Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - John C. Lennox: Has AI Become God? The Ultimate THREAT of Artificial Intelligence

Episode Date: February 24, 2026

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/yt to win a meteorite 💥 In this episode, I sit down with renowned Oxford mathematician, philosopher of science, and public intellectual John C. Lennox to explore the urgent questions surrounding artificial intelligence and humanity’s future. We dive into the biggest questions about AI, consciousness, truth, faith, and what it means to be human in an age of accelerating technology. If you’re curious about whether AI is humanity’s greatest achievement, its greatest temptation, or something even more profound, watch the full conversation and join us as we explore the future of intelligence—and our place within it. Key Takeaways: 01:05 - Who Decides What’s True in the Age of AI? 03:14 - Can AI Ever Be Truly Creative? The ‘Einstein Test’ 04:10 - Consciousness: The Uncrossable Barrier 07:20 - The QWERTY Keyboard Problem: Are We Stuck with LLMs? 19:10 - The AI Hall of Mirrors: Training on Itself 27:02 - Information Isn’t Just Bits and Atoms 32:05 - Are We Trying to Build God? 36:48 - The Deepest Question—What Does It Mean to Be Human? 47:50 - The Temptation to Play God: From Babel to the Singularity 50:14 - AI’s Relationship to Power and Surveillance - Join this channel to get access to perks like monthly Office Hours: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 Get my books: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with productivity tips from 9 Nobel Prize winners: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life-changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Follow me to ask questions of my guests: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast #universe #podcast #briankeating #intotheimpossible #science #astronomy #cosmology #cosmicmicrowavebackground #intotheimpossible #artificialintelligence #aiandethics #2084 #religionandscience #surveillancesociety #superintelligence #philosophyofscience #humanconsciousness Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Imagine a world where your phone isn't just tracking you. It's training you. Not to buy things. To believe things. Now, take Orwell's 1984. Fast forward a century and swap boot-on-face tyranny for something cleaner. Algorithms, incentives, and safety all wrapped in convenience courtesy of our government. My guest today is John C. Lennox, Oxford mathematician, philosopher of science,

and one of the foremost public thinkers alive. He's debated the new atheists, lectured around the world, and spent decades asking a question that suddenly feels urgent. What happens when the tools that inform us start to reform us? His newest book, 2084, is a warning shot about technology, surveillance, and the seduction of a future managed by AI technocrats like Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Mark Andreessen. But we're not doing generic AI is scary today.

We're going to get specific. Who decides what's true? What does misinformation mean when power defines the dictionary? And what's the line between protecting people and quietly replacing their agency? And how does Jesus Christ fit into all of this? Now, let's go deep into the impossible with today's guest, John C. Lennox. Let's go. I was just going to say that the older ideas,

get the more important they have. Today I'm joined by my friend, an Oxford mathematician, legendary scientist, author, thinker, John Lennox, all the way from Oxford. And today we're not talking about the usual topics that we talk about on this podcast, although we are in a different form, because we're going to be talking about the AI race that's enveloped the planet, even more so since John wrote this wonderful book called 2084 as a sort of riff off 1984. we'll talk about the parallels too, but imagining a world 100 years hence. And John claims that the push towards super intelligent AI is nothing less than a modern attempt to make God and to be God.

Meanwhile, the ancient scriptures like the Book of Revelations, may describe patterns that we're now recreating through surveillance technologies that have a commonality with George Orwell's great work. So our question today will be, is AI humanity's greatest invention? its last invention or just its latest temptation. John, welcome to the Into the Impossible podcast. It's great to see it. Well, thank you very much, Brian.

It's a real honor to be on this program with you. Well, we've been friends. We've known each other for a little while now. We met in Europe and now we're talking all the way across the country with the help of modern technology. And we're going to talk a lot about modern technology, especially the pursuit of superintelligence. and I've spoken to many researchers about it. Some claim it may be like God.

Some say that they are the gods for creating it, but for the wisdom. But the first question I want to ask you is take you back to this other mathematician, physicist of some renown named Albert Einstein. Albert Einstein, you may know, and my listeners may have heard me say it in the past, that in 1907, he said, I had the happiest thought of my life. And that was that an observer in free fall, like that, would feel. no gravitational field. I want to ask you, John, what are the prospects that a silicon or quantum computer or any kind of artificial technological intelligence could ever have a happiest thought

and could visualize the sensation of free fall and have this kind of magnificent breakthrough that Einstein did? Pose the Einstein test instead of the Turing test. Can an AI ever achieve what Einstein did sort of seemingly naturally for him? Well, I think it's highly unlikely for a very obvious reason because Einstein's experience is crucially dependent on the fact that he's a conscious thinker and until someone gets a handle unconsciousness as such, what fascinates me in the race for AGI artificial general intelligence or superintelligence or whatever you want to call it is that people tend to be. pretty careful to screen off the really hard problem.

And in what's often called the Bible of AI written by Peter Norvig and his colleague, they honestly admit that they take the stance that Alan Turing took. In other words, what they're doing is playing the imitation game. They're imitating or trying to replicate using technology. what is normally done by a human conscious being. But they're not trying to make their machines conscious. In fact, many of them admit they wouldn't even know what that meant because nobody knows what consciousness is.

And I think that is an almost fundamental barrier, a bit like an event horizon surrounding this whole topic. So however much they will imitate what normal human beings and highly intelligent human beings and maybe superhuman beings will do, it nevertheless will remain imitation. And I think that's a very important thing to bear in mind, particularly in light of the kind of vocabulary that increasingly is being used about these technologies. They're anthropomorphized until people almost think they have human minds, feelings, all the rest of it. But they don't experience qualia.

They have no minds they don't think. That's right. And I think it's kind of interesting that we've kind of conflated, you know, that there's people use the word band-aid, at least here in America. I don't know what they call it there. But they call it or pamper,

you call them nappies or in the UK. That's right. But band-aids are bandages. but they become synonymous or Kleenex for tissue. And that's an example of sort of these lock-in phenomena where something that became first kind of takes over. So, for example, the Querti keyboard that you and I have in front of us, presumably, unless you have the Dvorak keyboard,

and I'd be very impressed if you have a Dvorah. No, Querti, sir. So Quirti was designed because in ancient typewriters, that I remember, and you certainly remember, hunting and pecking. And there was a problem that the keys were making. mechanical and they'd strike the paper and the ink and if you typed too often letters that were very close together very frequently associated with each other they the hammers would that held the letters

would stick together so they invented this way to slow down progress which is to invent this quirky keyboard where the letters are not associated by frequency of use so that would slow down and have now we're locked into that literally a hundred plus years later you and i have query keyboards for no good reason. They don't get stuck together now. Now, I'm wondering, John, if the same thing might happen. Most people think of, you know, LLMs or AI as chat GPT or Claude. And you inform me before we began your party to a lawsuit, which may get you a billion dollars.

And I hope that you'll remember your friend Brian here in San Diego when you get that anthropic lawsuit cash, that sweet cash. But, John, tell me, do we make a mistake by assuming AGI, ASI, or even just a super, useful AI will come from an LLM. I mean, don't forget, these things came from GPUs, graphic processing units, matrix multiplication, which is not very complicated, and a couple of algorithmic steps and huge training sets, but they're not very complicated, but are we getting locked in, just as a way we got locked into the QWERTY keyboard, we're getting locked in because of the success of GPUs and large language models? I think you're probably right. And you know, I'm old enough to remember

that even the QWERTY keyboard or an old typewriter, they stuck. I got stuck many times with my first typewriter. It drove me crazy. But I think you might be onto something there. There's always the danger. If you've got a very successful product

of a lot of thinking that goes on behind the scenes in machine learning and neural networks and all this kind of thing, The danger is that then the product is going to be the producer of higher and higher levels until we reach it, but it may not be. It may require, if ever we get anywhere near anything like this. Certainly, AIs will be combined with one another so that they'll get more and more sophisticated. And I will readily admit because I was testing it recently that Chat GD.

P-T-5 is extremely impressive. I put to it a question. I wanted to illustrate an abstract idea, an abstract biblical idea. And I said, invent a scenario that would illustrate this. And the result was staggering. It was so good making a short film about this, you see. So it then prompted me and said, would you like to see how this would. pan out in terms of cinematographic directions in order to make your film. And there they were instantly. And it was most impressive, although I'm well aware that these things hallucinate, which is a polite way of saying that they make errors.

And that's what they are. But I think, I don't know, you see. I don't know, but I'm puzzled, Brian. and you may be able to solve the puzzle for me. The fact that some of the leaders in this field appear to be nervous about the control problem and they claim not really to understand how what they appear to have produced works

and start calling for a moratorium when at the same time, of course, piling on the research to out to do their competitors, which is a rather funny way to behave. But I wonder, and this is a question for you, actually, is there something they're not telling us about what they have discovered in the inner workings of this kind of thing? Because it's a very unusual situation to be in, to have a technology where you're afraid of losing control of it.

Right. Well, they call it, you know, humanity's last exam, humanity's last invention. I actually am an AI optimist for the following reason. I don't believe, I agree with you, I don't believe there'll be an AIAE, you know, Albert Einstein. I don't think that that will come about for the simple fact that if you look at the way the human creative mind works and you point out this distinction in the book, the difference between, you know, the, you know, Pinocchio being, you know, created by Jepetto. Jepetto having a child begat, you know, as the Bible says, right? So there's a difference in creating

something and, you know, and actually instilling and breathing life into it and insoling something. And I think if you look at the equations and your colleague and friend, you know, Stephen Hawking used to talk about what breeds fire into the equations. Now, he was not a believer. He was a devout atheist, I would say. But even he recognized there was an intangible leap that he, humans needed to make. So I do worry about the murder bots that you talk about in this book. I worry about out of control, things like character AI, which has been alleged to be party to the tragic death of a young person. I'm not going to comment on the legality of it. But and I agree to some extent with my friend Max Tegmark, who's very prominently featured in the book. And also

has been a guest many times in the podcast. But also with Jan Lacoon, they're kind of on opposite sides. And I had them, you know, fight with each other or just send each other messages. Yeah, they were not at the same time. But the bottom line is to create a truly useful artificial intelligence, I think it would have to do something that human beings can't do. And I see no evidence of that with LLMs as being the key driver. Now, that may change with other types of architecture for artificial intelligence. But I think what's going to happen is that the LLMs are so successful. They're the QWERTY keyboards times a trillion, and they're never going to be replaced. I mean, imagine replacing every keyboard and every phone on every desktop, 8 billion computers

with Dvorak keyboards because it would make us much more efficient. I mean, it would be 10 or 20. It will never happen. And I don't believe that it will happen with a AGI coming about until it can create new laws of physics. That's the Keating test. The Keating test is, can it create some new law that we wouldn't have suggested? And my work with my students here at UCSD, We even put in, you know, speaking of Einstein, John, we put in the, all the data on Mercury's orbit for thousands of years from JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has actual historical measurements plus forecast retradiction. We put that into chat cheap to a large language model and we said, why does it behave this way? But no other information. It could not figure out, now, that's a huge leap.

It could not figure out that there was a Romanian metric and that there was, you know, Riemann curvature and all sorts. I couldn't, you know, I couldn't probably do that either, you know, starting from scratch. But it tried to discretize it. It made up different laws. It was very sycophantic, which is another problem these things have. So I don't think AGI is coming from LLMs, and I think LLMs are so successful. They're going to extinguish the oxygen of any nascent, youthful AI technology. So I want to talk about what these things are doing, which are really sophisticated, you know, next word predictions.

and word is a very important word to you and to me. As you mentioned, you know, in the beginning there was the word. In Hebrew, the word word and the word thing are the same word, Dvar. So what is, what are these things? Is the universe, I always thought the universe was mathematical, scientific, maybe linguistic, but you point out the essence of it being a personal universe. What does that mean to you? Well, let's start with the word concept.

It seems to me very clear that this is a word-based universe. And the Hebrew text of Bereshite or Genesis is very clear. It's a wonderful document of about 100 words in Hebrew. and constantly repeated is the idea, and God said. And you have a sequence of steps leading up to the creation of human beings in his image. And so that would indicate to me that in a very deep and real sense, this is a word-based universe.

But the interesting thing is it's, and God said. This is a personal being speaking, which is very different from the abstract notion of word. And it's summed up, as you quoted in the New Testament in John's Gospel, in the beginning was the word, which is essentially summarizing Genesis 1. They accord precisely at that point. And this idea that the word. word is ultimately personal. What I mean is you often see these posters and God said and then underneath you see Maxwell's equations written out and it says and there was light. But that is a

total misunderstanding that light doesn't appear from citing equations even verbally. The equations describe what's going on, but they don't produce it. And that seemed to be almost the late Stephen Hawking was a genius, but I do not think he understood the philosophical implications of that, that the idea that equations were enough to create a universe, equations create nothing. They describe, they don't create, they're hugely important. So I think the heating test is absolutely fascinating

and you're onto a good thing there because it is very important, I feel, that with all the hype that's going on, that people keep clear heads and remind the general public that it's not a question of incremental improvement or even quantum improvement that going along this track is

never going to yield new laws of physics and this kind of thing. And we need to be reminded of that because you will know in the academic world, I just had a conversation yesterday with people that work in the AI Institute in Oxford. And they're having large discussions about how do we assess students? Because every student is using AI to produce, I suspect you have that in San Diego. Just that my final yesterday. Yeah, exactly. And in the end, they are saying we'll have to get back to the old unseen exam system

where the students are put in a Faraday cage and have to do their examinations with no external communication because if we keep up simply allowing grading AI and we'll end up grading it by AI, We won't do it ourselves. So we're saying creating AI, the students will become intellectually mute and intellectually incapable of doing anything. That's what I'm afraid of. Do you fear that? I do. I do.

And I also fear the AI is being trained on AI generated information. I make the analogy, you know, into the mad cow disease of your country. We have no problems here in America with our beef. But, John, you guys had an issue with mad cow disease where cows were being fed cows to eat. And I feel like I call it mad bot disease, you know, because they will just ingest the, you know, the scribblings of previous AI outputs. And this will lead to just further entrenchment of these bad ideas, of the sycophanty, of the hallucination. But, you know, speaking of Stephen Hawking, you know, he was certainly a materialist. And I think that he had, at least he was honest.

He was very funny. I met him once. I asked him, why did you write this book, a brief history of time? It was back in 1995 at a Royal Society meeting. He could still respond in more or less real time. I said, Stephen, no one's read this book. He basically said, well, it's not important that they read it. It's just that they buy it.

But the reason that he wrote it was that he needed to pay for his daughter's private education. So he was honest, but at the end of his book, he says, you know, if we, when we, not if we, but if, when we discover the laws of string theory, which are, we will know the mind of God. We will know the mind of God. Now, was that cynical? Did he insert that God because it would also lead to book sales? You know, every equation he said, cut your book sales in half, but every mention of God, he said, doubles your books.

What do you make of this relationship that he had, this kind of worship of science in the natural world and this acuity that he had, but also this kind of, you know, blindness to maybe what is really going on behind the scenes. Was it utilitarian? How do you think he viewed or would view LLMs and AGI right now? I have no idea. I always think it's difficult to second guess what people really think. But I noticed this because I did read that book from beginning to end.

And I noticed this. And I thought, well, is he leaving a door open there? But in later life he shut the door. It seemed he very clearly shut the door, at least as far as his public utterances went. But there's another side. I understand that he began to attend church, and he showed interest in that kind of not only spiritual dimension, but Christian dimension. I've met one or two people who talked to him about these things.

but how deep it went it's very hard to say and of course I think that Lord Rees made a point about Stephen and Lord Rees

admired him you know him I'm sure very well he's been on the podcast he said about Stephen he said he'd written papers with Stephen I know Stephen very well and

he knows Stephen very well and he knows virtually nothing about religion and very little about philosophy, and I wouldn't talk to him on either of those things. And what struck me about his books, very honestly, I was hugely surprised. I saw an advanced copy of the last official book he wrote, and I wrote about it. I wrote a book called God and Stephen Hawking to try and put my thoughts together, which is still in print.

And of course, I never got any reaction to it from the Hawking side. But I just felt that with all his genius and logic and mathematical ability, his understanding of philosophy was extremely weak. I mean, for a man to say that philosophy is dead and then write a book, the rest of his book on the philosophy of science wasn't exactly clever. So I never met him, Brian. I remember seeing him because he was just beginning to show signs of his illness walking around Cambridge. I went up in 1962, which is roughly the same time as he turned up a bit older than me to be a PhD student.

So I remember him. And he clearly was an absolute genius. And I've talked to people who worked with him. But Einstein, you mentioned, is useful, of course, for many reasons. And one of the things is his famous rather dry observation that the scientist is a poor philosopher. That's right. Well, it goes back even to Galileo, you know, in his first encounters with the telescope, that he would say things like, well, the telescope obliterates the need for philosophers,

because you can prove with your eyes that the Milky Way is made up of stars, for example, which is wrong. And it's just amazing to look at how many of these great men and presumably, you know, their, their colleagues, you know, that they had great flaws. And I think when we lionize and we venerate them, we kind of worship them as gods, especially, you know, I've written about this in the book about the Nobel Prize, that we kind of, it's sort of a kosher idol, you know, for Avodazora, for idol worship. because it's not bad, right? I mean, you're doing science, but you literally, John, you go to Stockholm, you bow down, you receive a gilded graven image of Alfred Nobel, who's the patron saint or, you know, whatever, of dynamite, you know, the merchant of death he was called. But getting back to Hawking, so one of the final things that I remember Roger Penrose has told me many times is that Stephen was the best person to make a bet with because no matter what side of the bet,

he chose, he would always flip-flop, and so you'd be right, and you'd win the bet. And he did this with my friend Kip Thorne as well, obviously, too. Yeah, in the black hole information paradox, he speaks a lot about the notion of information. And I wonder, in the context of the mathematics, at least, of black holes and their ability to seemingly rearrange information at least so, so, you know, decisively. that it's impenetrable and scrutable, does that mean that there will be some perhaps only human capabilities which can never be computable?

In other words, is there some way to demonstrate maybe through the black hole information paradox that there is something unique about humanity as opposed to any other type of intelligence? Well, you mentioned Roger Penrose, and I've been very interested. I try to follow it as best I can. in his discussion, particularly of Goetle's results in mathematics.

And as I understand his argument, and I'm quite impressed with it, that this seems to indicate that the human mind can deal with things that are non-computable. And if you are a materialist and a mechanist, so to speak, you will never reduce human thought ability to computing. And it seems to me, therefore, that just adding to that and taking a sideways step from it, information, as you know better than I do, is not easy to define.

And we've got various types, semantics, syntactic, and all this kind of thing. And we can calculate how many bits per second can be transatlantic, can be transmitted across a channel by Shannon's brilliant theory and all the rest of it. But I have always taken the view in spite of a lot of pressure

coming from the other direction that information in itself is immaterial. Now, there was an argument. Was it Landau or somebody like that who wrote a book or a paper called Information is material. And it seems to me that it confused the fact that information is usually embedded in

material things. For example, the information I'm receiving right now through sound and hearing depends on physical substrates to communicate it, but the information itself is not material. And if that is the case, which I believe it to be, you have two things. First of all, you have the non-computability of certain things and perhaps Gregory Chaiton would be the man to ask about that as well as Roger Penrose and information is immaterial. That to my mind spells an end to materialism as a philosophy.

There must be something more. And that intrigues me as well. I've observed more and more as I've got older the number of leading intellectuals who are beginning to pause and say there must be something more. And I suspect you've come across that phenomenon in this connection. But I'd love to hear your take on Roger's notion that he can actually show, at least he argues,

that the capacity to do something like Goodle did shows that which computers cannot do, he says, it has led to a huge storm of discussion. I don't know whether it's ever been resolved. No, I don't think it has been resolved. It's reminiscent to me of Descartes. You know, I think therefore I am. It's I compute, therefore I am.

Yes. It's a wonderful kind of exposition and his book. And I've had the honor of being with him and Stuart Hammeroff to talk about consciousness. But the thing that, you know, so I wouldn't say that Sir Roger is particularly, you know, religious, although he's incredibly philosophical. No, he's not. He says he's a humanist. And he talks about scientism in sort of the, one of his books is called faith and fantasy

where he's talking about some of the things that Hawking put so much of his great hopes for salvation. And it makes me think, in reading your book, 1984, really makes me think about the parallels between AGI, the search for AGI and religion. And I just have a list of the ones that spoke the most to me in your book. And it's funny, John, because many of them have a parallel structure, and maybe you'll write about this someday, between the search for extraterrestrial intelligence as well. And let me say what they are. And then I want to ask you, is the AI race the race to make God? But let me get the parallels first.

So there's a notion of eschatology, that there's some future event that's going to transform everything. And ASI, it's the singularity. There's sociology, the salvation that comes from a higher intelligence, that having this super intelligence, as I said, Elon Musk calls it the last invention, these things that are supernatural, as we call it, superintelligence. There's notions of imminence and transcendence where the higher mind lives.

Obviously, the higher intelligence is imminent. It's built from objects, as you see, said material objects and material processes and mathematics, but then it transforms via this strange mathematics that, as you said before, its creators don't understand. And then lastly, but not least, you know, there's rituals, there's purification, there's sort of this prophet archetype where the first country, for example, we're often told that we can't pause, John, we cannot stop the race at Claude or ChatGPT to or OpenAI to make AGI. Because if China does it, then America's days are over, right?

This is what we hear. Even though we invented all these pernicious things like social media and pornography, as you point out, that all came from America, right? So it wasn't like they were held back and we succeeded economically beyond our wildest dreams because we invented Snapchat and AI girlfriends. But John, let me ask you, are we trying to essentially create God with AI? I think that people are and they say they are. It was, I'm trying to recall her name, a famous pioneer of AI,

who said that the whole thing began with, quote, an attempt to forge the gods. And if you listen to someone like Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Homodeus, the very title of the book, The Man God, or the Man Who is God, and he says quite explicitly that we've managed, or at least evolution, as he puts it, has managed to get us from creatures to thinkers. we can now take evolution into our hands and by what he calls a rather wryly, I think, intelligent design, we can turn ourselves into gods. And he says, well, gods with a small G,

but you get the idea. And then coming from the other end, you have the inevitability of people starting to worship something that they don't understand but is bigger than themselves. after all, as has been pointed out very often, if you take some of the theologians,

ideas of God being a being who is omniscient, well, after all, we've got advanced AI surveillance technology that's going very rapidly towards omniscience. Omnipresence, it's everywhere in the world, the internet is worldwide, etc., etc. and it'll soon know more about us than we know about ourselves if it doesn't know already. And I believe that in the US at least, there are groups of people who are given to worshipping AI officially. And it is inevitable.

This whole idea, though, Brian, is so interesting because if you go back to the Hebrew scriptures, starting in Genesis and its brief but very succinct report of how damage came in to the world you have the famous account of the Garden of Eden and the temptation

by the snake as you will very well recall and it's so clear is that God is trying to keep you humans down and he knows if you go against what he says and eat the forbidden fruit you shall be

as gods knowing good and evil and it has been well pointed out that they were banished from the garden but they've been looking for that climb up to be gods ever since and so right through history

and I've traced it in considerable detail in some of my books You have these outburstings through history of powerful leaders claiming deity in order to establish their powerful rule. You got it in the ancient Babylonian world under which the Jewish nation suffered terribly. And I've written about that in my book on Daniel. And it's fascinating. Then the Caesars started to call themselves gods, usually post-mortem until some of them got impatient and decided they were gods before they died and caused a lot of trouble with the Senate. And all through, and if you think in my lifetime, Chaisesco in Romania was treated as a god, Hocca in Albania had him sung to him.

And this idea of reaching out to be a God is absolutely ingrained. And it seems to me that AI may well be facilitating that. I would like to add one staggering point to my mind that the biblical revelation shows us something the exact opposite. All of this stuff is humans wanting to become gods. And the central message, as I understand it, biblical message is that the God has become human in order to do what you were saying, the soterology, in order to save us where the Jewish and the Christian tradition flow together. So I feel that the biblical material has got a huge amount to say about one of the biggest problems this raises. And that is what exactly is a human being?

now that we're replicating so many properties of humans. So it seems to me that the Keating type of test is actually very important that you push from the side of cosmology and science and physics, particularly, to really spell out the way you see the limits. You know, I've written a lot about the limits of science, and most scientists agree with it. They're not scientific. They don't take the view that science explains everything.

But we need to bear down on that and point out that not only do the natural sciences not explain everything, they don't answer the big questions that now people are attempting to answer through a pseudo-religion of artificial intelligence. In other words, who are we? Why are we here? what is the meaning of life?

That's right. These are the things that matter the most. And I learned from a Christian pastor, even though, you know, I'm practicing too, that in the opening lines of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible, it said, God says, let us make man in our image, which is a very, you know, all little kids in Hebrew school learn this, but I didn't learn it until I was in my 50s. But the point is, who has God talking? Like, who's he talking to?

And if you look at it, the only entities that are around when he says that, and by the way, nobody has to take this literally. Nobody should take away that I'm at least biblical literalist whatsoever. I have my right to talk to people like John and like Sam Harris, who I've had on, or Lawrence Krause, Richard Dawkins. I've hosted in person in America. In Canada, actually, it turned out. But the point is, who's he talking? to, the only entities around are him, the angels, you know, godlike entities like angels and him, and the animals. And I think that's beautiful. We have this kind of angelic, you know, godlike ability

to create and to partner, you know, with a higher being. But we also have animalistic urges for power, for money, for sex, for greed, for all these different things. And I think that's the wisdom, which artificial intelligence for all its flaws at least doesn't purport to be wise. You know, it's not called artificial general wisdom. And in Hebrew, you know, like the, it's reputed that the native, you know, Eskimos of Canada and Alaska have 30 words for snow or something because it's so important to their culture. You know, in Judaism, we have at least eight different words for intelligence, wisdom, insight, foresight, you know, all these different types of things, because it's so unique to what humans can do. And I think that's where, again, I'm an optimist. I love

I love AI and I'm so, I'm just so, like, proud to know you and so happy that you are who you are because I don't know anybody. Even my contemporaries, John, that use AI, that understand AI as well as you do. And you started this book before the year 2020. I know that for a fact because it came out for the first time in 2020 and it was released again last year. But let's do what you're not supposed to do. Let's judge a book by its cover. I have an AI-generated jingle, which my producers are going to insert right now, but judging books by their covers.

Hey, book lovers, we're judging books by the covers. We know we're not supposed to do it, but it's into the impossible. There's nothing to it. Let's take a look and judge some books. There it is. So, John, take us through. What was the reason that you chose the title, 2084? Oh, right.

I have one or two comments to make if I may on what you just said because I resonate. I resonate a great deal with it. And I've got something which I'd like to show you. This was given to me by the president of the University of Barilan in Israel. And it's very special. you see, I didn't have to reach far to get it. And it spells beta and Aleph, bait and Aleph,

but you'll notice if you look carefully that it's a stereoscopic microscope and the two lenses are the Torah. Torah scroll. And it's one of the most wonderful symbols. Beautiful. Now I'm jealous. Now you've given me the sin of jealousy, John.

How could you do that? It's wonderful in the way it harmonizes the natural sciences and the Hebrew scriptures, the biblical scriptures. And I'm extremely proud of it. I love it. It sits very close to me and it reminds me that the beginning of wisdom is to be found in the Torah. So there's something rather special for you. And your question, where did I get the title? I got it from an atheist and out and out atheist.

This will amuse you because you probably know Peter Atkins, the Professor of Physical Chemistry at Oxford. Well, he and I were traveling together in the back of a car in 2019 or 2018 or something. And we were going to a debate on the God question where we were taking opposite sides. And it's a fascinating discussion, which is on the internet under the wonderful title, dueling professors. So in the car, I said, Peter, we're not going to discuss tonight's debate. And he said, no, we're not. So what are you writing, John? And I said, well, I've got very interested in artificial intelligence.

And immediately he said, I've got a title for you. I said, what is it, Peter? And if it's good, I might use it, and I'll acknowledge you. I said, well, he said, it's 2084. So I used it. And you will see that I acknowledged him in the book. So that's where it came from.

And I thought it was a very good idea. Peter hasn't changed his mind. I don't know that he's had a look. book at all. Wow. Well, another great topic, again, from the Bible. And I promise we'll get into a couple of non-transcendant topics. No, no, I'm really enjoying this.

It's not for you. It's not for you. It's for my audience, the members of my audience that have a visceral anti-religious reaction. And I should say, you know, as you know, I was born Jewish and then I became converted to Catholicism. and then came back to the religion of my faith and so forth and tried to learn all these things that I would have learned

if I had a bar mitzvah at age 13, but instead I was an altar boy in the Catholic Church in Chappaquin, New York. But one of the stories that has always resonated with me, whenever I read the Torah, you know, Jews read the Torah once, one chapter, one weekly partial portion each week, is, of course, the Tower of Babel, which everybody's sort of heard about. There's language, you know, kind of learning tools called

Babel and all sorts of things. But what's never mentioned is that when the Bible mentions it, it's always alongside with the tower and the city of Babel. In other words, it's never in isolation. The Migdal is always with the ear, the city and the tower. Why do you think that is? I mean, is there something about like the human agglomeration in cities that leads to this desire to, as you say, transcend and reach to heaven? Oh, I think that is. And I think one of the people who sees it very clearly is Leon Kass, a very eminent Jewish thinker and writer from the University of Chicago. His book on Genesis is magisterial. I've learned a vast amount from it. But I decided to do a lot of work in trying to understand this when I was writing about Abraham and his story that is

very important for the whole Bible. And it seems to me that the city and the tower are hugely important because of what cities represent and what towers represent. And to come directly to the point, skyscrapers are very interesting. And there are some cities in the world, as someone has said, like Kuala Lumpur that you'd never have heard of if you didn't know about the towers that were that. were there. And a lovely quote, I started to read accounts of the motivation for building a skyscraper. And one journalist said behind every skyscraper, there's a massive ego that's bigger than the skyscraper itself. And here you have people reaching for the sky. And one of the bits of dry humor in Genesis is, and God came down to see the tower. So they didn't reach heaven after,

all he had to come down to see it, which is absolutely marvellous. But it seems to be a wonderful symbol, that city and tower of human hubris. And they were trying to make a unity that would never be scattered by their own power and by their ability and their brains. And it had to do with the fact that they all had one language, a common language. Now, this interests me greatly because you see, the result of AI is that we are getting more and more efficient translators that are making it almost at the moment where I could speak to you if you were Chinese in English and you would hear Chinese come out immediately

out of the other end of the system. So that what we're experienced technologically could be seen is a kind of reversal of Babel, which is a very interesting way of looking at it, because this idea of forging a unity through sheer power and coupled with the rejection of the true God and making yourself or AI into a god, because the interesting thing about images in the ancient world

and we're now building technological images as you point out in the modern world is they simply embody the ideals of the people that create them and they're pushing towards the sky and they won't reach God unless if they're restricted as many of them are that's quite obvious they are because of the amount of atheists,

that's tied to AI. Now, like you, I'm not a pessimist about all of this, and I hope you didn't get that impression from my book. I'm trying to be a realist, and the reason for writing it, which you asked, was to inform, first of all, and to get people thinking about its implications, because you know better again than I do,

that technology always suffers from the fact, that the powers, the ethical principles needed to control it, always develop much slower than the technology itself. And so we find ourselves in a situation where companies are scrambling to have some kind of ethical statement, but they know for one of the big reasons you gave that if it can be done, it's going to be done by somebody. And it is putting a lot of power into the hands,

of fewer and fewer people. Now, those trends, that unity in Babel or Babylon as it was, that idea starts to barrel up through history. And we see it in the great empires of the world in the Roman Empire. And of course, when I was young, not too many people talked about the idea of a world state, but they're talking about it now. And the glomons, of power. And that's, of course, where I brought the book of Revelation, the last book in the Bible into this, which uses the imagery from the Jewish prophecies, very powerful imagery, particularly from the book of Daniel, where Daniel, a fascinating character, if ever there was one, he saw down through history the rise and fall for sequence of empires, and he identified the three of them, they're explicitly identified as Babylon, Medo, Persia and Greece. And then there was a fourth one, which we can identify as Rome. And the amazing thing about Daniel was, as I believe, he wrote in the 6th century BC and he got the stuff right, which is amazing. But he talked

through this imagery of great animals and beasts and so on about these empires. Now, symbolism, which is used in Daniel, C.S. Lewis taught me, I used to listen to him at Cambridge, the fact that symbols always stand for something real. And if you approach the book of Daniel and revelation that way, yes, there's symbolism, but what does it stand for? And the idea of coupling animals in these visions with certain human properties like human intelligence

and insight leads you to an idea of a hideous strength in the future that governs the whole world. And what I say is, have a look at Max Tegmark's fascinating book, Life 3.0. I found it so interesting. I've never met him, but if you're talking to him, tell him I found it extremely interesting. Because as I remark in my book, one of his scenarios, the one he, highlights now he's very open he said I'm not saying which one I believe will happen and I take that but his Prometheus idea which has come back with some of the leaders a day I just recently in a company of that name is so close to the descriptions in Daniel and the book of revelation that I have a little argument with people I say to them look if you take these

scenarios seriously that are written by eminent intellectuals and physicists like Marx-Tegbark, perhaps it's worth revisiting what Daniel the Prophet said 26 centuries ago and what you read at the end of the New Testament. And actually, you probably don't know this, but just recently, I brought out a very big book, my biggest yet, and the publishers have called it God, AI, and the end of history, understanding the book of revelation in an age of intelligent machines. That might just interest you. Yeah, absolutely.

And you bring up our mutual contact, at least. I can't call him a friend, but Peter Thiel, you know, said a kind of echoing Mark Twain's famous, statement about history not repeating but rhyming, that he claims that AI basically rhymes with the book of Revelation. Well, that's right. And I was fascinated when I read that. And I've talked to him about that.

And it seems to me a very interesting coalescence of ideas that as a technologist, he sees AI at least facilitating that kind of service. surveillance technology that would enable a world dictatorship. And he sees similar things from the Bible, which he studied in his background. And I see exactly the same. And I feel, therefore, that it's worth talking to people about it. Because, of course, in days gone past, people used to just laugh at any sort of identification of the things that happened in Daniel and Revelation. and we've got to be extremely careful.

But what we can see is what we've been talking about. You can see the trends towards the deification of man is the way I would put it. You can see that all through history. That isn't a symbol. It's reality. And we can see the move towards unity and power and control and all this kind of thing. And looking from the perspective of trends, we can build up a very good idea without necessarily identifying every last thing,

which some of our four fathers tried to do without success. You know, Hitler was the beast and all this kind of stuff. Well, he was a representation of that kind of thing, but maybe not the final one, sadly. So there's a lot of work to be done, I think, in communicating to the public that it's not so crazy. taking a biblical view of things. And the sad thing to my mind is that, as you say,

many people have been put off by encounters with religion that have left them bruised and beaten, and that's a tragedy. So go back to the original documents, I would say. Read Genesis, read Revelation, read this stuff, and see if it makes sense. And it makes a lot more sense, I think. Yeah, from a most purely sign, when I talk to my atheist or even my radically agnostic friends, like my friend, the late great Freeman Dyson, he was the first guest on the podcast and he would spend his win.

Was he really, right? Yeah, he would spend his, he was smart man, you know, he wouldn't, he wouldn't spend winters at the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey. He would come here to La Jolla, San Diego, at UCSD, and we'd always do a podcast and talk together. And I said, you know, you're kind of inscrutable, you know, Freeman, because you claim to be. be agnostic, but if I were to ask you, you know, what do you do on a normal Sunday? It would be identical to the same things that, you know, Richard Dawkins also doesn't do, namely go to church, you know. So in what ways does an agnostic differentiate by his behavior from being an atheist? I think most, many agnostics are just unwilling to admit that they're really atheist or, you know, or God forbid, admit that they may be tempted by religious understandings. I think that's right.

There are two kinds of agnostics, of course. Greek agonosco means I don't know. You don't know, right. But it mutates to a much more, a much less humble position, which is I don't know and you can't know. Exactly. But if I don't know, how can I know that you can't know? Exactly. There's a contradiction.

And I think that's absolutely right. It's more of a popular descriptor to avoid having to face certain deep issues. But there again, I am fascinated in these last few years of reading people like Tom Holland, for example, who coming from an atheist position, fascinatingly, because he is a classical historian understanding Greece and Rome. And he used to think that all the best values came from Greece and Rome until he discovered they didn't. They came from the biblical worldview and he has moved steadily towards reclaiming that ground and Jordan Peterson who perhaps a bit further back is doing the same kind of thing and there are a number of people like this.

And I find that immensely encouraging at the high old age of 82. That's right. Well, you're two-thirds the way to the biblical age of 120, John. So I hope you will make it. And the remaining minutes that we have, I know it's late there, but if you'll indulge me with your legendary forbearance to ask two more questions. Sure. And the first one is about really, you know, topics that we've brushed upon.

But one of the wonderful things I think of a scientist is to balance humility with, you know, as we say in Yiddish, chutzpah, you know, to have a little bit of arrogance and ego. Because if you're, if you just try to, you know, defeat Mother Nature, if you won't call it God or whatever, you say Mother Nature is undefeated and always will be. We'll never know all of it. You can never win science, John. You can never get to the, just like imagine getting to the end of the internet, right? I mean, every hour, there's like a million hours of video posted to YouTube. So it's hopeless. But if you, if you purely led with that feeling of hopelessness, you'd be brought to despair and you'd never do anything.

And yet, John, it's very hard. There's a Yiddish proverb which says, the man who stands in the middle of the road gets hit by both sides of the traffic. You know, if you have too much humility, you'll never do anything. And if you have too much arrogance, well, we know where that leads to. But do you think that this is just another incarnation, you know, maybe before it was technology, the internet, all the different types of technology, that we are trying to do something. We're trying to transcend our limits of perhaps our mental

abilities, our physical abilities, and maybe just maybe our lifespan. Do you feel that this is dangerous in some sense? In other words, I think it could well be. From where I set, you see there is in the human spirit a longing for transcendence and you said something a while back that is absolutely fundamental for me and that is the statement let us make man human beings in our own image you know I have a telescope sitting behind me which you probably can't see but I love looking up at the Andromeda and so on on the odd nights that it's clear here. I sometimes wished I lived in Southern California.

Maybe you'll visit us for your sabbatical. But anyway, the heavens declared the glory of God, said the Hebrew Samist, but they were not made in God's image. You were and I was. And this gives human beings a tremendous dignity by virtue of being created beings. And that is my answer to this feeling of all the knowledge in the world is overwhelming. All the feeling, as Newton did, you know, I'm just at the edge of a vast sea of the unknown. And that is absolutely true. But if we are genuinely, and I believe it to be

the case made in God's image, that is a an immensely freeing idea. And I'm just glad that I learned it very young from my parents. And we have a value, therefore, that is transcendent. And here it is. People are seeking for transcendence, but they're seeking it through their own ability to produce technology that maybe we'll let them last a few more years or in cryogenics or uploading their brains into the cloud or something like this when all the time there's a transcendent message coming down through Abraham of the Hebrew prophets and i believe into the new testament of a savior that comes to save us from that and to give us a new life and a new power to live that's as a

gift and one of the most important statements and I've written a book about it basically is when Abraham was commanded in Hebrew lech lehle ha it's it's two of the most important words in Hebrew says the late chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks that I love to listen to in the UK and lechle ha means a number of things that means go yourself go on a journey, or it means go into yourself and learn about yourself and so on. And if you ask, what was the major lesson that Abram learned on his journey? It was this. It was the lesson of what it means to trust God. The just, the righteous shall live by faith. Abraham believed God, says Genesis, and it was accounted to him for righteousness. And that, to my mind, is the heart of

of everything so that you can have transcendence in yourself as a free gift by learning to trust God. But that means that you've got to start by believing that there is something transcendent way beyond AI. Well, yeah, I like to say that if belief were enough, right, I mean, you never say, I believe in gravity, right? You drop this thing. Einstein didn't believe in gravity. We have evidence for gravity. And I think the problem is that scientists demand evidence of everything. And I don't think, I mean, this is my guess, but you can correct me if I'm wrong. But there are certain things that you accept as axiomatic. You know, for, you know, for Christians, it's that, you know, Jesus was the son of God, the son of man, the, the, who died for our sins,

as you believe. Jews believe it's in the future. But, but also that he, you know, he was, he was, died, but that he was resurrected, and then that he ascended. And one thing I've always, you know, kind of been curious to ask someone like you is, is what is the nature? I mean, can you, can you explain the sort of, in other words, the evidence that, that Jesus was lived is, is stupendous. I mean, there's a tremendous amount of festival. We know his, we know not only where he lived, but we know his rabbi's name. And we know that he was a great rabbi. And he, and he, was great. And the Talmud speaks about the mistakes that the Phariseic Jews, which is basically all Jews nowadays descend from Phariseic Jews, but it took on sort of a negative term, obviously.

But that they treated him poorly. I mean, that is recognized as a mistake and if nothing else in the way that he was interpersonally reacted, not that we killed him or whatnot, as often alleged. But the ascension, John, has always been puzzling to me because this does tie into what you just mentioned about cryogenics and living forever, the fact that Jesus was resurrected is different than he ascended, right? So there's a difference between those two. And I think that a lot of scientists can accept the notion that he was born, that he lived, even that he did the works and deeds that he did, and then that he was killed, obviously. We know that. And that he was was at least not present and was presumably according to the Christian tradition that he was

resurrected, but that he then ascended. I've always been curious about that as a non-Christian, you know, and my... Right. How does that work? Is there any kind of influence of physics, of physical laws? Is there some way to understand that? Or must it be accepted purely based on Amuna, on faith, on notions that are transcendent that cannot be proven? And you should, should not look for evidence for it. So can you explain what the ascension really means, maybe to a simple physicist like me? Well, this is a fascinating question, and I happen to believe that Emuna, the Pista's faith, is only valid if there's evidence for it. And let's start here.

This could be the beginning of a very big discussion, which I'd be happy to have, but I'm going to compress it. There's only one, as far as I know, scientifically trained person who writes in the New Testament, in some sense a scientist, and that was the medic, Luke. And it's Luke who gives us the fullest description of the ascension. And one needs to read it very carefully, because people have the idea that Jesus went up and up and up and up and up, and up, and up, and up. And And that shows that Luke believed in the three-decker universe, hell beneath, and all this kind of thing. That is not what he says. Jesus went up physically, is the claim.

And then a cloud took him from their sight. That is the disciples' sight. And two angels spoke to them and said, you men of Galilee, Why do you stand gazing up to heaven? Because this Jesus, this same Jesus, shall so come as you saw him go into heaven. Now, in those phrases which I'm quoting, five times over is mentioned a visual dimension. They saw it. And what they are told is that it is that it is.

is a thought model to help us to understand the way in which Christ as Messiah will return. They saw him go physically and literally, and I've come to that in a moment, and he had promised them that he would return. He promised the disciples that privately, and when he was put on trial in Jerusalem and asked was he the Messiah, he said yes, and you were. And you, will see, and he quotes Daniel now, and says, you will see the son of man seated at the right hand of God and coming on the clouds of heaven. And it was that that triggered the crucifixion because he was in their eyes, not all of them, but some of them, in their eyes, blaspheming, claiming to be the divine figure that Daniel had seen operating the judgment of God. Now, what is so interesting

about it. I believe Luke is not basing his writing on a three-dimensional view of the universe at all. He's simply reporting as a fairly hard-nosed person probably trained in Alexandria, where they knew quite a lot about the planets and the earth and all this kind of thing. And let me put it this way. In 19, I think it was 53, Queen Elizabeth ascended the throne of Great British. Now, what does that mean? Well, of course, you don't take it literally. She didn't get up on, but she did. You see, she literally got up and sat on a throne above her people.

But that actual physical movement was at the same time, what we call a concretized metaphor. It was a symbol that she was taking over power. In other words, what we've got in the ascension and what you need to read is the Apostle Peter's explanation of it as a fulfillment of Hebrew scripture.

This is very important. But that Jesus went up and demonstrated that he was above and then went into the other world in ways that we wouldn't begin to understand. So demonstrating that he was above as I think C.S. Lewis once, put it rather gleefully, he said, if Jesus had gone down into the ground, it would have started

a very different kind of religion. That's right. To sum that up, it seems to me the ascension is part of the whole picture because Jesus didn't come back immediately, and that has led to sorts of questions. And as you know, one of the big problems, and I understand it well from a Jewish, Jewish perspective is if he was the Messiah, why didn't he really rescue the nation from the Romans and all the rest of it? And the solution to that, according to the New Testament, is the coming was in two parts. First of all, he came and fulfilled Yaziyahu, Isaiah's prophecy that he would

be wounded for our transgressions and bruised and would die and then would be raised and then for a time. Now here's the interesting thing. I was just reading it in Hebrew this morning. I tried to wrestle with the words. Psalm 110 is the most cited Old Testament scripture in the New Testament. And it says, the Lord said unto my Lord, sit on my right hand until I make your enemies the footstool off your feet. The Lord said to my Lord. and who's speaking to who

and what exactly does it mean because as Jesus pointed out in his day this is David speaking David is speaking to his Lord now who could that possibly be that's been invited to sit at the right hand of God and Peter at the day of Pentecost said this is a prediction of the ascension

that the movement is part of the whole timeline of the history. Messiah comes, he's rejected, but the earth has not heard the end of him. He will return to fulfill all those things that are at the heart of Jewish hopes for those who do hope for Messiah, and many do, as you know.

So there, it seems to me, is the beginning of a way of understanding it. Now, of course, it's supernatural. I'm not questioning that, but we can make sense of it by seeing it as part of the whole story of, well, it's soteriology, of redemption, of the way God is dealing with the problems on this planet. I find it really fascinating that there is enough detail here to get us thinking

about possibilities that aren't crazy, but do make a lot of sense in light of the big picture. Yeah, I mean, I was hoping on two first. maybe that you'd bring up, you know, quantum entanglement as the mechanism for the, or maybe a wormhole, you know, for Stephen Hawking? It may be. I just don't know. The point is, let's, let's, that's a good question, Brian. But I go back to this.

It seems to me that the central biblical claim is there's more than one world. And you were making the point earlier, angels, animals, end at the beginning. And what amuses me often is the fact that if the Bible says that there's more than human beings in the universe, everybody laughs at it. But if a scientist says we're not alone in the universe, everybody takes them seriously, which is a lovely contradiction. This is not the only world that is. That is the crucial thing. There is another realm. And that's at the heart of Jewish and Christian thought.

and if that is true then interactions between those worlds are likely to be very complex they're likely to involve a multiplicity of dimensions and quantum mechanics and wormholes and all of that I just don't know what they are

that is why I very carefully said Christ didn't just go up and up and up till he reached Andromeda he demonstrated that he was above and then he went into that other world from which he had originally come. So this is big stuff.

And it's lovely to think about it from the point of physics, but I think you would have more illumination than I would. Well, this has been incredibly illuminating. I do wonder if perhaps, although we might not be around to witness it, that there will come an ascension of ASI or AGI

if it ever comes, which again I'm quite dubious about, but maybe it will withdraw or subsume into some higher realm. And maybe it will leave us alone. And maybe it will be for a good, as we say. And we'll go as it's known from strength to strength. But, John, I do want to bless you and wish you a wonderful Christmas

and meaningful Christmas season to you, recording this in early December. Just after Alfred Nobel's death day, you know, that they celebrate the Nobel Prize that are awarded on the day of his death, not the day of his birth. It's kind of interesting. and that's December 10th, or today's December 11th, but the Nobel Prize were just given out.

But, John, I want to wish you and your family a wonderful, wonderful and meaningful holiday season. Maybe by the time this comes out, it'll be Greek Orthodox Christmas in January, whatever that is, and it'll still be timely that I'm wishing you a Merry, Happy Christmas, John. Well, I wish you the same,

and I want to say, Brian, this has been by far one of the most interesting chats I've had for many years. And thank you very much for honoring me by inviting me on. It'll give me a lot of thought. I'll be up for conversations anytime, but you've really got me thinking. And it's so encouraging. But just on your last point, when people come and tell me, like Harari, that the big agenda

item for this century is, one, to solve the problem of, human death. It's just a technical problem he says. And we're going to solve it by technical means. And then his second agenda item in his book, Homodeus, is increasing human happiness and giving people some sort of eternal life and existence. I have had some very interesting reactions, as you may have gathered from my book, when I say to people, you're too late. They say, what, we haven't got there yet. AI is not there yet. I said, but look, the problem of physical death was solved 20 centuries ago when Jesus was raised from the dead. And if you're talking about uploading your brains and all the rest of it and having eternal life, he offers it to anybody

who trusts him. And one day, when he returns, there'll be the greatest uploading of all, because we'll take those who trust him home to heaven. I'm looking forward to that, increasingly. And I wish you and your family, all the best, Brian. Thank you for doing what you do. You've got a most interesting handle of things. And I say again, I have immensely enjoyed this. You've honored me greatly. Me too, John. And you inspire us. And I do wish that you'll continue to inspire to the ripe old age of Maya, the Esram, 120 years, John. Holvai. May you live and be healthy. and your family too, and continue to have these blessings of your intellect, of your spirit, your joyousness. I mean, when you see, I believe, I'll just end with this, I got this from my friend

Dennis Prager that, you know, when it says that you shall not take the Lord's name in vain, it doesn't mean that you can't say God. I mean, you and I have said God many times today. I don't think that's what it means. At least in Judaism, it doesn't mean God. God is not his name. That's an English version of good, right? Good comes from God. But it's that you carry a negative countenance. You profess to be religious. I'm not saying you. I'm saying when one claims to be religious and believe in God and they're miserable and they're unhappy.

And that's why I love this group of Jews. I'm not called Habab because they're incredibly joyous and they bring everything with joy. And when you see somebody like them and like you that has this joy of life, you are the best type of ambassador. whether you believe or not. Again, John and I, I'm forbidden to proselytize. John, John, you know, has the motivation of his words and his intellect. But for me, the fruit of the tree, you shall judge them by the fruit, right? They judge them by their deeds, as Jesus said.

So, John, I just want to continue to bless you that you'll have this inspiring effect for good, for the world, your mind, your intellect, your spirit. It's incredibly inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us. And again, have a wonderful, meaningful Christmas season. You're an inspiration as well, Brian. Keep at it. And bye-bye.

Maybe we'd be again together soon, maybe in the new year. Bye, John. Thank you so much. Bye-bye. If you enjoyed this conversation with John Lennox, especially the collision between technology, power, religion, and science, and what it means to be human, then you're going to love my episode with Stephen C. Meyer.

Watch that next. Stephen goes straight at the deeper question underneath all of this. When we look at life and the information-rich structure of biology, are we seeing an accident or something more like agency? Check that out here, and don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe. It really helps us with our AI algorithms that are all too prevalent, not just in 2084, but in 2026. See you over there now.