Why I believe in God | Dr. John Lennox interviewed by Dr. Amy Orr-Ewing

the problem with technology is it advances and develops far more rapidly than any ethical underpinning and that's why there's a scrambling among companies and Nations how are we going to police this because it was Vladimir Putin who said some years ago the person of the country that is the leader in AI will control the world evidence-based faith if you don't mind me putting it that way is of the of Christianity a person is a fool to trust someone if they have no evidence to trust them or a fact so that when it comes to trusting the person of Christ I need to know about it well hello and welcome to this interview with professor John Lennox hosted by Premier we are so privileged to have Professor Lennox with us today um renowned professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford but also an extraordinary Contender for the Christian faith in our generation so welcome John and thank you so much for joining us for this interview it's my pleasure to be with you um the first question I want to ask you is just really about your personal faith how did you come to personal faith in Christ well the first impression I had of Christianity was through my parents and as people will immediately detect I'm from Northern Ireland lovely l yeah well I'm not sure how lovely it is but our country has not exactly distinguished itself for being an Exemplar of Christian patience and peace and tolerance and I grew up in a pretty sectarian divided Community but the first impression I had which was very deep was that my father ran a a small Country Town store maybe maximum 30 or 40 employees is but the interesting thing was he was Christian without being sectarian he employed as far as he could equally across the Protestant Catholic divide and was bombed for it my brother was nearly killed and I said to one day Dad why did you do this it's far too risky and he said look he said scripture teaches us that every man and woman irrespec of a worldview is made in the image of God and I intend to treat them like that now that made a deep impression on me this evaluation of other people the second thing that impressed me was that their Christianity was lived out ethically and morally and it was showed in the fact that if Dad felt he'd been too tough with us he'd apologize to us and that got across the notion that there's an objective standard of morality that was outside him yes you see and that taught me that this this standard of course came in his view from God the next thing was that although he was passionate about his Christian faith they didn't force it down my throat in fact they encouraged me to think very widely so my first experience of Christianity I was interested in everything was mind expanding and dad made sure that he introduced us to reading about the authenticity of scripture the history all this kind of stuff but one of the most interesting things he did was when I was about 14 he handed me a book and he said that's for you and I said have you read it and he said no well why should I read it he said you need to understand what other people think it was The Communist Manifesto wow and that was so unusual yeah that kind of Mere Christianity that he practiced that was open was promoting thought and and I grew up in a situation where it never would have occurred to me that the Christian faith produced bigotry you see and that was wonderful and in a way I responded to the gospel there was never a time that I wouldn't have defended it now of course I'd been clearly taught that you have to become a Christian you're not born a Christian but when that actually happened to me it's very difficult I'm nearly 80 years old and looking back it's very hard to distinguish between what you remember as a child and what people told you about your experience but I can just about remember once wondering how I could be sure and I think it was my mom recited to me that statement where Jesus says in John 5 truly truly I say to you he that hears my word and believes that him that sent me shall not come into judgment but has eternal life life and I think she asked me who is it you find difficult to trust look what he's done and it that clicked and I suppose if you want a starting point that was it but starting points are only valuable if they lead to something and of course my Christian faith developed very strongly before I went to University I believed I came to be convinced that Christianity was true I read a lot of stuff my father also introduced me to CS Lewis and that appealed to me the logic of Christianity so when I got to Cambridge in 1962 I hit the ground running wonderful so you arrived as an undergraduate at Cambridge and you studied mathematics but I believe you actually got to hear CS Lewis lecture is that right can you tell us a story about that yes yes I did I knew he was there I didn't know he was dying and very ill and he hadn't lectured uh in the previous terms of that year but in the mlus term the Christmas term 62 he was put down to give a series of lectures on John dun poetry and the maths Department was just across the road from the English faculty lecture room so I skipped the math on occasions and went across uh to listen to him and I'm so glad I did he was a legend in his own time the place was packed students all over the floors no health and safety of was bother and it was very cold and he was a big Burly man and came in with a heavy coat and a big long scarf and a hat and he'd start lecturing the moment he came through the door and he would gradually pick his way through he would be divesting himself of his garments so by the time he was comfortable behind the lectern you already heard three or four minutes of a brilliant lecture he went for 50 minutes and then he reversed the process he kept lecturing as he put on his hat W up a scarf put on his coat and the last words were uttered as he burst out through the doors no Q&A that's amazing so amazing so why do you think 60 years after Louis's death um his writings his work are still so um admired and read and relevant people today because the Christian message has Eternal validity and that's one of the evidences for its truth it appeals to every generation but Lewis was a master at understanding the implications of the Christian faith and also he was a master of analogy and illustration how to unpack it so people could grasp it and for me as a scientist he understood science in terms of the philosophy of science the implications of science much better than many scientists which is why many of them don't like him and his book for instance on Miracles was very important and the arguments in that are as valid today as they were then but you know in 1940 he was writing the abolition of man which is a book that is entirely relevant in days when we're questioning the definition of what a human being is because we're trying to enhance ourselves and producing super intelligences with AI and I find Lewis saw it all he wrote a science fiction novel the last one of the three That Hideous Strength and it is quite amazing to read that book and read it beside yal Noah hari's book homod deos he was preent so he helped me enormously in fact before I went to cabridge I'd read every book he wrote except for the technical ones in the English language in which you're an expert wow well yeah that's for another time but gosh that's that's amazing John so um tell us a little bit about your own Journey as an academic so you did your undergraduate studies and then you began to emerge as an academic yourself can you talk about what it was like being a Christian and an academic mathematician well the big lesson was learned as an undergraduate when a Nobel Prize winner tried to encourage me to give up my faith that was a very significant moment I met him at dinner and I asked him about his Nobel Prize and said did he ever think that there might be a mind behind the universe but he didn't like that that stopped the conversation I thought that was it but after dinner he said Lennox come to my room and up to his room I went it was a command and he invited several other senior members of the University including sadly the chaplain of the college and they stood around he sat me in a chair and he said now do you want a career in science I said yes well in front of witnesses tonight give up this naive faith in God because you never make it wow You'll never make it and it talk about Force maure the the the pressure was enormous of course it occurred to be later if he'd been a Christian I'd been an Atheist he'd have been out of his job the next day go and I was so thunder struck I wondered what to say and I believe that the Lord helped me I said sir what have you got to offer me that's better than what I've got in Christ oh he said the philosophy of Amy bero well for and day I'd read CS Lewis and I knew about Amy bero it was a very bad choice because before he died beron who was Jewish had thought of converting to Catholicism so so it wasn't a good choice and I just looked at him and I just said if all you've got to offer me is the Elon vital the spirit of life that burone believed in I'll risk it and stick with what I've got and I got up and walked out wow but that put steal into me yeah that's amazing John you know I had an almost word for word conversation with my old testament Professor Oxford who said unless you give up your Evangelical Faith it's over for you and amazing isn't it and now here you are what your own PhD maybe there's something about um needing in apologetics to really face whether we believe this is true or not I think there is yeah and I think that helped me enormously because it helps remove the fear of people like Dawkins well we're going to come on to Dawkins but before we do a much Nic subject Sally can you tell us about how you met Sally and how what it was like s of building a family life and navigating the Journey of your academic work but also as you were beginning to emerge into into Ministry yes well uh I had a mentor who went to gloryia a few years ago who was a classicist brilliant and uh he used to joke a bit and speak in a semi biblical language that I got to do over in Ireland because he was professor of Greek at Queens uh and when I went to Cambridge I got advice from him because he was one of the few people I knew' been there and he said by the way my boy he said uh there is a man in Cambridge with four daughters so I arrived in Cambridge on Saturday was taken to church by one of his friends on Sunday and there were these four blood girls 43 21 and they Elder stuff that was Sally so I saw her on day two Tri at Cambridge and and we got married uh some years after that and she's been absolutely wonderful putting up with me looking after me especially when I started to get involved in traveling uh for the defense of Christianity particularly behind the Iron Curtain we can come to that in a moment but you asked the question family life children coming along I have three children 10 grandchildren there and people often ask how did you juggle all that and sort it out well I was given a bit of advice I used to think you'd solve that problem by 30 and then You' begin to live and my mentor he said to me you've got it all wrong solving those problems is living yes and that totally changed the perspective rather than seeing life is a series of problems to be solved and then living solving them is living and I I think I owe a great deal to my wife because of the support Way Beyond what any woman should have to put up with and she became a Believer very young and she had this sense and told me that she would never stand in the way of anything the Lord called me to do and that's a big deal because I sometimes was out of the house not often but month at a time time in Russia where everybody's saying your husband's crazy and they weren't supporting her so so there was that I got married in the last year of my PhD at Cambridge and we set up a student flat and she's very hospitable so we had hordes of students coming in because I was already as an undergraduate beginning to run Bible studies in multiple colleges simultaneously you know was all over the place and beginning to develop facing the questions people were asking because uh there's another element and it has to do with irishness and that is when you come from Ireland and you end up in Cambridge the very first thing people will say well of course you're a Christian they're all Christians there they fight over it it's a Freudian objection yeah and I'd heard it many times but somehow I heard it very early on the first week I think and it clicked you've got a chance now in one of the best universities in the world to interact with people that don't share your worldview why don't you make friends with some of them and get to understand what their questions are and I deliberately set out in week one to make friends with people that were agnostic atheists and I've been doing it ever since and that is what fed my parallel interest that had been inspired by David Gooding because he taught me to think about scripture that putting those two things together and relating scripture to people's questions and to the culture that began to develop in such a way that I started to share it with others very modestly at first and they cogged on so I started a very big Bible study for those days Intercollegiate that met for three hours on a Sunday afternoon wow where I tried to help them I'd been helped to think about scripture and it was marvelously encouraging because many of those people are around the world today at the same time I got very committed to Mission not only in the University but I'd been on operation mobilization before that George bwood just died not long ago and a lot was crude and primitive in those days I started the OM prayer group the first one the British University in Cambridge and out of that grew the Bible study so the two things went together studying scripture praying together being involved in Mission not only in Cambridge but abroad and that was a very important foundation natural selection is a mechanical blind automatic force it is it's it's not I can't say it's not guided but there's no need for it to be guided the whole point is that it works without guidance but it could be guided or do you completely shut that out I mean why bother when you got a perfectly good explanation that doesn't involve guidance I mean the point is you use words like you lose you use words like blind and automatic this watch is blind and automatic but it's been designed the words themselves do not shut out that notion and and it seems to me that the impression I'm getting is that what's coming through is that the whole process is so sophisticated it itself is giving evidence of a rational mind behind it sometimes I think people feel a bit put off by the word apologetics they think that's for kind of very professional experts or they think it maybe sounds like apologizing but what is apologetics well it's not apologetics the word is a disaster because it's a transliteration straight from Greek apologia becomes an English apologetic but if they translated the word it means defense and Peter puts it brilliantly the Apostle he said always be ready to give a defense an aalia to anyone who asks you a reason for the hope that's within you now I find that fascinating I've actually written a little book about it called have no fear uh to overcome the barrier of witnessing because people have that impression they say to me you're into apologetics and I say aren't you oh no that's for clever Christians and this is nonsense let me try to explain when this word is used by Luke it is used in the book of Acts where Paul gives his defense what's his number one defense I met Jesus on the Damascus Road and he turned my life around in other words his primary defense was his personal experience of the Risen Christ no one could take that away from him and no one can take it away from you or me so our apologia don't let use the word our defense I like the definition that Peter May set up for it persuasive evangelism because think of the context Peter anybody that asks you that's not preaching that's conversation people are asking me a reason for the hope that means they've seen that I got some hope so I am supposed to live actually in such a way that people say I've got hope and then they come and say what reason have you got for that hope now evidence-based faith if you don't mind me putting it that way is of the essence of Christianity a person is a fool to trust someone if they have no evidence to trust them or a fact so that when it comes to trusting the person of Christ I need to know about him now we live in a multicultural pluralistic society if you open your mouth about Christianity people will come up with difficulties objections misunderstandings and you have to clear those away in other words you have to say no it's not like that you have to defend the faith and that's what it is and all Christians are engaged in it I I simply am sad about the idea that using the word it sounds like apology as you say I'm not sorry that I believe the go but getting rid of that word yeah what we want to do is to encourage people to answer the questions and that's what Premier does brilliantly I I feel and that's why I'm sitting talking to you because we both are convinced we're set for the defense of the Gospel as Paul said and it's very important we encourage everybody to do it at the level they can starting with their personal experience but also depending on who they are beginning to learn how to answer the questions and we need to work on it and do it so that's the kind of approach I take to that's brilliant you would call yourself an atheist I would yes I would call myself a Christian humanist one of the big themes over the history of what we now think of as science has been questioning the exceptionalism of humankind I think the critical thing is what gives something value would you say that mind construct meaning or detect meaning I have had made from a little piece of my arm something that could reasonably be called a second brain I think one of the real challenges the evolution by natural selection puts to Christian belief is the idea that so you mentioned a few moments ago about going behind the Iron Curtain and I know that's been a really important part of your life and there are so many stories to share from that that season of your life but could you could you share with a listener is what it was like going behind the Iron Curtain when you know communism is in full power and control and you're lecturing and teaching in your subject area but you're also contending for the truth of the Gospel can you share a bit about that John well there are two distinct things here there are two phases in this there's the before 1989 and after 1989 I first went to Eastern Europe and 1976 and the first country I went to was Hungary and I wasn't going to teach mathematics I was going because I had met some Hungarian Believers in Germany and they invited me to come and I was a bit scared and all this kind of thing and there's a long story connected about me going but which I'm telling now in an autobiography that's nearly finished oh wonderful which is rather too long at the moment but but it was going in to encourage Christians the main country I went to was East Germany the German Democratic Republic I also went to Poland Hungary Poland and East Germany but because I fluent in German East Germany was the place although in the other countries I spoke German because in those days because of the war many of the older people they spoke German no English now they all speak English and East Germany was the most thoroughly communist even stalinist and it was possibly because of my past experience of being interested in meeting people who didn't share my worldview the diametrical opposite of Christianity's atheism Atheism in terms of Applied Marxism was all around in East Germany and one incident will show a very moving incident I I was in a little town and the people used to flock out I I love to encourage them as a Christian because very few of them at anything like the education they weren't allowed to have it they were stopped at 13 there was a a parody of the confirmation Church confirmation service where at the age of 13 a child had to stand in front of the huge Bust or statue of Marx in Carl markad now chemets it's old name and swear allegiance to the atheistic State now I can give an example of that that really touched me I was in the home of an evangelist and his daughter came in Esther she was weeping and we were visiting their home briefly I was teaching and what's wrong Esther she said the teacher has just told me today no more education I've been the top student in the school all the way through but because I will not not swear allegiance to atheistic State no more education so I said to her what did you say to him and she said I said to him sir one day you will stand before God and answer for what you've done to me today and we just stood and wept it was so moving yeah later years I stood and married her to her husband in East Germany still but that just in a sense encapsulated for me what happens when atheism becomes essentially a state religion and obviously it made me more and more determined to help these humble people many of them very bright who' never had the chance living in these Villages and they came out in droves to to hear me Teach so it was mainly Bible teaching the actual doing my own subject began a bit in Hungary but very much in Russia because when the wall fell and I helped to knock it down I was in Berlin on the days when all that happened amazing I God called me and directed me very specifically to get to Russia and there I went with the Academy of Sciences and that was a whole different world equally fascinating and I was able to interact with all these sort of people and they were yes interested and kind about my mathematics but they were much brighter than me most of them but what fascinated them was here's an intellectual from the Westy believes in God and that's all they wanted to question me about so I got immense opportunity to begin to talk in those academic situations I gave the first lecture on Christianity in the University of Nova seers in 75 years wow By Invitation of the Rector of the university and that's all a very long story but there were two two phases then let's try to talk in your your kind of language if if if there was a creation then presumably the something that we now experience was preceded by the absence of something and I presume that we can call the absence of something or the absence of anything nothing so presumably at the creation somehow or other AB absolutely nothing changed into I use the term rolled over changed into something is that what by principles of indolence and no ignorance and no those come later oh I see I need to read this you see Peter I'm sorry you catch me but I think let me speak to the point let me just finish so presumably you think that if there was absolutely nothing and it turned into do absolutely something that there was an agent involved in causing that is that the creation I wouldn't quite put it that way I would say that the Universe comes from nothing physical but it doesn't come from nothing God is not nothing in fact we get the whole thing upside down we tend to think partly because of um the way we're educated in terms of science that Mass energ and material is the basic stuff of the universe of course now we've come down to nothing being the basic stuff I would want to say about that is I don't believe it but secondly God is Not physical God is Spirit and the fundamental stuff in the universe is Mind and Spirit it's not Material so then if I could finish the universe comes from nothing physical but it does doesn't come from nothing it comes from God who created it let there be light and there was light so it seems like the Lord has taken you into very strategic places and and strategic times in world history where there's great kind of power I guess contending against the truth of the Gospel the power of atheism and you know the Communist setup behind the Iron Curtain but actually after 911 the world changed here as well and you were in a position I think to to speak in into the rise of the new Atheism in the most amazing way can you share a bit with us about how 911 changed the discourse around God and Atheism and your experience of taking on some of those four horsemen of of of the new atheism yeah yes it's the new atheists themselves that Will Dawkins particularly who said that 9/11 radicalized him this is religion so we must get rid of religion and it was just throwing everything out all religion he modified his tone after a while but it's pretty obvious that there's a big difference between Islamic terrorists and the Amish for example and very foolish to to put them all together you've got to look at religions one by one actually and what they do but it certainly radicalized them and made them very aggressive and the thing that characterized the so-called new atheism which has been its downfall actually is its aggression it's very interesting from time to time people cross the street in Oxford and say oh are you Professor Lennox yes well thanks for taking him on now I am an atheist don't get me wrong but I can't stand for this aggression faith is rational and evidencebased I mean if that were true it wouldn't need to be Faith would it I mean if if there were evidence for it uh why would you need to call it Faith you would say just evidence and when you said that we that that faith in relativity in in Einstein's theory of of Relativity is is evidence-based that of course it is but um the but the evidence is is all important I mean Einstein's predictions fit in with um with uh observed fact and and with a whole body of theory whereas we only need to use the word faith when there isn't any evidence no not at all I presume you've got faith in your wife is there any evidence for that on would you base it yes plenty of evidence um I they debates with Dawkins came about not through me at all I I had never done any debating but a friend in who became a friend in America was in Oxford uh trying to find someone who would help him reach some of the circles in Birmingham Alabama full places he had a real passion he was a history teacher a very good one uh leading young people teaching the Bible but he wanted to reach parts of the culture there that the church wasn't reaching and he was looking for someone who might help him to do this and the very last talk he came to was a talk in the refectory of all places in wickle Hall and it was hot he almost didn't come and he thought well I'm going home tomorrow my whole mission has failed so I might as well go to this talk and he said within 5 minutes I knew I had the answer so he comes to me afterwards was very tall and he said would you ever think of coming to Birmingham Alabama that's the accent and I said I was exhausted and I just wanted to go home there was a long line of people ask I said it would have to be really serious and he said thank you a few weeks later I had this long list of things I can organize this and this and this so I went and then he came back and he went to hear Dawkins read one of his books and I got this invitation copied to Dawkins and vice versa would you come to Alabama and give us a taste of the Oxford debate on God and science so that's how it came to pass and I never met Dawkins before and we were put up in a Lovely Hotel and a huge Conference Center to debate and it was a confrontational debate and that's another thing that has really passed uh short introduction 15 minutes 15 minutes 10 10 all this kind of thing but the idea was to divide the thesis of his book The God Delusion into six thesis and we each comment on them and so on and uh just before the debate I met him he got on reasonably well and he said I don't debate well I said if it's any consolation I don't either I've never done one but I said what I intend to do Richard is I want to put into the public space tonight a credible alternative to your atheism and he said I'd buy that so the rest is history in a sense because the thing has been viewed millions of times and it had a side effect for which I'm very grateful it catapulted me onto the world stage and gave me an audience that's Global and it's inter interesting looking back I I'm sad at the aggressiveness and I did my best to read and study it took an awful lot of preparation because these things are very expensive on time and preparation it's much better to do a moderated discussion or have a discussion like we are having now but talking about a subject so that is how I got into it it was quite a terrifying experience now has just contrasted science and religion religion being content with not understanding where science is unraveling the understanding of the universe and I understand and feel the force of that objection very strongly because sometimes Christians I admit have been guilty of a lazy god of the gaps kind of solution I can't understand it therefore God did it and of course God disappears as the gaps close but I I'd like to point out that there are two kind of kinds of Gap ladies and gentlemen there are gaps that science closes and I call those the bad gaps but there are also gaps that science opens and we may come to some of those later but as for the idea itself Richard referred to the very important fact that science and modern science as we know it exploded in the 16th and 17th centuries and it arose out of a theistic background and many philosophers of science have studied this and come to the conclusion that's now called whiteheads thesis that human beings became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver I think that is profoundly important because it means far from religion hindering science it was the driving force behind the rise of Science in the first place and when Isaac Newton for example discovered his law of gravity and wrote down the equations of of motion he didn't say marvelous I Now understand it I've got a mechanism therefore I don't need God in fact it was the exact opposite it was because he understood the complexity and sophistication of the mathematical description of the universe that he his praise for God was increased and I would like to suggest Richard that somewhere down in this you're making a category mistake because confusing mechanism with agency we have a mechanism it does x y and Zed therefore there's no need for an agent I would suggest that the sophistication of the mechanism and science rejoices in finding such mechanisms is evidence for the sheer wonder of the creative genius of God one of the most interesting was with Peter seinger in Melbourne he's Australian but he he's got a chair at Princeton we're talking ladies and gentlemen about two Di diametrically opposed World Views and the easy way to see that is Peter will say look he accepts the universe as I understood you Peter as a brute fact it's there so in that sense it's for you Ultimate Reality everything else is derivative including mind intelligence and the idea of God because there isn't a God I take the exact opposite view that the mind is primary not derivative in the beginning was the word in the beginning was God and the mass energy the universe or or Multiverse or whatever we think of it as is derivative that is the issue between us and as someone once put it uh the question is not whether there is an ultimate fact the question is which ultimate fact do we believe in and Peter believes in the universe in that sense or as as his ultimate fact and I believe in God and my argument simply is here that far from I can't speak for other religions uh Peter I can speak mainly for my own faith they must defend themselves but it seems to me that Christianity makes far more rational sense and I did mention it does seem to have been the foundation for modern science I explain to the audience as they always do my background my parents chrisan all this kind of thing so we were talking about the existence of God the big audience Melbourne town hall and Peter started and he said well there you are John has just given my main objection to religion that people stay in the faith in which they're brought up you see and I thought when I heard that this is going to be wonderful because what he seeded to me I said now Peter I've told them about my parents and you have made a point about that but tell me were your parents atheists and he said yes they were oh I said so you've been uh kept in the faith in which you were brought up and he said oh but it isn't a faith Peter I said said I'm really sorry I was under the impression you believed it and it brought the house down and cyberspace went viral here is one of the world's leading philosophers who doesn't see that his worldview is a belief system it was staggering but afterwards we had a long chat and I was deeply moved by what he said to me because he is an ethicist with some very extreme views and I had some awful letters before I debated him I should eviscerate him intellectually and all this but I didn't I started off by saying many of you will be aware of his extreme ethical views and I do not share them but I think they proceed from his atheism and that's what we're going to discuss but first before we start I want to recommend one of his books to you and it's called the life I can save and I said as a Christian I learned a lot from it afterwards he came up to me stuck out his hand he said I want to thank you I said what for Peter he said no Christian has ever treated me like that wow and it it was deeply moving and he said I want you to be the guest of honor at lecture I'm giving private tomorrow night and it was very difficult but I went wow and you know I was deeply moved by that because what I learned from this slides he showed was that his family had been desperately damaged by the Holocaust and once you discovered that you understand but the really funny thing was I had a friend who organized that lecture and he comes from a Hungarian Jewish Family exactly like Peter Singer so he went up to singer and he introduced himself and he said and we were from the same background singer was delighted and then this chap says I've been Hungarian Jew and I became a Christian I changed by world view so the very first person that spoke to him was a person that had changed their world view now for me looking back historically experiencing the power of the Gospel to change people's worldview was crucial to me because coming from Ireland where people just said would you believe it because you're born that way and singer saying the same thing they fact that the gospel can help people to change their worldview is very important and of course I'd experienced it Cambridge and so on but I look back to that with with some fondness and of course you can see it on the yes that's amazing John and and listeners can see your debates with Christopher Hitchin and with Michael ruse as well yes so your in a way your your ministry your career if you like debate especially in that era of new atheism has been very strategic but I guess we've kind of moved a little bit in the culture now haven't we away from some of that anger um what do you think the big questions are right now that that people are asking and facing with regard to whether the Christian faith is true or relevant the question of meaning is probably number one and I think it always has been a deep question of meaning and significance people want to know what the good life is and a number of universities famous ones are developing courses in the good life what it is and so on and I think that's very important I'm actually very interested in the recent work of Ian mcgilchrist and his book the matter with things he's a neuroscientist and his analysis I find fascinating that is roughly speaking we got two brain hemispheres the right and the left and we're all used to describing people as left brain to right brain according to whether they're very scientific and rational or they're artistic and Musical and so on and literary types but what he is doing with hard Neuroscience is arguing he's quite controversial that there is a real difference that there's substance in this and he's used it to an analyze cultural history and he he quotes I I think it's Owen Barfield one of the inklings who made the point how is it that we've come to the space where we understand how many things work and we know the meaning of nothing and that's a very interesting Insight because that's where we're at we're full of understanding of science technology all kinds of things but meaning is evaporated and he makes the point that for several hundred years we have unconsciously allowed the left side of the brain to dominate and it cannot he argues from Neuroscience it cannot see meaning now that to my mind is fascinating it's only a comment on what I believe to be true for other reasons so we don't need to depend on Neuroscience for it but it's very important Jonathan Sachs read migil early book The Master of his Emissary and he had a a light bulb moment and he wrote a book because of it caused the Great partnership and he says science takes things apart to see how they work religion puts them together to see what they mean and the interesting thing about mcgilchrist and I mention him because he is a a a representative of a new generation of people that are not theists yet but have a great sense there's something more they're searching for that meaning what is this something more more and the most important chapter of his huge book 2,000 pages with 200 pages of references the most important chapter and the hardest he found to write is space for the sacred we've got to do God to put it in Tony blism of the past and that is very interesting to me precisely because it's written was by someone who and here's the problem with his CIS he feels we've emphasized the left side we need to get to the right side but that means he becomes suspicious of claims to truth and Doctrine and dogma and you need both actually because he's a hard scientist he uses the left side of his brain all the time so this amounts for me to looking out on folk today and there are several of them one person who's much nearer to theism he may well have become theist is Jordan Peterson I had a lengthy interview with him just recently and it's fascinating to watch him interact with the Bible he had a long series with o gdus you know discussing the book of Exodus right through and I welcome that because it's a very good start there must be something more and I believe that we have the task of explaining what that something more is uh leading people to God a leading philosopher Alvin planting of notame says if atheists are right that we are the product of mindless unguided natural processes then they have given us strong reason to doubt the reliability of human cognitive faculties and therefore inevitably to doubt the validity of any belief that they produce including their atheism their biology and their belief in naturalism would therefore appear to be at war with each other in a conflict that is nothing at all to do with God yet my atheist friends still insist that it is rational for them to believe that the evolution of human reason was not directed for the purpose of discovering truth and yet it is irrational for me to believe that human reason was designed and created by God to enable us to understand and believe the truth curious logic by contrast with that biblical theism asserts that Ultimate Reality is personal and intelligent and the reason science works and this was the motivating force that drove the great pioneers of science is that the Universe out there and the human mind in here that does the science are ultimately the product of the same intelligent Divine mind human beings are made we are told in God's image and that means that science can be done that makes infinitely more sense to me as a scientist than atheism does so that question of meaning is important but the other thing that's related to it is the question of identity who am I as a human being and we live now in perhaps the second or third generation that is no sense of an objective moral standard and that's creating all sorts of difficulties with identity with gender fluidity all these issues and it's very complex to grow up in a world where you've got no normative indicators no um clear moral Dimension and you're living in a vacuum and we have to address that so it's a different set of parameters I do still believe though that because of the power of Science and especially technology and the latest AI Technologies we still have to talk objectively as far as we can about the Goden science questions but we need to bring these other things in and become much more personal and not be ashamed to talk about our experience and I often say look when you're looking for evidence for God and Christianity there are two levels at least there's the objective there are the basic facts I'm speaking Loosely but then there's a question of personal experience you can call that psychology if you like I don't mind but we need to look at that as well because we're persons God is not simply a theory a person and we got to relate to him with our whole personality and that holistic approach I think is one of the things that I noticed most of and that indicates to me I'm growing old because I can't really relate to young people that are finding their identity being glued to a tablet all day long and social media beginning to really unravel their capacity to think so there positives and negatives in the technology that needs a lot more explanation the mind and brain are connected but the scientific data doesn't enable you to establish the nature of that connection or the relationship just because science can't demonstrate that physical processes and mental processes are the same thing that in and of itself doesn't give you any evidence that that's not the case either some people talk about seeing deceased relatives and communicating with them this idea of floating up out of your body and watching things happen and being able to describe it afterwards that could be formed in your imaginative mind conscious experience and brain processes are two fundamentally different things I wonder if we're talking about you like me to go out for a bit you guys seem really happy I wrote the book because there's a mixture of confusion fear and excitement as you say about artificial intelligence and in order to understand it the first thing to realize is there are two kinds very different first is narrow Ai and a narrow AI system is a computer a big database and an algorithm and typically it does one thing and one thing only that normally requires human intelligence for instance your database may be a million X-rays of human lungs and they're labeled with the diseases that they represent and then an x-ray is taken of my lungs and the system compares the picture of my lungs with the million and produces diagnosis and that normally these days will be better than I get in my local hospital and it is marvelous advance and and it is in a sense visual recognition technology now that has been developed to a great degree so it then becomes surveillance technology with closed circuit cameras that are now so sophisticated they could recognize you not only from your face but from your walk and from the back and of course wonderful if you are a police force trying to pick a terrorist out of a crowd but I I often say to people AI like any other technology is Like a Knife a sharp knife can be used for surgery or murder yeah now think of the surveillance technology the very same technology is being used to suppress the weager population in China and that is terrifying it's really scary the the depth of intrusion and control of an ethnic minority and of course the argument is you've got to give up your privacy in order to have security and that argument is being used in the west as well so we need to think about these things very seriously the AI That's working now is Raising massive ethical problems now you probably have a smartphone you've got a tablet I got a smartphone so the two of us are voluntary allow voluntarily allowing ourselves to be tracked and all that's being recorded where we've been and possibly we're saying and all the rest of it and many people don't realize that when they say buy a book on Amazon Google or something what's being harvested is a great deal of data about our habits and so on that data is being sold to third parties without our permission and more sophisticated things chat GPT is wonderful as a sophisticated look up in Google kind of thing and is very useful but it can be used too it's not always accurate and it it can um help very rapidly disseminate misinformation and we're into the world of deep fake technology already where a clip an audio clip of you plus a video clip and they can make you say anything now these are serious things and the problem with technology is it advances and develops far more rapidly than any ethical underpinning and that's why there's a scrambling among companies and Nations how are we going to police this because it was Vladimir Putin who said some years ago the person or the country that is the leader in AI will control the world and that is a serious thing now this is all narrow AI the stuff that's working and there are dozens of other examples and I give them my the second kind of AI is Agi artificial general intelligence and that's the attempt and it's much more speculative and there's a great deal of Science Fiction in it to produce a super intelligence in one of two ways either enhancing existing human beings by cyborg engineering by implants by all kinds of things like that or by constructing an entity that can do everything a human being can do and more based on a nonorganic substrate like Silicon the idea is that we eliminate aging disease all this kind of thing now the hype around that is is colossal and one needs to investigate uh what is hype and what is fiction and what is genuine the problem is it's not just the science fiction writers and historians like Harari that are writing about this it's serious scientists very serious like our astronomer Royal Lord Martin Ree who says that the intelligence in the future will not be remotely like ourselves they'll only have a dim memory of how we functioned and that kind of thing raises a deep question which really is why I wrote the book what is a human being because a lot of this now there are many wonderful Christians working in AI one of the most brilliant is rosn piard who's using it to to develop a whole field of AI called affective Computing and she's developed smart watches that can recognize when a child or an adult is about to have a seizure a fitness savings people's lives now this is marvelous stuff I encourage scientifically minded young Christians to get into this field because we're going to need them there people with knowledge of the science and also people with an ethical sense who are able to develop this kind of thing so that's hugely important but my impression is that a great deal of this is actually driven by atheist thinkers and they are focusing and a lot of it's coming straight out of Oxford where I I am is transhumanism that is creating the super intelligence is going beyond the human with the idea that humans model 101 that we are are only a a point in a whole spectrum and we're going to develop superhumans we're going to eliminate aging and hari's agenda for the 21st century is two things one solve the problem of physical death it's just a technical problem W and we'll get a technical solution and that will mean that humans may die but they don't have have to the second agenda item in his big book homade bestseller the man who is God that tells you everything everything yeah is enhancing human Happiness by genetic engineering all kinds of things okay now when people come to cut a long story short because this is a really big issue when people tell me about this this glorious Prospect I I say it's far too late you're far too late and this say what do you mean I say look both of these problems have been solved first of all the problem of physical death is solved by God raising Jesus from the dead 20 centuries ago and as to the enhancement of human happiness which some of you think is going to happen when we upload our brains onto silicon there's something far better than that and far more credible that because Jesus has been raised from the dead that means he's conquered death but he promises to everyone that that trusts him who repents of their sin that is turns away from the mess they've made of their own lives and probably sadly the lives of others and trust them as Savior and Lord they're going to be uploaded one day if I might use that vocabulary because they will be raised from the dead death is not the end for them and there's going to be a realm which we will enter called heaven where we will be with him and it'll be utterly glorious no dying no pain all those those things that the AI proponents think they're going to get rid of but all I say to them is it's interesting you have all these scenarios and many of them actually mention God where they talk about a super intelligence in the future and I say but just a moment the Bible has been talking about the future for centuries and actually it is some things to say that are eerily close to some of the scenarios that you take seriously one for example I mention is by a brilliant physicist Max tegmark of prinston and he has this notion that one of the possibilities and it's the main one he details in his book life 3.0 is the Omega project where this vast Corporation takes over the world and it runs the world it starts with Amazon and develops and develops runs the world one single government but everybody is required to wear a thing like an Apple Watch which is a smart bracelet which has a device that if you don't follow the ideology of this world government it injects a lethal toxin into your hand now and it controls all the economics and the Book of Revelations centuries ago talks about a world government run by something called a wild animal which we're told as a human being behaving like a wild animal utterly brutal and controls the economy by insisting that everybody has a mark of some kind on them some kind of recognition implanted and I say look if you're going to take tag Mark scenario seriously before you reject Christianity please look at what it has to say because actually the evidence for the Christian scenario is much greater than the evidence totally speculative that we'll ever reach this kind of Omega because there's strong evidence which I can't go into now that Jesus actually rose from the dead and can transform lives and that is what you're looking for you see a lot of it the as you interjected and pointed out quite rightly the name hodos says it all the man who is God the first temp ation to humanity was if you disobey God you rise and you'll be as Gods knowing good and evil and that idea of becoming Gods is run through the whole of history with the Caesars the Babylonian Empire chesu and now we have arari openly saying we're going to turn turn humans into gods and the interesting thing is that some aspects of AI are becoming very like a deity that people not are going to worship but are beginning to worship because omniscient knows everything GPT is trained on billions of books including probably yours and certainly mine because I've checked it and uh yeah my children have checked it yes the ability to to write scriptures to answer every question and so on and so forth and we're starting to see in the world today AI religions and we got to take stock about this and I I um amplifying the book massively because there is a need I believe to inform the public not only Christians so that they can see what's good and benefit from it but so that they can prepare their minds I am really concerned about what's called long-termism and that's the idea again coming mainly out of the Oxford Institute for the Future run by Nick Bostrom and it sounds like altruism in fact the original idea is called effective altruism now we all know altruism as being concerned with the other other people and so on reaching the homeless the impoverished but now they're saying that history is going to move towards a scenario where there are going to be billions of entities they won't be human that will live in some sense so that we ought to today to be preparing that they won't go extinct and so instead of giving money to help the poor we should concentrate all the money on the intellectuals who are developing AI systems wow and well let the poor go hang I mean it it is terrifying what they Lally say explicitly because that's long-termism you live for the long term so if a few generations of humans model 101 have to die out so be it so be it that is very terrifying so the value of a human being we're getting back to the question of meaning which is partly why I wrote the book so we're into territory that's new AI is as significant as the Industrial Revolution and I just want to try to think about I mean I'm not I have developed no AI systems but I'm interested in the philosophy of technology and the ethics of technology and of course the biblical Dimension to it and I do believe that one of the most important things now for me to emphasize as a Christian is to bring back into the center the teaching about Christ's return that was the central hope of the early Christians and we've neglected it because it sounds so crazy it is not crazy anymore so I want to try and be in on that that's wonderful John can we segue into another really significant apologetic question that has always been with us and I think always will be with us and it's something that you've written about and spoken about a lot and that's the question of suffering and how God could be loving and this be the world there is and we've talked little a little bit about the image of God and um the significance at the heart of the Christian faith of human identity being rooted in that sacred image and I know you've spoken a lot about then how the the reality of our lived experience of suffering kind of fits with that could you could you share with us a little bit how you speak to people who are really suffering who've gone through horrific things I know you were in New Zealand around the time just shortly after the earthquake that happened there how do we speak of Christian hope and the truth of the Gospel you know in this awful suffering World well with great sensitivity because it's the heart problem and it's the hardest problem for any worldview to face and you mentioned the goodness of God the power of God that's what people come up against how can we reconcile those when the world's in such a mess and my brief response to it which is inadequate and one needs to take time is first of all there are two perspectives on it there's people who are actually suffering and there are people who watch suffering and the reactions vary people that watched the earthquake said well of course there isn't any godone that's one possible solution but it doesn't get you very far because actually philosoph Al it raises the problem of how you define evil and I take the view that the I the existence of God and actually having moral categories belong together and that's a philosophical topic which you didn't ask me about you asked me about how do you approach people who are actually suffering which is a more important question I believe their answers to the first one I've written about them I've even written about them in the little book I wrote about the Corona virus where is God in the Corona virus world but in the earthquake situation it happened just a few days before I got there and that's all people wanted to talk about if God is good all powerful way do he stop this now the earthquake is what we unfortunately call Natural evil because not really moral it's to do with the fact that there are tectonic plates in the earth and there's a huge dilemma there because if it weren't for the existence of those no life would be possible because it has things to do with the atmosphere and so on and ironically on my way to New Zealand I was reading a book on the necessity of tectonic plates that move for life so here you have the construction of the earth that's necessary for Life destroying life so the problem is not the tectonic plates but building houses unconsciously above an earthquake zone now it's very problematic and it raises the question question couldn't God have made a world where that didn't happen and then there's the moral problem which is separate in a way couldn't God have made a world where humans don't do bad things to each other so you've got the natural world going wrong disease cancers earthquakes toames uh and then you have the moral world people doing bad things and people suffer for both of those reasons often at the same time often at the same time Abal and one thing can lead to another yeah a natural disaster can be caused by a moral disaster people DeForest the Earth create a desert and then people suffer so it's very complex and my first response to it is to say on the moral evil side of course God could have created a world in which there were creatures that didn't damage each other we can we have they're called robots but in that world you wouldn't exist I said actually wishing for a world like that is wishing yourself out of existence because a robotic World a word of autom lacks love and morality now I say God took a risk in creating a world where people had a certain range of choice but that introduced the wonderful possibility of positive things like love and morality now I said I have three children and I remember holding the first one little girl and thinking I don't know why I thought it but I didn't think it you know you could grow up to reject me cuz you've got the capacity to do that why have children well most parents would say well having a child is a wonderful thing because I hope that with my nurture and love they will grow up to respond well perhaps we should allow God that in other words there's a real risk now that raises another question and it is granted that there a risk has God made provision if things go wrong and that's what brings you nearer to Christianity so let's hold that there and then come back to the other problem surely a good and all powerful God ought to etc etc and we argue about that particularly students all night and no one ever gets a satisfactory answer I'm a mathematician and when we try for a few hundred years to answer a question we get nowhere we have the sense to stop and say are are we asking the right question now I think there's another question it's equally hard but it gets us further and that is this every worldview in light of the suffering and evil has got to face the mixed picture that our world presents to us I call it Beauty and bombs and that says it all we look at the sky the stars magnificent we look at what's happening in Russia Ukraine and the Middle East today and it's horrific how do you come to terms with that and here's my hard question granted that it's like that we've all got to face that is there any evidence anywhere that there's a God that we could trust with it now that's a big question I think there is and it starts with the fact that the central claim of Jesus Christ is to be God incarnate and as we see him on the cross which is the heart of Christianity it raises the question what's God doing on a cross well at least it says that he's not remained distant from suffering but has become part of it now if that were all that we'd never have heard that story but Christ was raised from the dead and that changes everything but because it means that death is not the end and that begins to show me I don't say this is the answer but I do believe deep down it's giving us an insight into where we can accept with all our questions that remain where we can have confidence that God knows how to deal with this and that we can trust him with it because he understands our suffering and our pain and he promises those of us who trust him that there will be a day when we will experience the end of all of that now I can remember just to a little anecdote I spoke on this in Christ Church huge audience church one of the biggest for years and there was a note waiting for me as I went out the door and it said I'm sorry I couldn't stay I couldn't face the people I lost my husband earlier in the week but this has given me a window into hope and that's where I want to start is the essence of Christianity is God so loved the world that he gave his son now if my wife were here she'd say I'm going to go to heaven with loads of questions about this there's a lot of it we don't understand but I deeply sense that once we see the whole picture the other side of the tapestry if you like we'll not have so many questions but that gives me real hope atheism is a hopeless philosophy it has nothing to say so I think here we are we have to decide if there is evidence that there is such a God and one thing that encourages me is that the Bible tells us about both these sources of suffering it's very interesting that the biggest book of scripture one of the longest anyway the Book of Job deals with this both problems from the beginning because job's family was attacked by seans that's moral evil but also there was lightning and natural and winds there was the natural the two and Jesus as he stood on the temple it's very interesting was faced with both simultaneous ly he was talking to the crowd and they were discussing the fact that pilate and his soldiers had murdered some people when they were sacrificing and Jesus refers do you think they were Sinners uh above all people which some people think you see if you suffer you're sinning that the doctrine of Karma and all of this um which I met in New Zealand no he said they aren't you must not necessarily feel it because a person suffer it's because and that's very important it's because it's their fault but unless we all repent we shall likewise perish and then he introduced he said or do you think that the 18 people on whom the T Tower of silam fell were Sinners above all he he refers to a natural disaster in almost the same breath and that shows me that it takes this business seriously yeah and the main story that helps us get into this is in John 11 The Story of Lazarus who Jesus was told he was Ill by his sisters and he didn't come and it brought the sisters very near to doubting the love of God he who you love is ill we've got to read that story in light of the Lord loved Mary and Martha and Lazarus but he didn't come he let the man die and when he arrived at the graveyard and Martha met him if you had been here here my brother would not have died she didn't doubt his power but why wasn't he there and that's the problem in a nutshell why does God allow this to happen and he says you will see the glory of God and he'll be raised yes I know he's going to be raised at the last day oh no Martha it's more than that I am the resurrection and you see the two reactions there she was very bright theologically trained obviously and entered a a vigorous discussion the other sister just wept and Jesus wept too and that shows the sympathy of God's heart to the two reactions the intellectual how are you going to questioning yes how you going to sort this out and the other the the emotional thing and the interesting thing is that Christ then revealed who he was by raising the man from the dead and they had to live through the suffering and the pain of losing their brother and he had to die and yet in the end they saw that it was the resurrection that did it and I believe that that is true in the general sense now there are all kinds of hundreds of Fringe questions but that's how I start but I do believe that we need to approach this with immense because some people have suffered unbelievably I have friends who've lost all the relatives and the Holocaust and all this kind of stuff we must understand why they feel as they do about God can I ask you one final question and it's related to what you've just shared um so you talked about the hope of the resurrection and that being an evidenced hope so my last question to you is you know as a scientist who held a a a professor's chair at one of the greatest universities in the world don't you think that Miracles are violations of the laws of nature no I think David Hume whom you're quoting was wrong and it's very interesting looking back because uh when I was younger the world's greatest interpreter of David Hume was Anthony flu and I met Anthony flu uh sometime before he died but not long before he died and I asked him about this and he said you know I was wrong and all my books would have to be Rewritten and I never get to do it it was the most honest modest humble statement and I probed this and Le saw long ago why hum was long in fact you were talking about the debates Christopher Hitchin challenged me of this in public and said well hum has put the final nail in God's coffin or something like this and I said nonsense I said miracles don't violate the laws of nature uh let me explain to you why and uh I stay in a hotel L say in London here tonight and I put1 in the drawer then I put another 100 the next night that's 200 200 wake up on the third morning and I find £50 in the drawer now what do I deduce from that do I deduce that the laws of arithmetic have been broken or the laws of England I think about that clearly I deduce the laws of England have been broken but how do I know that because the laws of arithmetic have not been broken my mistake was to think that the drawer the room was a closed system of cause and effect but actually it was open to a thief putting their hand in the laws of arithmetic can't forbid that they helped me to say that that has happened and so hum is just totally wrong here the problem is that the word violate laws sounds like jurist Prudence it it sounds like law in terms of the law of a country the laws of nature are not like that at all the laws of nature are our descriptions of what normally happens the law of gravity says if I drop an apple it will fall towards the center of the earth that does not stop you sticking your hand out and catching it exactly and God has made regularities and buil them into the universe and it's our knowledge of them that helps us to recognize when God does something special he's not breaking any laws and it's just total misunderstanding that has been perpetuated by Hume and Dawkins and Hitchens and all the rest of them and after the debate he said that was heavy stuff about Hume and I said it wasn't it was elementary logic Christopher you're listening to the wrong scientists he laughed but the point is very important Lewis got that right and Anthony flu could see that that science deals in that sense with laws of nature and all the rest of them and it's our knowledge of them now H made several other objections and one of the biggest is silly he said it was possible to believe in miracles in an age when people didn't know the laws of nature and you read the New Testament and you have a man uh born blind Jesus heals him and he points out to the theologians that investigated the religious authorities he said from the very beginning of the world it's never been heard that a man born blind he knew the norm that if you're born blind you don't get seeing and so when he was cured he recognized an intervention an intervention similarly Joseph knew exactly where babies came from and when his fiance Mary came and said I'm pregnant what was he minded to do to divorce her because he knew exactly where babies came from he didn't believe her story and it took a massive intervention of God speaking to him by an Angel and everything else before he got beyond that prejudice that was based on a knowledge of the laws of nature so it's sheer nonsense to say they knew exactly also the dead bodies don't normally rise which so they ra recognized because of the evidence before them and the appearances of Jesus and all the rest that he' risen from the dead so I I feel that this objection is very weak indeed but it's made again and again and again and well there we are actually David Hume appeared to have a residual belief in God as Creator which is a bit remarkable that people usually lose in the fog of this whole discussion wow thank you John thank you so much I think that's such a critical point to to end on Miracles are interventions by the author of the laws of nature and we can only recognize them as His interventions because we know those laws precisely so helpful thank you so much for joining us for this interview with professor John Lennox hosted by premere and [Applause] [Music] goodbye [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Premier Unbelievable?

Views: 194,716

Keywords: unbelievable, justin brierley, premier christian radio, christianity, atheism, philosophy, faith, theology, God, apologetics, Jesus, debate, science, evidence, Bible, big conversation

Id: qnOkOAqyTYE

Length: 86min 38sec (5198 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 20 2023