The Science & Faith Podcast - James Tour & John Lennox: Christianity, Humanity, and A.I.

[Music] [Applause] welcome to the science and faith podcast with dr james tour and that's who i am you can check out my credentials at jmtour.com or you can check out my social media at drjamestour.com this particular interview is in in collaboration with crosspoint church and west university baptist church for their august apologetics program and if if you are interested in being part of the studio audience for future presentations you can do go to signup.drjamestour.com and we'll get you on the list because when this broadcasts there will be a live chat but that's not able to interact with with the speakers at that time to be able to interact with the speakers you have to be part of the recording and that's what the the sign up at the audience for the audience would do i'm a practicing scientist i'm not just uh somebody who talks about science but also i love jesus more than anything else in the world and uh um that makes this super unique and the the unabashed reason for this podcast is that is that i want to see people saved i want to see people come to a knowledge of jesus christ who i love so much i want you to experience that as well and i want to see the body of christ built up and with that i want to introduce our guests for today dr john lennox dr lennox is a prominent mathematician specializing in in abstract algebra and group theory he's emeritus professor of mathematics at oxford as well as emeritus fellow in mathematics and philosophy of science at green templeton college of oxford an associate fellow of the said business school at oxford he's spoken in many countries and conferences as an academic fellow and is maybe the most notable to our crowd maybe most notable to our crowd as a christian apologist through his expertise in math philosophy and ethics dr lennox has become a popular speaker through many forums and uh he's debated publicly prominent thinkers like richard dawkins three times christopher hitchens twice and peter singer and with that i'd like to welcome my guest john lennox thank you very much uh delighted to be with you well thank thank you for joining us and the first thing i wanted to say is that my wife shireen says hello and she wants to know when you're coming back again for an indian dinner well i would like to come back later today but i don't think we'll be able to do that i have the most wonderful memory of a dinner the last time and also of a presentation that we did together in rice university that was extremely memorable right right i think we called it cosmic chemistry and you and i started out with our we started out with our testimonies and then we just had a discussion and uh and that's that's hopefully we're going to do another one of those today i want to ask you the first question is with all of your learning and everything like that how can you as such a such a educated man believe in something so incredible as the physical resurrection of jesus christ well it's only incredible if you don't consider the evidence for it and i'm a christian as you are because i believe christianity is true and i think that the resurrection does not create any difficulty for a scientist many people think that david hume put an end to respectable belief in resurrection by saying that miracles like that are violations of the laws of nature but i think hume was wrong and many philosophers who are not christian agree that he was wrong the miracles like the resurrection do not violate the laws of nature the laws of nature describe what normally happens but they cannot prevent god intervening in the world that he created to do something special and in fact if we didn't know the laws of nature that for example in this case the dead bodies normally don't rise if we didn't know that then we wouldn't see anything special in the resurrection of jesus so our knowledge of science does not prevent resurrections i think one of the problems is simply this that the word law confuses us we think of violations in in your country of america i often notice on a freeway violators will be towed if you break the law of the land then you get a penalty but the laws of nature aren't like that i i think finally that c.s lewis gave an illustration that's very helpful if i stay in houston in a hotel and on the first night i put a hundred dollars in my bedside drawer and the second night i put another hundred then the laws of mathematics tell me that i got two hundred dollars if i wake up in the third morning and find i've only got fifty dollars there i don't conclude that the laws of mathematics have been broken no i conclude that the laws of texas have been broken and i conclude that because i know the laws of mathematics have not been broken i thought that the drawer in my hotel room was a closed system of cause and effect i was wrong a thief put his hand in and took a hundred and fifty dollars and it's exactly that that we're up against the dominant materialistic notion is that this world is a closed system of cause and effect but it isn't science doesn't tell you that and the biblical view of it makes perfect sense it's an open system but it's got regularities that we can recognize and because we know them then we can see when god does something special to draw our attention and he drew my attention a very big way when i was a teenager and came to see that jesus had literally risen from the dead and therefore he was still alive and therefore he could be encountered and that is the foundation of my christianity over the last 60 years wonderful wonderful and that yes i can say amen to that let me say today we're going to be speaking about your new book called 2084 artificial intelligence and the future of humanity and i have just read that book and uh i have a bunch of questions for you let me just start by saying so the people understand artificial intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines especially computer systems specific applications of ai artificial intelligence include include natural language processing speech recognition machine vision uh machine learning is a subset of ai where where uh it enables systems to learn from data now with that i want to ask you john what is narrow what is narrow ai versus general aai or or agi narrow ai is the kind of artificial intelligence that everybody's using these days it's the stuff that actually works and as you say the idea is to have a machine with a large database and a pattern recognition algorithm that simulates one thing and it's normally only one thing that normally requires human intelligence i think a very good example is the analysis of x-rays say we set up our database consisting of a million x-rays of people's lungs and then i get a pain in my chest and my x-ray is taken now the database will have labels we get the top medical professionals in the world to label the pictures with the diseases they have so the algorithm compares my x-ray and seeks to match it with a pattern in one of those million and it comes up with a diagnosis and at the moment that diagnosis is likely to be better than what i would get at my local hospital and this can be multiplied in many different ways the point is it it's artificial intelligence it only simulates intelligence it is not itself intelligent there's a marvelous paper written by one of the pioneers of this topic who happens to be a christian and i've met him once and his paper was entitled the artificial in artificial intelligence is real and he really got it in one layer artificial general intelligence is as the name suggests the attempt or the attempts to build some kind of system that will simulate everything a human being can do and there are two directions in that firstly there is the attempt to enhance human being start with existing human beings and try to enhance their intelligence by genetic engineering by drugs by all kinds of means to produce a super intelligence or the alternative is to start from scratch or at least start from some kind of silicon base and build up an artificial intelligence into which the hope goes on the part of some people would be able to upload the contents of our brains one day and so give ourselves some kind of immortality now there's huge amounts of speculation in this direction the problem with it is it's taken sufficiently seriously by some leading scientists that we need to think about it because there are scary dimensions to it but long before we get there we must realize that even narrow ai the stuff that works raises huge ethical problems that are beginning to be very obvious around the world take to tell us tell us more oh sure well what are the problems let's go back to the idea the idea of pattern recognition is one thing with x-ray photography but very soon you're into something a bit more sophisticated which is facial recognition and you can see immediate advantages of it for a police force picking out gangsters or criminals in a crowd but it's a surveillance technology and as such it can be used to apprehend criminals it can also be used to control populations and one of the most frightening things that appears to be going on in the world today is the suppression of a whole minority culture the uyghurs in xinjiang in china where the ai systems and the surveillance is unbelievable in its intensity and its quantity and they are being subject to surveillance and if they don't keep the norms of those that are doing the surveillance then they are arrested and put into all kinds of uh camps for re-education and it would seem that there's an attempt to obliter obliterate their culture now that's really scary my book's entitled 2084 and of course that's a take-off from 1984. big brother is watching you but we're already there with that that's not a scary science fiction in the future we're already there and just this week i read a report by some senior police person in the united kingdom saying we need this technology here and we need the most sophisticated version of it that not only recognizes faces but recognizes the emotion that is being portrayed in those faces so we have ethical problems how do we control this kind of development which is being used to control us well you know before we wrap up this interview i am going to let you give us hope because about 25 of your book at the end is just hope as a believer the hope that we have and i'm so glad you finished with that because because it would be frightening you know i have many chinese students that have worked with me when i was an undergraduate i remember when the first chinese visiting scholars came they were generally men in their 40s and they they had their litten their their their caps on that the the the mao type cap and then i remember when the first graduate student started coming and i love the chinese people they have made me famous they have they've they're in every paper of mine every patent of mine they've worked in my labs and i love them so much but i'm seeing what's going on in china with with ai and it's frightening i've heard that that they they can find any human being in any chinese city within seven minutes they know they they can track them and they can locate them within seven minutes and then you talked about in your book how there's going to be a point system so that if you violate certain things you lose points if you do good things that the government deems good you can gain points but you can lower enough that you become an outcast of society this seems to be quite frightening it's very frightening and it's already an operation it's not that there's going to be a point system they're rolling it out uh the last i heard it was 13 cities but i think they're going to roll it out over all of china and by the way i share your experience of chinese people there are many wonderful chinese people and when i was younger i was inspired by stories of chinese believers and today of course there are millions of them and we need as christians to pray for them because this kind of development threatens free expression and of course it inevitably may threaten the gospel but there is hope and one of the ways i got into writing this book was because i read the book homa deus by yuval noah harari who is an israeli historian an atheist and he is a transhumanist in the in the sense that he hopes that ai is going to bring us beyond the stage of being simply humans 1.0 and here's the idea that we're going to do two things in the 21st century firstly we shall abolish death because it's only a technical problem now by that he means that medicine will get to a stage where although we may die we won't have to die and then secondly he says the agenda is going to be to enhance human happiness by upgrading humans by biogenetic engineering drugs all kinds of stuff like that and so give ourselves some kind of experience of immortality now when i'm faced with that my short answer to it is you're too late you're far too late because the irony of the position of the transhumanist agenda is the problem of death has already been solved we have discussed that at the beginning the resurrection of jesus proves that humans can rise from the dead but not only that because he is the son of god he offers everyone who trusts him that they will receive eternal life that is god's life and they will experience a resurrection once he stood in a graveyard and he said i am the resurrection and the life if a person believes in me even though he or she dies yet will they live so that's transhumanist agenda point one it's already been dealt with and if you look at it the way they are putting it it's going to be very expensive if it ever happens it will only be available to an elite with vast amounts of money but the gospel the good news of jesus is absolutely free if we're prepared to trust him the second thing is that the upgrading or the uploading even well the promise of the gospel is the most incredible uploading you'll ever conceive because the central hope of christianity is not the resurrection it's based on the resurrection it's that jesus will one day return and we are told that the dead shall be raised and believers will be taken to be forever with him talk about an uploading and the reason that i infinitely prefer this scenario to the ones say suggested by max tegmark at princeton is that there's a credible basis for believing them there's strong historical evidence for the resurrection of jesus and experiential resurrection of those like ourselves who claim to have met him and have a relationship with him in other words the hope that the transhumanists are looking for i think is a vain hope because there are huge barriers in the way of any scientific attempt to produce artificial general intelligence the biggest one being consciousness and here we are with a message that 20 centuries old that solves both problems at once but in the meantime gives us what the ai agenda doesn't do and gives us power to live a life of moral integrity yeah that that is beautiful that's beautiful you know you mentioned in your book a little bit about about origin of life and i'll tell you that that if you look at the robots because you talked about robots in your book if you look at all the robots we have they've all been they've all been made from from uh st from woo from uh composites and silicon and and uh pieces like that they've not been made from biological entities there's so much that we don't understand about biology so much that we don't understand that people say oh well we understand biology well if you understand biology why don't you ab initio build a robot that looks like a biological robot you never do you never do because you don't understand biology what you do is you work with silicon you work with composites you work with copper wires but you don't work with biology because you don't know what you're doing with biology it is just wildly complex very hard to understand how to build something out of that now we might be able to take a piece of biology and put electrodes on it but to ab initio begin to build up cells and have those cells interact into higher systems we are totally lost and that people are building and planning the building of robots that are based on silicon and not on biology underscores that even though biology is ubiquitous around us and we've not learned how to even copy it fleshly part of it well part of their worry i think is as i read them is that they notice that biological life dies and they're terrified of death so this drive to escape biological dependence i think is partly driven by the fear of death which as the bible tells us is a shadow that hangs over everybody and people are basically scared of it and certainly the advances in ai technology are not helping people to face it at all really but the biblical message helps us to face it but you're absolutely right and i'm sure your audience know that you have every right to talk about the fact that we do not understand biology because you're one of the leading people in the world on what we can do with nano machines and all this kind of stuff and you know from the inside what the difficulties are in trying to create anything remotely resembling even the tiniest part of a cell let alone a complete cell now what would you say to people that say this is just the natural evolution of things humans have evolved and now humans have learned how to make the these ai based systems these ai-based systems you're going to make some ultimate machine that is then going to start creating better and better machines from there and humans are just one point along this evolutionary process and then we'll be done away with and these wonderful ai systems would take over what do you think of that well the scientist and me and i'm a very limited scientist compared with you says well what is your evidence because talking about human beings they are living beings so the first thing to ask about is show us your processes for the origin of life itself and the biogenesis is a totally unsolved problem today as you know in terms of chemistry biology physics and everything else people just don't know and of course the more advanced we've become in understanding the genetic basis of life we realize there we're dealing with language like material and one of the things that does not occur through random unguided at least biological processes is the generation of the kind of information we find say in dna let alone the vastly more complex levels of information that are beginning to come out in systems biology the epigenetic phenomena we just haven't a clue how those develop and therefore i say to people who say we've we've reached this stage and we can move further give us evidence that the mechanisms you propose and they normally are natural selection mutation but i'm not a biologist jim but i've read a lot of biology and in recent days it does seem that the neo-darwinist consensus is falling apart and people like my colleague in oxford dennis noble fellow the royal society say it doesn't need to be extended it needs to be replaced because it just can't do the job the whole thing is far too sophisticated so i find this kind of development really interesting but coming at it from a christian perspective i think humans 1.0 are very special and my reason for that is the central claim of christianity or the central fact of christianity is that god became one and that is staggering to my mind humans are so special made in the image of god which incidentally as jordan peterson recently said in a very interesting lecture this is the cornerstone of civilization we neglected at our peril that were made in the image of god now jordan not only david peterson said that yeah absolutely that you need to wise me his lectures on genesis are full of fascinating discussion but the point is that as john says in his gospel the word became flesh and dwelt among us god became human now that's staggering but that is the central thing that i'm committed to because i believe it to be true it may be unfathomable but it's the only thing that makes sense of what we see in the life death resurrection ascension of jesus christ that's the only explanation that makes sense and i would much prefer as a scientist to accept an explanation that makes sense over against one that makes no sense whatsoever wonderful you know you had a quote in your book and i want you to ask you just expand on this you say that some authors wonder whether god will survive science but you ask the question will atheism survive science yes i do i i do very seriously because i think that c.s lewis alvin plantinga and thomas nagle are right when they suggest that the current naturalism undermines rationality and a crude way of putting it and i often put it to my colleagues i say what do you do science with they say my brain because they think the mind is the brain i don't actually but leave it and then i say tell me the brief history of the brain and they say well it's the end product of random unguided processes and i look at them and smile and say and you trust it really tell me if you knew that your computer was the end product of random unguided processes would you trust it and i've always forced an answer and it's very interesting every time they've thought for a while they've said no and then i say you have got a problem then a very big problem with the very thing you're using to do science so one of my big reasons for not being an atheist putting it negatively is that it would remove science it doesn't give me any basis for thinking that human rationality will reveal anything whereas believing as the pioneers did newton kepler clark maxwell and all of these people that this is a universe created by an intelligent god that gives you a justification for doing science but as i say it seems to me that science is unlikely to survive atheism it's a wonderful way of putting it you mentioned john's gospel i want you to to well i could use the term flesh this out a little bit more what do you mean by by by information and that separating that from material and then the two merging in into a single entity tell us about that and how we get that from from the first chapter of john well most of us have an informal idea of what information is we read um a text and we understand it because we've independently learned english now the central and the starting claim of john's gospel is in the beginning was the word the word was with god the word was god and then a bit later he says all things came to be through the word now that to me is stunning because it is claiming that our universe is a word-based universe it's not a matter based universe john is saying that the word is primary mass energy matter are derivative all things that came to be came to be through the word now in the first book of the hebrew bible bereshit or genesis there's a repeated phrase in the creation narrative and god said let there be light and god said and god said that to my mind corresponds precisely with what john is saying in the beginning was the word this is a word based universe is there any evidence of it piles of evidence of it first of all you're a scientist you are using words in fact you're inventing words all the time to describe what you see in studying fundamental material science i use words to describe mathematics we use words and science is built up of words and we regard it as telling us something about what's out there even though we don't always get it absolutely correctly because we believe the universe is rationally intelligible now that fits absolutely with the notion that it's a word-based universe and i think one of the great ironies of that is that science has revealed in our lifetimes the fact that the basis of life are one of the bases of life is the longest word we've ever discovered the genetic code and it carries information to build the proteins that form considerable parts of the human cell and so on so we're bombarded from each side the fact that we can do science the fact that we can do mathematics the fact that the universe is rationally intelligible the fact that genetics has an information base like that and the point about it all is information though it is usually carried on a physical base words are written in ink and paper but the physics and chemistry of the ink and paper cannot give us any clue as to the meaning of the symbolism that the words contain and i've often had this discussion with brilliant scientists who say that they are reductionists and the view is simply this that you can reduce everything to physics and chemistry and i'll pick up a menu from a dinner table and say okay have a look at that and they say well it says roast chicken i say how do you know well because i have independently learned english i suppose yes okay you're a reductionist yes everything can be explained in terms of physics and chemistry yes okay say explain to me the way those marks the r o a s t the way those marks carry meaning and please only use physical chemistry of the paper link and they're completely stumped because they can't do it and it's such an elementary thing to realize as many physicists now realize that information is an irreducible concept in its own right and it may be the fundamental concept you've heard physicists as i have asking the question is the universe it from bit or is it bit from it now the naturalists and materialists say that it's bit from it you start with the physical stuff and you deduce the mental stuff but actually the correct way round is the other in the beginning was the word it's very much it from bit and the bit is of course the mind of god right you know i liken it to the fact that that i can have a thought and then i take that thought and i i write it say on a piece of paper then i take that and i type that into my computer and so it goes through my fingers into these keys so that's another form of matter that it's upon so it was was in my mind it goes into a piece of paper physical piece it goes into buttons on a keyboard that ends up in in memory which is usually usually a a ram and then that when i hit save that ends up on a flash memory then when i upload that it goes through an rf wave so that same information now is is now in an rf wave it's it it's in in some sort of light wave that is that is transferring light being the whole spectrum so it's in a radio wave frequency and going up and that is going into a little box on the wall then that goes now through a wire into what we call the cloud but that's really a server form another another transistor sitting in some some some place and we call that the cloud there is the same information has been on so many different forms of matter but it's the same information and the information and jesus said by your words you shall be justified and by your words you shall be condemned every careless man every careless word that a man shall speak he shall render account for in the day of judgment and you think every word is being stored yeah it's being stored in the cloud this is a word-based system that that god has set up yeah i think that's i think that's absolutely right and you see the information itself is not identifiable with any of the material substrates it itself is abstract and therefore it means the implication of course philosophically is huge materialism doesn't work because one of the fundamental things that we deal with every day is not material yeah yeah beautiful let me let me let me point something out you had mentioned in your book you talked about the laws so some people say to me well yeah okay right now we can't explain how life started and as a scientist i can't say we will never know but it's been said to me there are probably some laws that we're not aware of now and then based on those laws you'll be able to understand how you'll be able to understand the origin of life but as you point out in your book laws don't do anything they explain things but they don't physically do something explain that to us that's right and i owe that idea to c.s lewis uh and you know he he makes this lovely remark he's saying that you can add one and one from now to infinity but it'll never create any money for you if you've got one dollar plus one dollar you've got two dollars but doing arithmetic won't create money that was one of the problems behind the financial crisis people thought you could create money by doing mathematics and i i i really do think that that that there's a point there the the laws as he points out usually say if you take this then you get that but you've got to have this before you get that the laws won't do it for you and there's huge confusion as to what laws are and what their powers are partly because of what i said earlier people confuse the laws of nature with the laws of science oh sorry with the laws of a country okay and and let me let me take another thought because getting back to this whole idea of ai ai having a conscience ai really understanding what it's doing if a self-driving car which is now controlled by an ai system if it decides to avoid a squirrel running across the road and in doing that runs over a child so it's made a decision to spare the squirrel take out the child because these decisions are being made or the programmed in but if we say it's the ai system that has done this who is going to be sued is it going are you going going to to sue the ai system no the ai system doesn't care if it's sued it's just just a bunch of software no it's the the people who have built the system that you sue those are the people that you sue so so it's not the ai system that really has the conscience about this thing it's the programmers behind it can you explain this a little bit well it's pretty obvious that no a.i system so far anyway has got consciousness and it hasn't got a conscience but the morality of situations ethical concerns are increasingly to be seen to be problematic now the example of an autonomous car that you've mentioned is a very good example because sometimes when we're driving a car we might have to make a split second decision on the basis of the lesser evil you might have to hit an elderly person crossing the road to avoid plowing into a line of children waiting for a bus now people who put the sensors in and program the sensors for self-driving cars are well aware of this and it's their morality that is built into the cars and i think you're perfectly right if the car kills somebody then it is not the fault of the car because the car is not a being with a conscience it's the fault of of the programming and here comes a major problem but most people realize that getting agreement on this kind of thing is less and less likely the more international dimensions are involved take the example of human rights and face recognition technology look how the different countries in the world vary on human rights even today although we all know from our perspective that if you regard human beings is made in the image of god then that gives people immense dignity and value and therefore carries with it rights and i notice and i mentioned it in the book that some people are genuinely scared of policing all this kind of stuff and they're therefore trying to build up internationally agreed norms of ethical behavior that they hope to program into their artificial intelligence systems all the time hoping that if anyone develops an artificial general intelligence it won't simply scrap the lot of us as as useless and eliminate us you know there's great hope for a benevolent super dictator which it strikes me historically as a pretty forlorn hope but you're right the ethical side of it is is huge even in much simpler things than this here we are and i mentioned that the book voluntarily many of us wearing a tracker called a smartphone and we're ordering books on it from amazon and that's very convenient but what we don't realize is that a lot of the information that it's picking up maybe even listening to us we don't know that is being sold on to third-party corporations without our permission it's a huge intrusion of human dignity and it's happening in the west and in my book i do mention the work of susanna zhubov who's an mit professor at meritable brilliant in her work on surveillance capitalism pointing out that this is a very serious stuff billion dollar industry and we're all conniving with it and in a sense to use a metaphor from someone else we're sleep walking into a catastrophe okay john before we take questions i want you to speak a word of hope there's all of this scary stuff that could happen with ai but as believers we don't walk in fear help us out here to understand where we stand as believers and and the hope that we have in the wonderful son of god well since the beginning of christianity believers have lived in scary times it wasn't easy living under the totalitarian dominance of of the caesars and the fundamental christian hope looking forwards was the fact that jesus would one day return he promised it to his disciples i will go away and prepare a place for you and if i go away i'll come again to save you to myself he said that privately but he also said it publicly to his judges and they crucified him for claiming to be the son of man who would come in the clouds of heaven so that is the hope but it hasn't happened yet and what keeps hope alive i believe is the fact that through trusting christ something really happens to us this isn't some airy fairy imagination but he gives us his life if we repent and trust him and that life that eternal life that is in him is something that empowers us through spirit day by day and that's not something that you can capture in a box but that life can be fed and the important thing to my mind is that we keep fading it by listening to him speak to us and talking to him in prayer and reading his word because if he's risen from the dead he's still alive and the most important evidence for the resurrection is not the important historical evidences of it it's the actual living evidence of it in our life's experience and i think one of the things that gives me great hope not only my own life but in observing others is the transformation that christ brings you see someone maybe a student and they're at their wits end they're in despair they may be on drug dependencies and all kinds of things and you meet them six months later and they're radiant and you say what has happened to you and they may say well i met jesus or i became a christian or i was born again they may put in different ways but you can see that there's been a transformation in their life and when you see that many times then you put two and two together you get four that the lord jesus actually does transforms life's lives this stuff is real and i think a final point is that the greatest joy comes from sharing this with other people and seeing them respond you know if you've found a source of good food one of the things that one likes to do is to share it here you could have some of this as well and when you see it actually taking root in the lives of others particularly young people who are so uncertain about things these days it again establishes a confidence that enables you to face the downs in life of which there are many let's remember c s lewis once said something that i've never forgotten he said most of the christian era has been lived without anesthetics and as someone who gets nervous going to the dentist i think that is just remarkable somehow they received fortitude and they comforted themselves with those wonderful psalms of david the lord is my shepherd i shall not want and i read a lovely thing the other day a little girl got the psalm wrong and she put it this way the lord's my shepherd that's all i want which i thought that's beautiful that's beautiful you know i i've seen that that's the richest part of my career is leading young people to jesus and i see them from the point where i don't think they're even going to get through school and they get saved and they become radiant and changed i have seen this over and over again nobody could convince me that the gospel message is not true because i have seen it lived out in my own life and in the lives of hundreds of people i've seen it globally but through my own witness i've seen it through several hundred students over the years this is what i've seen with my own eyes it's amazing the way jesus threw a simple conversation 15 20 minutes they pray the sinner's prayer and then all of a sudden they're changed they'll say i need to go back and i need to apologize to some people i mean people don't normally do that and then there's a richness that fills their life the gospel is so true jesus said he who sent me is trustworthy in the niv version of john jesus who sent me is trustworthy and i trust him i trust him in these uncertain times john we've got to go to some questions because there's a lot of questions coming up let me ask you this we just got to go through these be concise and and just answer these because i and i've seen you do this before when you speak you just boom boom boom one after another and you're quite good at this what is the mind and where does it reside and it's or its thoughts originate well of course that's a good question that people have thought about a long time ago we don't even know what the mind is we don't know what consciousness is and it's common today to think of the mind as the brain that cannot be true because if you have got some kind of medical equipment like a computer tomograph you can tell me what's in my brain in terms of electrical firings you can't tell me what's in my mind i can't tell you what's in my brain but i can tell you what's in my mind so the mind and the brain are clearly connected but we cannot precise what the mind is but we use words often that we can't precise we use the word energy and consciousness but we don't really know what either of them are but they're useful terms for something that we sense is there and it's very real so i can't answer your question okay um if the universe is a word-based universe and came from the word of god does the universe merely exist in the mind of god well when we talk about things existing in the mind we're using that normally to contrast with actually existing physically and i think one of the wonderful things about god is he has created something physical and tangible now exactly what that means what is matter is another of these profound mysteries but i think it's misleading to think of the universe simply existing in the mind of god i think there's more to it than that there's the creation of a universe that is not purely mental so to speak that's as much as i can say again we're dealing with utterly profound things that i'd love to know greatly more about myself and as it tells us in john chapter 1 verse 14 and the word became flesh and dwelt among us so the way god constructs it is he's proclaiming matter he's proclaiming matter right there what do you think of that john well i i think that's absolutely right and genesis 1 supports that that god created a physical world and he sought was good they drive to push everything to the mental side often comes from greek philosophy not from biblical theology where they believe that matter was somehow evil and created by a demigod or a demi urge and not god himself but the biblical revelation is that matter is good it's good it's good it's good and we should accept that it's we humans rebelling against god have misused matter but if we look to the future resurrection is not resurrection of the mind it's resurrection of the body that's what it means anastasia's in greek means standing up again a physical body standing up again and jesus made sure his disciples understood that because they touched him they heard him speak and they watched him eat a fish and when he had disappeared the fish had gone too and they were left wondering what on earth had happened do you think we are living in a this is related do you think we're living in a simulation that was created by an advanced civilization would belief in that be similar to a biblical view of heaven and mankind i doubt it very much i i think that kind of thing again is trying to push things into the mental side heaven if anything is much more real in our experience now and the bible i think moves away from that kind of concept by telling us that there are new heavens and a new earth and if you put that together with a notion that there is a bodily resurrection it would seem that the physical dimension is not going to be lost but is going to be an essential part of the world to come okay here's a long question which is too long for the for the for the youtube uh uh prescription so this means it's coming from one of the operators with today's technology scripture has been reduced to a searchable app i find memorizing scripture is going away or at least interaction with scripture has changed over the years to be by reference rather than by memorization what's your view on how this may affect our morality daily decisions and human interactions when god's word is conveniently carried in our pockets rather than treasured in our hearts and what would you advise i think that has always been a problem in earlier days it was left in the book and it didn't get into the heart i think there is no substitute for spending time with the word of god itself whether you're reading it from an electronic tablet or not i i think the problem today is though that we need to practice what i call electronic fasting in other words if we ask and i often ask young people but not only young people look just think over the past week and add up all the hours you have spent watching a screen that has nothing to do with your work or your studies or your christian life add it all up and then come and tell me you've no time to read the bible it's just a nonsense we have time and we will spend time on things we love and unfortunately what should be a tool has become a master and people are strangling themselves and choking their spirituality by attaching themselves to what is now called the internet of all things and for many young people to be disconnected is literally death sadly we have suicides of people who are disliked on facebook or something like this so that it behooves us really to get back to the situation where we read the bible and if we find too much addiction to the screen then we need to buy the bible in book form i believe they're still available they're still available how do we or can we identify consciousness and what has it is there a good argument for arguing whether ai could or could not have or develop consciousness is it safe to get involved in ai if we cannot grasp what consciousness is well those are two different questions the first thing is we don't know what consciousness is so i can't begin to answer that question suggesting that ai will one day be conscious is a meaningless question if you don't know what consciousness is but getting involved with ai i think i would want to encourage young christians particularly if they're scientifically minded by all means get involved with ai particularly the narrow sort that's doing a great deal of good now you're using it in your work and in mit there's rosalind pickard who's doing wonderful work on her own field that she invented called affective computing where she uses the facial recognition technology to with autistic children or children who are liable to seizures to predict that and to save them from having those seizures this is marvelous stuff and we need people to go into these fields first of all to make a scientific contribution but secondly to understand them from the inside so that they can comment credibly on the ethics a lot of people who like me and harare and so on are not actually hands-on working in this space it's important for us to think about the implications there for everybody to think about but we do need practitioners who are convinced believers who can take these things on board and learn to draw lines where lines need to be drawn and to explain and if possible influence the ethical principles that are needed for further research and development okay good i want to take this moment we're going to we're going to close out the questions now and i want to take this moment to say to ask you to say anything you want in closing just just wrap it up however you would like john well my passion is exactly the same as that of my colleague here dr tour and that is for me the bottom line of all of this stuff is that this is the big story the christian story is the what we call a meta narrative that begins at creation and goes on into eternity and the atheist story is tiny it gives us such a tiny world to live in and therefore i would like to join him and commending it to you ask your hard questions because i discovered very early in life that it wasn't a good idea to duck the questions and one of my reasons for not only sticking with christianity but propagating it and defending it and debating it is because all the time i discovered it was giving far better answers than any other philosophy or worldview that i'd ever read and i have spent my life making myself vulnerable to strong opposition as dr tour has said richard dawkins and all these people they're formidable foes but the truth will stand and i do firmly believe that if we honor the lord and trust him he will honor us and he will enable us to have something that everybody watching us now desires and that is a sense of real fulfillment in life we all need a story big enough to help us do two things one is to face ourselves and to repair the damage that we've done to ourselves and others and also to give us a real living hope and a power for life and christianity does both of those jesus does both of those by offering us forgiveness he died for us and offering us new life he rose for us and any of us can experience that in our lives by responding to him and as we've said a couple of times before we've seen this so many times john that was terrific i mean i i just i mean it is so wonderful to walk with jesus and he modeled for us what it is to walk before god he was perfect in every respect and he is yet kind and gentle and loving with the sinner kind and reaches out to us in his mercies it is so good knowing him and that's why i enjoyed being with you because i know you sense this same love from jesus that i have known that the goodness of jesus he's the best the best the best the most magnanimous captain in every way that's exactly right it is said of a very famous theologian in late life that he was asked to sum up christianity and he said this brilliant man said jesus loves me this i know for the bible tells me so and that's the story that's the story thank you so much my friend thank you for doing this thank you for your time and remember remember this book by john lennox and i think that this is something that is certainly worth a read and uh uh 2084 artificial intelligence and the future of humanity if you just go on on amazon and just type in 2084 boom you'll it'll come right up and uh it's a good read as are all the books that i've read by john lennox and and uh they're usually uh simple to comprehend he takes big concepts and reduces that to things that just the common person can understand so thank you john one not at all one thing i would say is there's a special website for the book 2084book.com okay 2084book.com you can get it there that's right all right and it's thank you very much for watching okay and it's also available in in audible books so you know if you can only have time to do it while you're working out or something or in your car you can get it as well all right god bless you john i appreciate you my brother all right [Applause] you

Channel: DrJamesTour

Views: 57,217

Keywords: Dr. James Tour, Jim Tour, Science, Faith, Jesus, nanomachines, NanoEngineering, Bible, Professor, Chemistry, Science and Faith Podcast, Apologetics, God, Universe, Mathematics, John Lennox, Artificial Intelligence, AI, Humanity, Super Intelligence, Transhumanist

Id: Odz4fXUEDJ0

Length: 64min 22sec (3862 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 31 2020