positive role to play in the development of science itself yes absolutely but the popular line now of course is that science and christianity are somehow at war with one another incompatible and yet science in many ways is a product of a christian worldview that says there's a god out there who did things and does things in an ordered way we therefore have an opportunity to go and understand that order and to explore creation to put it that way but that's completely washed out of the narrative today yes it is and ignorance of history is a very dangerous thing as you know it's it's sad but pointed it out very clearly and he was actually stating a thesis which is commonly accepted by leading historians of science and they're the important people here and lewis's summary is memorable it is this men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in the legislator and he was really summarizing the work of the philosopher and historian sir alfred north whitehead but today that thesis is widely represented you have a very famous representative of it in australia and not only an edwin judge the distinguished historian but in the younger peter harrison who's a distinguished australian professor and he adds to it very interestingly because it wasn't only the judeo-christian worldview believing in an intelligent creator and the rationality of the universe but peter harrison actually goes further and he says that a great contribution was made by the reformers attitude to scripture going to scripture not with ideas of allegory or what it should tell us but rather to see exactly what it said and kepler did the same with the universe let's see what it says and that changed the face of science for for all time so there's a very close connection there are various nuances of course but i find that one of the strong evidences for christianity and i often put it this way john i say to people look i'm not ashamed of being both a scientist and a christian because arguably christianity gave me my subject the mathematician david belinsky has written a book uh called i think he has yeah i think the title is a play on dawkins's book the god delusion and i think polinsky even though he's an agnostic himself not a believer called his the atheist delusion now presumably he like lewis faced massive opposition or faces opposition to this perspective from scientists and yet the reality is that surely we need to accept science cannot answer all questions and perhaps we need to remember that scientists can be human too they're human they can make mistakes they don't get everything right none of us do there's a wonderful quote from the nobel prize winner richard feynman who says outside his field the scientist is just as dumb as the next guy and i i think that there are various sources for this problem it's quite complex because part of it is sociological and cultural as distinct from being purely scientific the enlightenment attitude to a corrupt church meant that people pushed in the direction of getting rid of god and then there was newton's view of the universe which ironically actually led to distancing of people from the concept of god they had the notion of a clockwork universe and it seemed to run on its own so god if existed at all became a kind of deistic figure in the distance but then added to that there are two major problems that people get very confused about when it comes to science and god being incompatible science is in the business of explanation and the argument is that if you've got a scientific explanation you don't need the god explanation the idea that god is not necessary is very prominent these days and it is that because particularly of the late stephen hawking but this is a confusion as to the kind of explanation that god provides hawking actually suggested that we have to choose between god and science and dawkins is in the same position and to my mind that's a failure to realize the explanation and explanation in terms of science by which i mean the natural sciences and in my book can science explain everything i give a very simple illustration why is the water boiling well there's a scientific explanation in terms of heat transfer across the base of a kettle agitating molecules but then there's a personal explanation the water is boiling because i would very much like a cup of tea now any child can say and i know that because i lecture in schools that those two explanations don't contradict they don't conflict but they complement and both are necessary and what amazes me is that some of the leading scientists that i've encountered and discussed with cannot say that they got explanation no more contradicts a scientific explanation a correct one of course than henry ford explanation contradicts the law of internal combustion as accounting for the existence of a motor car they complement each other and i think if folks grasp that it would take a huge amount of heat out of the equation we're talking about different kinds of explanation and explanation occurs at these different levels that's one of the main issues that i have to contend with all the time well science has been for many people a great blocker to faith for quite a while we're told but i wonder in fact whether that's still the case if you think of critical theorists and where they've gone to they reject not just religion not all great political theories not just modern thinking but science and reason and the enlightenment as well they've got to the point where they would argue that the fundamental problem in the world today is racism and that racism is is in essence white supremacy so you've got now a whole construct that's moved well outside the basis of reason and has left science behind so now you've got a problem where frankly the science community needs to realize that they are being rejected and challenged just as christians are and that what's taken its place is a deep commitment to emotional uh and and and heated and often very personalized presentation of world views that are no longer based not just in faith but they're not based in science and reason either so haven't we moved to a different place now there may be some people for whom science is the blocker but not most well some people have and it's ironic you know that these people come up with these views by using their reason they can't get rid of reason and i think part of the problem in the initial part of what you just said is that the concept of faith has been so twisted and distorted that people don't realize when they picked science against faith they're contradicting themselves because the whole scientific endeavor as we saw from the earlier part of our conversation depends on believing in the rational intelligibility of the universe and einstein said i cannot imagine a genuine scientist without that faith so we need to reset the compass bearing and point out that the atheist the current atheist definition of faith is completely false it is a religious concept and it means believing where there's no evidence it's not a religious concept it's an ordinary concept and faith coming from latin fee days has got the idea of trustworthiness reliability and evidence base but the post-modern move which thankfully is not true of everybody leading to what you say the most the more emotional touchy feely stuff that goes out the window once they confront a bank manager in the sense that all this talk about there's no such thing as truth and science tells us nothing and all this kind of stuff completely disappears because people cannot live without a truth concept and they cannot live without reason and if you go for a mortgage in any good australian bank and you say i'd like to borrow a million dollars and the bank manager says but you've only got 50 000 to your credit oh that's only your truth they'll not get very far with that kind of argumentation so i refuse to bow to the idea that this is characteristic of an entire generation a friend of mine puts it this way he says people are only relativist and postmodern in areas that they think are unimportant now those areas may be growing but there are still areas for every one of us that are important for reason truth factuality play a central role and we cannot avoid it and i think it's a mistake to play into such people's hands because civilization would collapse without the concept of truth rationality and a deep morality well it occurs to me that covert has actually made us realize that we want to know the facts we want to know real information we want to know what's true and what's fake and what we can know and what we can't know it's an example of something where we don't resort to the idea of well it's only dangerous if you think it's dangerous uh what do i mean by that you might think about it one way you might think it's dangerous i might think it's not dangerous and they're both equally relevant if we believe our position to be true there's a limit to this idea of moral relativism we don't really believe it at all when the chips are down when reality dawns we know that moral relativism doesn't work we want to know what the scientists and what the medicos can tell us about it you've written a book about coronavirus which goes right to the heart then of faith and the question mark that many people still have the one that's been around for a long time is of course this one of suffering how can a good god allow a terrible thing like this to happen you unpack it in your book what is it that you'd most like us to take out of it well this is one of those big questions with whom many of us who've thought about these things and that's most of us have wrestled all our lives and what i noticed during life about that discussion that goes back to uh lucretius really an epicurus and david hume who are always cited in this that god's goodness is incompatible with his power because look at the evil in the universe but since we do not seem to be able to solve that i ask a different question and that's because i'm a mathematician if we bash our heads on one question for centuries we often say are we asking the right question i wonder if we are here the fact is that we are confronted as we look at the world with a mixed picture we see beauty like the stars the night out in your farm in australia and we see ugliness we see pandemics we see barbed wire bombs and terrorism and the world presents us with that mixed picture and we've got to face it and no world view worthy of its salt that doesn't is worthy of insult if it doesn't face that so i asked the question is there anywhere any evidence that there exists a god of such a kind that we could trust with that that's a very hard question but it seems to me that christianity explores this not only rationally but opens a window on a possibility doesn't give us a simplistic solution and i wouldn't insult anybody's intelligence by suggesting that but in my book i point out that at the heart of christianity there is suffering and if jesus is as he claimed to be god incarnate then we can legitimately ask what is god doing on a cross and it surely shows at the very least that god has not remained distant from human suffering but has become part of it but if that were all we'd never have heard of jesus and the second half of the story is the one where lewis has helped me such a great deal and that is the resurrection that god raised jesus from the dead and therefore death is not the end that throws a totally different light on suffering you see i understand people because i know many of them who look at this problem and hume's formulation of it and say well therefore it's obvious the answer is there's no god and at one level they appear to have resolved the intellectual problem but they have not resolved the suffering and the pain they haven't removed it it's still there but what they've clearly removed and many of them will admit it is all ultimate hope now that may be the situation but it seems to me we need to explore further a credible alternative that goes deeply into that problem and offers us real hope through the resurrection of jesus atheism has nothing to say something of covered 19. christianity won't necessarily mean that they're cured of it but it has something to say it can tell them that through a simple step of commitment to christ and repenting of the mess they've made of their lives and perhaps their those of others they can enter into a new kind of life which transcends covet now i think that if that's true that is worth communicating and that is part of what my book is about i know this is a very inadequate presentation but if your watchers and listeners want to hear more i arrived in new zealand two days after the earthquake at christchurch and someone has put together a web page about what i said to the people of new zealand when they had to meet uh folks who had lost relatives uh in that earthquake which is what we call natural evil just as covet 19 is and if they google my name in new zealand they will perhaps find something that will help them to see a bit more detail in it and then of course there is my little book well i think you're being very modest i think what you've just said is very helpful the alternative to say that it's just an accident everything's an accident it's just in our dna is somehow very empty and quite devastating if you think it's stopping through there's no rhyme there's no reason there's no explanation the wounds will never be bound up the pain will never end there is no hope i don't know that we can really survive without hope it's not easy but one offers a difficult road to hope the other it seems to me to suggest that there is no such thing as hope it's an irrelevant human longing anyway so why suffering does anyone understand will there ever be any relief will the wounds be bound up if it's all meaningless then no one understands there'll be no healing there's no hope it won't end what a despairing place that seems to me and i wonder whether it hasn't this lack of hope now permeated our culture in a really serious way we see unhappiness anxiety depression self-harm very deeply enmeshed now in western culture we need despite our material well-being we need more i'm sure you're absolutely right and that's why programs like this are very important because unfortunately in my country at least the media are very biased against serious discussion of what christianity has to say and it's very interesting in the uk in recent days church attendance and virtual services has gone up it's multiplied by five to ten times and it shows that people want to investigate whether the god solution has anything to say in the midst of the pandemic but you're absolutely right and my heart goes out to young people who have been fed superficial materialism and have no not even the beginning of an understanding of what christianity has to say so it's important and that's one of the reasons i stepped into the public arena to call out some of these very inadequate understandings of culture and of history and of christianity and to try to inject some real hope into the situation that's not just a panacea or trivial yes it does seem to me to go back to the point you raised earlier it's dangerous to wash history out now in one sense christianity is history isn't it i mean the bible is is history uh it has to be red as history and that's valuable but we've lost any understanding of it very little understanding of what the bible actually says now in our culture the people who've wanted it eradicated have been surprisingly successful now they feel free to interpret it if it happens to suit to them we often see this in the media oh but that's not christian as though they have an understanding of what the bible actually says is christian but to go back to my earlier remarks about critical theory and that whole movement it seems we've actually reached the point in this age of biblical illiteracy that is very easy for christians or opponents of christianity you know to say not just that it's odd or that it's irrelevant or that it's not true but to actually say that it's hurtful or even harmful now that of course opens the way in this age when we have competing human rights all set out in law for people to say those who follow christianity and who promote its the teachings of the bible to be seen as people who are potentially criminals because they're saying things that that are harmful that more than hate speech they actually do damage i don't think we could have got to that point if we hadn't so destroyed an understanding of our own history and as a part of that what real christianity actually is so that people can make choices about whether or not it's true and whether or not they will believe we need to reaffirm the huge cultural influence of christianity on our sister on our western societies we owe far more to the biblical worldview than we realize in terms of the things we take for granted human rights civilized behavior all that kind of thing goes straight back to christianity and as for the latter point you make of christianity being harmful i used to wonder why there is so much emphasis made in the gospels on the trial of jesus as distinct from his death but when this wave of christianity is dangerous came up i could see why because what many people fail to realize is that the charge that jesus was charged with was that of terrorism and insurrection and he appeared before the roman governor who acquitted him of the charge but the very interesting thing is that the central part of the discussion was the nature of jesus kingdom and jesus said to pilate look my kingdom is not of this world in what sense did he mean it well he explained otherwise my servants would have been fighting and pilate knew that jesus had not resisted arrest and had also protected one of the high priest servants healed his ear actually when two of the disciples very foolishly took swords and pilate realized that here was a person who was not violent and would not uh have his kingdom progressed by violent means so he to the world declared him as innocent because and i think this is the important thing pilate realizes all of us must that the one thing you cannot enforce by violence is truth especially if it's truth about the love of god peace with god salvation forgiveness eternal life and all this kind of thing and therefore i think it's important for us to go back into the history because of course christianity is all to do with the person of jesus who is a historical figure he lived he died he rose again all of those things accessible through historical methods and we need to affirm that because there's no christianity without him and he dealt with the kind of problem that's being brought up in his name now i come from northern ireland so i'm acutely aware of the kind of allegations made against christianity they are reasonable allegations against perverted christianity or christendom but anybody who takes a sword or an ak-47 to to protect christ or his messages not follow him but disobey him explicitly and we need to explain that well yes yes uh there's a specific as a stewing of violence even in the garden of gethsemane with jesus response to the cutting off of of the authority's ear and it makes it plain that any attempt to enforce a view about christianity to force people to believe at the point of a sword if i can put it that way is wrong and not supported it's specifically rejected by the founder of christianity any attempt to enforce christianity has that effect of cutting the ears of people in a deeper sense they don't want to listen to the christian faith and that's why we are where we are today so i'm in the business of putting the ears back on people i'd like to circle back to c.s lewis and what he had to say about the challenge of making a decision about the central figure in history of christ but before we do that you've debated some of the finest minds in the world people who do not believe who argue that science disproves god or whatever so richard dawkins the late christopher hitchens for example can i ask you the thing that always worries me is that they're intent upon tearing down what little remains of our cultural house because supposedly that's a good thing to do but i would have thought burning down what's left of your house is pretty horrible unless you have a better house for us to go to and i'm wondering what that better house might actually be what better house is richard dawkins or whilst christopher hitchens suggesting that we moved to i understand that even dawkins has recognized that christianity is in such a rapid state of collapse in britain that he himself wanders i i don't want to put words into his mouth but i understand this to be the case wonders just how we might find a way to live going forward um so i don't know i i don't mean to be disrespectful i genuinely don't but you've debated these people and gazed with them at a level that i certainly have and i just wonder how they think the rejection of christianity is going to help us create a better world i i'm genuinely puzzled by it as well as challenged by it and i say that very sincerely well there'll be people who'll say they're a good atheist and i'm accepting that point i don't argue with that there are many good people and many bad people and sometimes it has less to do with what they believe than might first meet the eye but but the question is here as in my mind is where there is a better place and a better way for us to live where is it and you've had the opportunity to really discuss these things at great length can you enlighten me it's utopia it's no place and i don't think it exists and they're very reluctant to do it there's a lovely scene that's on the internet actually where um i'm debating with a number of atheists in the oxford union and on my side was peter hitchens the brother of the late christopher hitchens and he addresses them by saying uh to the audience he says you know these people are not telling you what their belief system leads to and it's it's pretty feisty stuff but i think peter was absolutely right they don't really tell us the implications of what dawkins calls the fact that dna just is and we dance to its music and by that statement he abolishes all morality even though he claims to be a moral being i think it is uh solely destructive and they've nothing to put in his place and therefore it's reflective it seems to me not of something intellectually solid but of a gut reaction they don't want god in their lives it's a visceral anti-god it's not simply anti-christian it's an anti-god feeling and it's we will not have this man to reign over us and i i have had that impression in in debating these people i do not think their arguments are substantial and i i fear that the blind uh rejection of god is actually undermining their intellectual credibility now i know that's a pretty strong statement and it's pretty formidable as you can imagine debating such people but one of the reasons i've done it john is because i believe that they have nothing to offer the atheist emperor has no clothes and the more we can spell out the logical consequences including the undermining of science including the abolition of morality and all of these things the more we call them out and people see that they are naked and they have nothing to offer well you made some very powerful and challenging remarks and i'm always keen for people to look those challenges in the eye and not simply brush them under the carpet they're too important and of course c.s lewis made the very powerful point that given that we know of the existence of christ i mean it's a nonsense to say that he there's no evidence to suggest that he lived i mean we that just i don't believe that honestly don't believe that washes the question then becomes well just who was he because you don't have many choices as lewis pointed out he's either a man who's mad to the level of a man who thinks he's a poached egg or he's essentially who he claimed to be the option of just saying well he was a good man and a moral teacher isn't open to us i mean people don't go around saying the things he did and making the claims that he did and performing the acts that he did if they're just a madman and nor are mad men generally remembered for very long especially if they lived in a very obscure little tribe in the middle east a very long time ago who do atheists say given the limited choices that jesus was if they're being serious rather than flippant and simply out of anger rejecting the idea of his existence well i get the strong impression that they don't really want to go there but whenever you get into one of these conversations with someone who wants to reject christianity the thing they don't want to do is to go to the question of who is christ this is the difficulty you get a dawkins saying well there's some people believe that jesus never existed and he says graciously then that although i don't go there but he then quotes his source but his source is a retired professor of german not an ancient historian and that kind of levity and superficiality when no ancient historian that i have read i've read many would deny that jesus existed indeed there agreed about many things even atheist ancient historians read edwin judge on that he brilliantly assesses the stuff that is such a low level that's bertrand russell who originally well he was one of the people that raised that question and they don't read what the gospels say and they misinterpret if people watch my debate with peter singer in melbourne uh town hall or city hall they'll see he brought up the transfiguration and he doesn't believe jesus because he was wrong about the second coming and his misreading of the transfiguration is spectacular as his his understanding by the way of the cursing of the fig tree i just feel that they just grasp at what is most obvious to them but they don't do what they do in their own field and that is to consult the experts in the field and what they think it is absolutely amazing to me uh one spectacular example of that is uh ac grayling who took up his pen as a column writer for the new scientists and the first article was on jesus accepts you to believe expects you to believe without evidence and i thought this is going to be very interesting and it was grayling commenting on the discussion between jesus and the apostle thomas in john chapter 20. and craving says there you are you see um jesus says to them thomas because you saw you believe but blessed are those that have not seen but yet believe there you are says grayling jesus expects you to believe without evidence and my attitude to that is can the man not read because jesus didn't say that he wanted his followers to believe without evidence he said blessed are the people who haven't seen that is physically seen and of course visual sighting is evidence but it's not the only kind of evidence and the sheer irony of grayling's misunderstanding there is illustrated by the very next statement in the text which says jesus did many of the signs in the presence of his disciples which are not written in this book but these are written that you might believe here's the evidence grayling didn't even read that and for someone who claims to be a leading philosopher that is to my mind it discredits his intellectual credibility well i take the point it seems almost right to say but until you've actually read the source materials of those gospels in particular you're not really in a position to say what jesus did or did not say no and that's hugely important john i say to many people look today people are biblically illiterate that's not always their own fault but before you reject christianity please listen and read to what it says because until you have heard what it says you won't begin to understand what's going on and you'd be in danger of rejecting something infinitely precious and valuable that can completely change your life on a very superficial basis so start by reading and listening before you make your judgment well i'm a father and a grandfather quite apart from somebody who being somebody who was for a long time involved in public life and believed very much in in good public policy as a deep commitment so i find that i do worry deeply at many levels about the sort of future that we're bestowing upon our children it seems we've stripped them of the tools they need to break down and understand the world around them and i also think we've damaged their hope we've stripped hope away in many ways they ought to be more inquiring and to demand more answers but we've led them by our own by our own actions to be fair i think to lose faith in many of the institutions in the west including governments including our economic arrangements many of the institutions of a free society the surveys are quite clear many young people have lost confidence in democracy and in capitalism without understanding that the alternatives as churchill put it are pretty dreadful and and what concerns me now is that i think we're going to hand them an absolute mess beyond all imagine out of uh imagination out of covert and if i may say so britain is no exception britain's debt levels are truly mind-boggling and they're rising very rapidly the price for managing that will fall to our children and our grandchildren why do i raise that when we're talking about matters non-material well it's because i think a large part of our mess is because we've lost our moral compass governments have behaved in untrustworthy ways bankers have done the same businessmen have engaged in crony capitalism and it's led to this breakdown in trust and confidence and the surge of cynicism that's pretty prevalent today young people are going to need hope john how do we offer them that hope in an age when it's so hard to break through and capture people's attention and provide an environment where we can talk and communicate and exchange ideas challenge one another offer ideas and hope that's not an easy question i'm a father i've got 10 grandchildren and the difficulty john as you know the generic questions they're very difficult to answer how do we give them hope there are millions of them and every single child is an individual and looking towards the future and many are in despair at the moment well all i can say at the practical level is the intergenerational contact is even more important today than it ever was and i'm thrilled to say and i got to say it that my wife keeps such contact with my grandchildren that she's able using skype and so on and texting to nurture them in the faith and the older ones coming in teenage now are beginning to look at their world through strongly christian eyes and that that thrills us to see that happening there's no guarantee it will of course but to get something in i can imagine that if you and i had been living in the roman empire and had been among the first christians we would have also been confronting a very difficult future scenario and every generation is concerned for the next one but you're absolutely right we are passing on a catastrophe it seems to me economically and every other way and the root of it is as you observed it's the loss of moral compass it's the loss of any transcendence it's the loss of absolute values and it's the loss of god and when alexander solzhenitsyn was asked to sum up succinctly what had happened and why a hundred million of his fellow citizens had perished he says the answer is we have forgotten god and therefore it's incumbent upon us a diminishing minority now in some countries to bring god back into the picture before it's too late but it may be too late at least for this generation it's it's very hard to say that but i'm no politician you are so you would be much better fix to say than me well these are great and weighty matters john and thank you for your bravery and your courage as i said at the outset for your clarity and your civility i think it's been said that we should be known by our love and you're very honest i think too in a way that's really impressive i think that's admirable because young people do recognize authenticity when it's really put before them they're not going to be able to sit on the fence much longer it's an uncomfortable place the reality is that the world's becoming so polarized that people have to make a choice they've got to jump one way or the other they'll have to make the choices that for so long in our material comfort we haven't made because we've not had to confront them about what is the purpose of life is there hope do i believe do i not believe and i think the future will be very different to the one that we've experienced as a baby boomer uh we've been very fortunate indeed i just hope there are enough people out there who are looking for a better way before it's too late so john thank you very much indeed it's my pleasure and thank you for a very interesting conversation and one thing that encourages me is that this kind of thing is being done so as the irish say john more power to your elbow and as a scottish australian i say it's wonderful talking to an irishman on friendly terms yes well of course my ancestors are scottish so i'm closer than you think thank you for watching this episode we appreciate your support if you value vital conversations like this one be sure to subscribe to the channel there and also click the notification bell to 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Keywords: johnlennox, christmas, christianity, religion, bible, god, mathematics, science, maths, atheism, morality, history, oxford, c.s. lewis, atheist, christian, christ, philosophy, church, critical theory, theory

Id: W5OPCtf-EhI

Length: 48min 53sec (2933 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 22 2020