The Eric Metaxas Show - John Lennox (Encore)

Episode Date: June 10, 2025

Mathematician and philosopher John Lennox has a new and forward-looking book, “2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity” — just what will the world look like a hundred years after the predicted grim dystopia found in “1984”?

Noble gold investments is the official gold sponsor of the Eric Mataxis show, a company that specializes in gold IRAs and physical delivery of precious metals. Learn how you can protect your wealth with noble gold investments. That's noble gold investments.com. Welcome to the Eric Metaxus show. I shouldn't tell you this, but Eric hired someone who sounds just like him to host today's show. But since I'm the announcer, they told me, so I'm telling you, don't be full. The real Eric's in jail. Hey there, folks. Since I'm in Greece and you know I'm in Greece and I know I'm in Greece, I can't do like, you know, live radio or anything crazy like that.

So I thought, hey, what if I play one of the amazing conversations I had with the super genius John Lennox? You know John Lennox. We have a lot of Socrates in the city interviews with him. But I interviewed him on this program. Half of what I write about in my book, is atheism dead. originally came from Hugh Ross or John Lennox. So here's my conversation with the brilliant Dr. John Lennox.

This is fun for me. I'll just say it up front. I get to talk to someone I consider a friend because he's very generous in that way. Dr. John Lennox, professor of mathematics at Oxford, the author of innumerable books from which I have quoted in my books. Dr. Lennox, dear friend, thank you for being on the program. That's a great pleasure, as always, to join you. And I can see that you like me are locked down,

you in New York and me in Oxford. There are worse things than being locked down in one's own apartment because it just means that I don't have to get on the subway. What's so terrible about that? Well, no, I found it a huge opportunity to do many of these interviews and I think we're in the 80s now in terms of interviews since lockdown for me. Wow. Well, good for you. Terrific. I want to talk to you, of course, about your brand new book. You have a brand new book out called 2084. That is doubtless a reference to 1984.

And in 2084, you talk about artificial intelligence and the future of humanity. That's the subtitle. 2084 artificial intelligence and the future of humanity. I have to say that, you know, knowing you as I do and knowing your books as I do, I was surprised that you decided to leap in to this subject for a whole book. What led you to leap into the subject? Well, quite a few different things, actually. The springboard that precipitated the writing of the book was being invited to give a talk on artificial. intelligence and the nature of humanity. And I first of all said, no, I don't really feel I'm not a pioneer worker in AI, though

I'm interested in it. And they said, but you're also interested in Genesis and it's teaching on the nature of human beings. And we'd like you to do it. So I reluctantly agreed, then did a lot of reading and realized very rapidly that this demands a serious book because most of my life actually I have been interested in the interface as you know between science, theology and philosophy. And of course, one of the key questions that faces everybody is what they think a human being is. And because of the advances in science and

technology, we're now in a position to do things, not only to individual human beings, but even potentially to the human race that would alter it permanently. And therefore, that raises the question in an acute form. And of course, AI is one of the directions in which people are going, and there are all kinds of futuristic ideas out there. And here's another precipitating factor for me, the immense success of the books of Yuval Noah Harari, particularly his second book, Homodeos, he wrote a book called Sapiens about human origins, but then he wrote Hamadeus about the future of humanity.

And when I read that, noticing, by the way, it's not written by a scientist, but by a historian, I thought someone needs to respond to this, well, many people probably have responded to it, but I thought perhaps it might be important, granted the extent to which he speculates about the future to bring Christianity to bear on it in the hope of showing that Christianity is something intelligible and communicable and interesting and valid to say about it. Well, let's go there, because I've heard of Eubel Noah and those books,

but I have not read them. What does he say? Where is he coming from? And what does he say in those books to which you felt a need to respond? He's coming from a strong atheistic perspective, but he's analyzing culture. And he looks at culture

and makes certain statements about it that are quite questionable, such as war is decreasing and all this kind of stuff. But what focused my mind, was his agenda as he regards it for the 21st century. The two main agenda items, he says, are one, dealing with physical death. We're now in a position. He says, death, physical death is a technical problem.

Technical problems have technical solutions. So what we're going to do in the 24th century is solve physical death from a medical perspective. Now, what he means by that is that humans will still die, but they won't have to die. There'll be a solution to the death problem. Then the second agenda item is, what are we going to do with these humans? And he says, we're going to enhance their experience of happiness. How are we going to do that? We're going to change them. We've already reached beyond the stage of animals. we've developed minds and consciousness, but now we're intelligent enough to take this whole process into our own hands

and start to remodel humanity, which is in flux anyway, according to their atheistic and materialistic presuppositions. And we're going to add all kinds of things, technology, drugs, biogenic engineering, all this, kind of thing, and we're going to raise human beings way above the state they're at now. So we're going to produce out of Homo sapiens, Homo Deos, the man who is God. Now, of course, there are all kinds of ancient ideas behind that, but that's the agenda. And I thought half a minute, something needs to be said about this, because this feeds into some of the most ancient

motivations behind human existence that there are. You're talking about something which, to my mind, inevitably brings up from the first chapters of Genesis, this satanic promise, ye can be as gods, or ye shall be as gods. It seems to me that it's like we've been allowed via technologically, to create a new kind of Tower of Babel, that what you're talking about is trying to reach the heavens on our own strength, on our own accord, to reach the heavens without God, and that folks like Yuval Noah, they sense this and they see it as, there's an irony, right, because they claim to be strict materialists where they don't seem to. to believe in a purpose, but at the same time, they operate in a way as though random evolution,

they would say, blind Darwinian evolution, has led us to this moment, and we have to seize it. It's kind of a Promethean thing. I mean, there's a lot that comes into it. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And the biblical background is entirely appropriate it because the scene as depicted in the beginning of Genesis is extremely sophisticated and in one way, simple to understand, it's a human rebellion against God, but it is done in such a form as to leave behind a trace that's flowed down all through history that God is against human beings. Now Genesis paints a very different picture. God creates human beings and dignifies them with his own image.

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That's Mypillar.com. promo code Eric, or call 800-858-0-263. promo code, Eric. Friends, I'm talking to Dr. John Lennox from its home in Oxford. The new book is 2084, artificial intelligence and the future of humanity. You were just saying this idea that we're created in the image of God, and how Jordan Peterson in his talks on Genesis understands how important that is.

So please continue. Yeah, it's hugely important. But the next bit of the story, the so-called fall of human beings when they rebelled against God, the temptation we are told was very subtle. It appealed to their aesthetic sense, their intellectual sense,

and God had forbidden them to eat of one particular fruit. They could eat everything else. That's the basic parameters, the basic things that you need to have a moral dimension to life, something forbidden, but the freedom to eat it.

And the temptation came in the form that God knows in the day you eat that, you will be as gods, knowing good and evil. In other words, God is suppressing your flourishing. He's against you. And of course, God wasn't against them at all.

The tree, which is so frequently said to be the tree of knowledge, was absolutely not the tree of knowledge. It was the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And that was a knowledge you don't want to have. And of course, when they disobeyed God, they found that they'd ruptured the fundamental relationship that they had from God at the beginning. And that has its consequences all down through history with this sense that many people have, particularly atheists, that God if there is a God, is against them. He doesn't want them to rise to his level. And I, of course, wish to say with the whole authority of Christianity behind me, that that is the lie. And so turning away from God as the source of life and immortality, the question. Now comes, the ancient quest was for an elixir of life. There's a tree of life mentioned in Genesis and God took it away from them when they rebelled. And those memories in folk memory, I think, are partly at least responsible for that search for an elixir of life, something that will

convey on us living forever. And now you come straight into the 21st century and they idea that death is a result of our biological involvement. If only we could get rid of that and upload the content of our brains onto silicon, something more permanent, we could solve the problem of immortality, and that would be a kind of elylexia of life. So all of those ideas are flowing in, and they have a very powerful appeal to human beings. Think of the folks that have their bodies frozen when they die in the hope that this technology will be perfect in the next 40 or 50 years

so that they can be reincarnated, so to speak, on silicon. Well, isn't this the problem? Because we're talking about two different things, right? I mean, we're talking about many things, but specifically now this dichotomy, they pretend that there's no dichotomy. They pretend that mind and brain are the same thing, there's no such thing as mind apart from our brain.

So the idea that you can download one's brain, perhaps, but you can't download a mind. A mind is something apart from a brain. And if you're a strict materialist, you don't believe in a mind. You believe that if I can freeze my brain, that's me. There is no me apart from the physicality of my body and my brain. So clearly, they're mistaken in that.

At least you and I know they're mistaken. Yeah, I think it's very obvious that they're mistaken. For example, the brain story, my brain story or yours and mind story are obviously different. For example, I can tell you what's in my mind. And if you're a special kind of doctor, you can connect my brain up to various instruments and tell me something about what's in my brain. For example, what parts of a very, it light up electrically when I see Eric Metaxus or something like this. But you cannot tell me my mind story. So you can tell me a bit about what's in my brain, but not in my mind. I can tell you what's in my mind, but not what's in my brain. And that to me is enough. There's plenty of other

evidence as well. And what has encouraged me, and I've written a bit about this actually, because it interests me greatly, that people, serious thinkers. in this area like David Chalmers are moving towards the kind of dualism that there is a mind and a brain, which has been rejected by so many people without really sufficient evidence to do so. The mind is much more complex than the brain, but they are clearly deeply connected, and we don't understand what the connection is. We don't know what consciousness is. I was going to say this is the key, right?

In case anybody's not tracking with us, let's be clear that if somebody has an out-of-body experience, that's independent of one's brain. If I'm floating over an operating table, watching them operate on me, that can have nothing to do with the pink tissue between my ears, which is on the operating table. My brain, my, I'm sorry, my mind or my soul exists eternally independent of my body, which will one day rot. So this really does bring up many questions, and you just touched on the heart of it. Consciousness, the idea that we can have artificial intelligence, some kind of computer that can be incredibly smart, smarter than we ever could be. Perhaps we can achieve that with technology. But to achieve consciousness is to make a leap across an abyss that never can really be accomplished.

there are many people who seem to think that it can, who seem to think it's just a matter of time, I assume that Yuval Noah is one of them. Why would they suggest such a thing? On what basis? They have any evidence for this? Well, of course, if you reduce mind to brain, you in a way give yourself more hope of doing that, as you suggested. But I think we need to step back from this slightly, because another reason I wrote this book was to deal with that aspect but to point out that there are other aspects of artificial intelligence that are already working and are very beneficial and to be greeted. And this other stuff needs to be seen in that context.

And let me give you an example of that. There are two kinds of AI. What we've been talking about up to now is called artificial general intelligence. That is super intelligence. inventing a system that can do everything a human can do, but do it much better. In other words, superintelligence. But normal, narrow AI is the capacity of a system that consists of a computer, a program, and a huge database to do a single task.

Sorry about that. If that's my wife, I'm not here. Okay, let me start that again, all right? Sure. Narrow artificial intelligence is the capacity of a system which consists of a computer with a lot of crunching power, a database, and it deals with one single problem. Example, X-rays of lungs, you take a million x-rays, there's your database. but they're labeled by the top, top lung doctors in the world with their respective diseases. Then I get problems with my lungs and an x-ray has taken.

The AI system compares my x-ray with the million x-rays, recognizes the pattern, and prints out that Lennox has got this particular disease. Now, this kind of AI has been different. develop to such an extent, it's putting out diagnoses that are significantly better than what you'd get at your local hospital. And much faster, because you're really harnessing the ability of the top doctors who may live thousands of miles from you. And they're applied to your case. Now, this is marvelous and is going to help with medical diagnostics to a vast degree. And the same thing applies to the search for vaccines, for.

COVID-19, the search for new medicines, all that kind of thing. That is really positive stuff. Now, there is a negative side even to the AI that already is operating. For example, facial recognition technology can be used to recognize criminals and arrest them, but it can also be used to create a surveillance state, as we read is being created in Xinjiang, in China, where the surveillance is just beyond almost all belief, but it is operating at this very moment. And there are voices in the West that want to introduce this in our countries as well. forgive me, Dr. Lennox. We're going to go to another break, but I was going to bring up just what you've said.

There is a moral component. This is the issue. When we come back, we will talk about that with Dr. John Lennox. Don't go away. Hey there, folks. I'm talking to Dr. John Lennox. He's at his home in Oxford. I'm at my home in New York City.

Amazing. We can talk face to face here. Dr. Lennox, you just brought up the thing that I was going to bring up is that inevitably, there comes a moral component. In other words, what we can do with science, with artificial intelligence, and I know you deal with this in your book, 1984, artificial intelligence of the future of humanity. What we can do is not necessarily what we should do. And so in doing science and working with technology, we human beings have to step in and make some decisions. And it seems to me that a strict

A scientific materialist says no. We can do anything we like to do. There is no aught. Those of us who know the sinful temptations that we as a fallen humanity face, we know that there are things that we can do or will be able to do, which we should not do. And when you talk about the surveillance state in China, I mean, we are there now.

What they're doing, there's even facial. recognition technology that they have. I was talking to someone on my program about it with regard to one's emotions. In other words, things that we don't even dream of that computers will be able to do, which will be used for evil ends. And so it seems to me that the thrust of your book and what you're saying is that we have to confront this. We can't pretend that it's all good, that there's a wickedness that can come into the equation, and it's already coming to. the equation in the Chinese Communist Party and what they're doing. Narrow AI that works is like a knife.

You can use a knife for surgery to save somebody's life, or you can use it to stab them. And we're seeing both. I gave you an example in medicine, saving people's lives. But now, with facial recognition, you can create the most advanced, totalitarian and intrusive state imaginable. And you are mentioning some of the things that appear to be happening in China. They're rolling out the social credit program right across the nation, I understand it, where every citizen has given so many points.

And you can add to your points by behaving according to the norms of the state. But if you do something that is not approved, off, then you'll find that your credit card may be cancelled, you can't travel, you can't book a holiday, you may lose your job and all this kind of thing. Now that is happening. They're putting up hundreds of thousands of new CCTV cameras over there. And what I found frightening in the Times article on this, the Time article on this, was people love it. Many people say, look how many points I've got, not realizing that what they're doing is sacrificing their freedom for alleged security. And that, of course, is the huge tension. And one of the leading police

people in London, I believe, said that's what we need in London. And of course, back in the days of Stalin or Hitler, they would have rejoiced to have a system like this. So there are pluses and minuses, facial recognition techniques, as you say, they can be used in a factory situation to monitor workers, and if there's any detection of any emotion that the authorities don't approve of, then that person can be called in. But think of what's happening just down the road from you in Boston, in MIT. There's Rosalind Picard, who's a Christian, a brilliant AI expert who's created a whole subject in her field called affective computing. And she's using facial recognition techniques on children who have certain diseases

that make them liable to seizures and fits that can be life-threatening. And by these AI techniques, she's able to predict in certain cases when these seizures are going to happen. and therefore to medically intervene and prevent them. So there's a wonderful, positive use of the thing that is enslaving people, and in the case of the Uyghurs, is putting many of them into what looked very like concentration camps at the moment. So the ethics, Eric, I would say this. The whole danger in this is all of these things depend on programming a computer.

the ethics need to be built in, but those will be the ethics of the programmer. And the trouble is it's obvious to everybody that technology is outpacing ethics by many factors. And that's what's alarming people like the late Stephen Hawking, like Elon Musk, and a number of these people who have got together thousands of signatures saying, hold on a minute. We need to develop basic, agreed international ethical principles to regulate what we already have, to save nothing of what we might develop in the future. It's extraordinary. I have to say, well, first of all, we've had Rosalind Picard of MIT on this program, and we have to have her back because she's one of the few voices in that world

with a biblical perspective. But when you talk about it, about being outstripped by the technology we've created. I mean, of course, this has been something that we've always faced as a species. It's just that in a way now, I reference the Tower of Babel, that we have abilities, in a sense, to do things undreamt of. I mean, it strikes me as something out of a C.S. Lewis novel, that when Lewis wrote in that hideous strength, he was beginning to talk about these kinds of, of, of, of and of the nefarious police state.

We're going to go to another break. Folks, when we come back, we'll continue the conversation with Dr. John Lennox, the new book, 2084, artificial intelligence and the future of humanity. Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to Dr. John Lennox in Oxford about his new book, 284 artificial intelligence and the future of humanity. Dr. Lennox, I really, I have to say that we are homing in as a civilization now on things that they were always distant, but here they are now. It seems to me that it sounds to me like end time stuff.

I'm not saying that it is, but it sounds to me like end time stuff in the biblical sense, because it's almost like a kind of final battle that we have people on the side, on one side, who say we must not do this and this and this because this is the nature of humanity. And then you have other people on the other side, very powerful people, powerful voices, who say, no, this is the nature of humanity, and therefore we can do this. So we've never been forced to focus so clearly on what is the nature of humanity. in the way that we are now, it seems to me. Yeah, that's exactly right.

And it's a worldview question. By that I mean that looking at this problem from the perspective of atheism, say, which says that human beings have no ultimate value, is very different from looking at it from the perspective as I do and you of Christianity that says that human beings are made in the image of God. And the poignancy of it all, and the urgency of it all is, as you say, that for the first time in history, we are now capable of doing what C.S. Lewis foresaw.

That is getting involved in reprogramming, so to speak, our genetic inheritance and passing it on to all humans that follow us. I say humans because Lewis made it such a powerful point. In 1940, in his book The Abolation of Man, they pointed out that when scientists get this kind of power to modify the generations to come. Now, you don't have to wait for artificial intelligence for that. We already appear to have it or be very near having it.

Then in the end, what they create is not a human being. It's an artifact. And he says the final triumph of humanity will be the abolition of man. And that is a hugely serious thing, it seems to me, that against which we need to protest in a credible way. And I wish to protest very strongly. You say it's an end time scenario, and in a very real sense it is, because the issues are mounting up. but I want to say, look, your quest for immortality and eternal life through artificial general intelligence, well, you're too late because eternal life is already on offer through trusting Christ

who was raised from the dead. The death question was solved 20 centuries ago, in a sense. And the wonderful thing about the gospel, and it gears straight into this, is that you can have eternal life, which will guarantee you're uploading into heaven to use that kind of language. As a free gift, you don't have to pay to have your body or brain frozen, costing millions of dollars, but by trust in Christ, you receive that eternal life. And then, of course, the promise is that he is the true homo deus, and here's the irony of it all, Eric, and I find this one of the most important points in this area. All of this stuff is a reaching like the Tower of Babel. It's a reaching for heaven. It's an aspiring to be God. Christianity tells us that not that we can

reach up to God, but that God reaches down to us. And the central Christian doctrine, the incarnation is God becoming human. That's the movement in the opposite direction. God has become human in order that we can become sons and daughters of God. He gives us his life. So the central expectation of Christianity, which is a big topic, but it is the fact that this world hasn't heard the last of Jesus Christ, the true homodeus, the man who is God, will return. Now that's a hugely different scenario from the ones advanced by Harari and Tegmark and these other people. And I want to say this, if we're going to take seriously all these scenarios of the future, many of which are dystopian like 1984, then it's time to revisit the biblical scenario

that at least has the advantage of having credible evidence to back it in terms of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. Well, you and I know that there's tons of credible evidence, but there are people who couldn't possibly comprehend that there might be such evidence. You've spent most of your life presenting that evidence. I'm trying to do something similar. It seems to me that those willing to look at the facts and willing to follow the logic will find themselves, if they have any kind of an open mind, stunned to see the evidence,

stunned to see that the other side really has no evidence. It has a bully pulpit, has a lot of loud voices out there. But the fact of the matter is, if you're willing to look beyond the surface, beyond those voices, the evidence is just overwhelming. That's part of what I keep thinking about, John, is that the evidence is mounting for the biblical view from a scientific perspective. We can talk about the fine-tuned universe. There was nothing to discuss 50 or so years ago, almost nothing. It's only in the last five decades.

that we have more and more and more evidence that what we have could not possibly have arisen without an intelligent mind behind it. And I think that as we make that case, some people will see that it's not only not as crazy as they thought, but that it's just shockingly plausible, something that they thought couldn't possibly be real, is reality itself. Yes, I agree entirely, and I'm a scientist, and every scientific bone in my body approves of this. You see, I'm not ashamed at all of being both a Christian and a scientist. The greatest of scientists, Newton and Kepern, Galileo and Clark Maxwell, were all believers in God.

And it was that that drove their science. They saw no contradiction because they were able to distinguish clearly, between the scientific explanation of how things work and a creator that created the thing that does work without whom there would be no universe for scientists to study. We'll hit pause there. We'll be right back, folks. I'm talking to Dr. John Lennox.

The book is 24, artificial intelligence and the future of humanity. I'm talking to Dr. John Lennox in Oxford. Dr. Lennox, this stuff is so deep and so rich. really talking about meaning itself, about everything. And it's funny because we come to it by way of talking about artificial intelligence. You are talking about the great irony, I guess, that people want to reach, they want to reach the heavens. They want immortality. And you said, of course, that we can have that.

that's the whole point of the Christian faith. But there's so many voices in the culturally elite circles, we can call them, who don't, they don't even suppose that what the Bible says might be true or that Jesus could have risen from the dead. And I would argue that the evidence, as I said earlier, is so clear and overwhelming if you dare look at it. But that's kind of our problem, is that, It's hard to get folks like that to look at it.

Yes. It can be hard to get people to look at it. I've been working most of my life to think of ways of breaking that barrier because unfortunately the slate has been written on and many people have the impression that Christianity is nothing to say and science is everything to say, which is why, by the way, I wrote a little book last year called Can Science Experience, explain everything. And you mentioned meaning. Now, this is crucial because the really great

scientists, and among them I include the late Feynman, who was an American Nobel Prize winner for physics, absolutely, absolute genius. And he saw very clearly that science is powerful because it asks questions that to which there are, it's asked a limited number of questions which it can answer, mainly concerned with how things work or the why of function, that is why is this bit there, not there and so on.

But it cannot answer questions of ethics, for example, on morality. The laws of nature, as I think it was he who once said, don't come with a label, you should do this. But secondly, they don't answer the deepest longings of the human heart for meaning. And some very bright scientists, like another Nobel Prize winner, Erwin Sheroudinger made the point that science just doesn't deal with the question of meaning.

So they've got to find meaning from somewhere. Now, one of the prejudices of the naturalistic worldview, which dominates the scientific academy these days, is there's no such thing as ultimate purpose or meaning. So the only meaning that we can derive is what we create ourselves. I don't rubbish that. I think that many people, for example, see meaning, and rightly so, in their children, and they see meaning in their work and all this kind of. thing, but what saddens me is that there's no ultimate meaning or purpose. And when there are so many things in our universe that speak that there is transcendence, there's something beyond, this isn't all there is, I like to encourage people at least to follow that instinct. This is one

the things that led C.S. Lewis to Christianity and to encourage people to open their minds, as you put it earlier, to consider the possibility that there is more to it than that. I mean, after all, no one could do science if they didn't trust their mind to give you a reasonable map of what's out there.