The Sean McDowell Show - John Lennox on AI and The Fate of Humanity

Episode Date: May 13, 2025

AI has been introduced and exploded into world we live in today. What does the future hold for humanity? How should we think about the rise of virtual reality and the metaverse? What worldviews are behind AI? Does AI point to the existence of an Intelligent Designer? Dr. John Lennox blew me away in this interview. Join for a discussion of this and much more.READ: "2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity" by John Lennox (https://amzn.to/3E9pIPD)*Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf)*USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for 25% off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM)*See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK)FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://x.com/Sean_McDowellTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sean_mcdowell?lang=enInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/Website: https://seanmcdowell.org

Artificial intelligence is everywhere. What do we need to know about this new revolution? How do we use and protect ourselves from emerging AI technologies? And what worldviews lie behind some of the grandiose claims made about AI? How it will either take over the world or destroy us? And how can AI help answer some of the big life questions such as where we came from and where are we going. Our guest today, Dr. John Lennox, really needs no introduction. He's written a fascinating new book

called 2084 and this is an updated and expanded edition that's just out. Dr. Lennox, thanks so much for coming on the program. It's my pleasure to be on it. Thank you for inviting me. Well this is a treat. I was talking with my mom last night over dinner about this book and it brought her back to the novel 1984 had a huge impact on her and framed how she viewed the future. So clearly this is a play on the novel 1984 about the future. But before we get into the details, you've written tons of books. Why did you write this book about AI?

Well, it goes back a while. I was invited by a group of Christian leaders in London. And they said that they were going to have a day on artificial intelligence. And what is a human? This very important question. And they said, would I speak to it and give the keynote address? And I said, you've got the wrong person.

Well, they said, we really want you to talk about what the Bible has to say about the definition of a human being and relate that to AI, but we want a biblical base for the day. So I started to prepare that and realized very rapidly that I was going to have to do something very different. That's how the book started. I began to see that some of the issues being raised by the people

who were promoting a particular kind of AI were so relevant to our understanding of what it means to be human that I needed to do a great deal of work. And I ended up with a book that was published in 2020. And then four years later, Zondervan said, we need an update. So I sent it to them within a week. I'd been writing it all those four years.

Wow. I tend to keep my books up to date if I can ongoing. And it's interesting that your mother found that book impressive. She might be interested, and your hearers might be interested to know that the title was actually given to me by a renowned atheist in Oxford here, who is Peter Atkins, professor of physical chemistry. And we were going on a trip to a university of South Hampton

to debate the existence of God. And he said, we're not going to talk about the debate. What are you writing? So I said, I'm writing about AI. Oh, he said, I got a title for you. I said, what's that? He said, 2084. I said, that sounds good. If I use it, I'll reference you, which I have done in the book.

So that's where it came from. That's a great reason to title that. I love it. So one of the unique things about your book to me is I have a separate podcast called Think Biblically, and we try to approach biblical principles to current ideas. I read your book and I was like this is exactly in the lane. You're bringing these biblical principles but you're also wrestling with the worldview issues behind artificial intelligence that oftentimes people don't wrestle with.

Now we're going to get to those issues but I'm just curious since you've been tracking this so far, I'd love to ask you what recent breakthroughs in AI most surprise you and if I could read one from your book, I read this to my wife, I was like I can't believe this. As a researcher and a PhD, you point out that there's this example of protein breakthrough, which was kind of amazing. This is on page 75 in your book. And you describe how it used to take a PhD student five years to work out one protein structure. Five years. Now, as of July 2022, almost three years ago, 200 million additional proteins were announced where they've been sequenced because of AI.

That's incredible. Give us one or two breakthroughs that just amaze you about AI. Well, that is probably the most impressive. And it's not surprising to me that the man behind it, Demus Hassabis, who's an absolute genius, was knighted recently. He's now Sir Demus Hassabis in the United Kingdom. And this was, for a long time, deemed to be virtually insoluble. And you could only deal with it by very long and painstaking calculations, as you read.

But the open AI system and their algorithm and so on, and I, of course, I don't understand them in detail how that works, has cracked this problem. And it was thought impenetrable to science, and they have marched straight through it. So that's an incredible thing. And just standing back from the whole operation, it seems to me it's quite important for people to realize

that the AI being talked about here is not the science fiction type artificial general intelligence, which we're nowhere near. It's narrow intelligence, narrow AI. And one reason I wrote the book was to try and show people that these are very different. One is full of hype and belongs more to science fiction, although many scientists take it seriously now. The other is being used all over the world and is particularly beneficial, I think, in medicine. But we can go into that as the questions develop. That's exactly the next question I was going to ask.

Is the difference between artificial intelligence, artificial general intelligence, and some of the worldview that lies behind this enthusiasm that we're close to artificial general intelligence? Okay, well, that is the key question, it seems to me. Well, let's... I'm a mathematician, so I like definitions. So let's think of what a narrow AI system is, what most people understand by AI. It's a computer system, basically, with a large database, and an algorithm, which is a step-by-step process that does some filtering. And it's much better to explain it by means of an example. So let's assume that our database is a million x-rays of human lungs, and they're labeled by the best medics in the world with the diseases that they represent.

Then an x-ray is taken of my lungs. And it's fed into the system, which very rapidly compares the X-ray picture of my lungs with those million pictures in the database. And it comes up with the picture that nearest matches my picture. And it tells me you're likely to be suffering from that particular disease. Now, this is being used in many medical fields. That's one that has to do with pattern recognition because it's x-rays. And nowadays, the results are normally much better than you'd get if you went to your local

hospital. So that has been an enormous saving and is being rolled out in medicine day after day. There's some new field to which this applies. So let me sum that up that a narrow AI system does one and only one thing that normally requires human intelligence. Now that's why it's called artificial intelligence. It's not real intelligence. The machine doesn't think, it doesn't have a mind, but what it does is it simulates intelligence. And it all goes back in a way to Alan Turing,

who's a brilliant mathematician who, during the Second World War, with his team in Bletchley Park, solved the Enigma problem and decoded the German way of communication. And he talked about the imitation game. And there's a film of that name about his life, which is very interesting. So these AI systems play the imitation game.

And it's very important not to let the language deceive us. Unfortunately, we talk about machine learning, artificial intelligence, and that tends to anthropomorphize everything. And people think it's real intelligence. I love a paper that was written in the early days by actually one of the Christian pioneers of AI who's still alive, Joseph McCrae Mellie champ. He lives over near Atlanta now and he wrote a paper many years ago saying this is title was this in the phrase artificial intelligence is real. And he just wishes that people would take that seriously and not start to think of the computer becoming alive and eating them up or destroying them and all that kind of thing. Now, AGI by contrast is, as its name implies, something bigger than narrow AI.

That is the idea of trying to produce some kind of system that we make that can imitate everything a human intelligence can do and way beyond that so that we get into terms like super intelligence and all this kind of thing. And there are two different ways in which people are trying to do that. The first is to start with human intelligence

and enhance it by putting some kind of chips into your brain or cyborg engineering. And in the end, merging the human brain with machinery so that it can outperform normal human beings today. The other way is to say, look, the big problem with present day brains is that they are organic and they die. Why don't we start with a non-organic and inorganic material like silicon and build a simulated brain into which we can upload all our thoughts and ideas and so on. Now, of course, this is just speculation. And I can tell you why I think there are huge barriers in the place of that later. But that is the dream. Now, if that were just being said by science fiction writers,

serious scientists would ignore it. But serious scientists aren't ignoring it. And you get at least some who have great hopes of doing something like this. One of them is a very notable scientist in this country. He's our astronomer, royal no less, brilliant mathematical astronomer. And Lord Reese is his name. And he says that in the future, it will not be biological brains that are in control.

It will be either mergers of the biological with the mechanical, etc, etc. And human beings, as they are now, will just be a distant memory if they're remembered at all. And when you get serious scientists saying that, of course, the pulse quickens on behalf of some people. And there's quite a drive towards that. And that's why I thought, look, we need to say something about this because that sort

of thing is clearly raising very big worldview questions about what a human being is. Narrow A.I. doesn't so much raise worldview questions in that sense. It does raise serious ethical questions. And of course, ethics does depend on worldview. And it's not surprising that many of the people behind a I are atheist but not all there are some very notable exceptions one in particular

in the US and MIT where Rosalind Pickard has developed a whole field of AI on her own called affective AI. And its practical outcome is that she's developed smart, well, they look like smart watches, but they're worn by people who are liable to have fits. And these watches can predict if one's about to happen so that help can be summoned and the person's life saved, that they are saving many lives. She's a most impressive example of using artificial intelligence, narrow AI for the benefit of humanity. And there are others like her. That's a really helpful distinction between AI and AGI. You talked about some of the reasons or the barriers philosophically from AI becoming AGI. I had a debate maybe, I don't know, four or six months ago with a skeptic Michael Shermer

about the origin of consciousness and he referred to it as an emergent property. And he said inflation, for example, emerges in a complex system. Maybe consciousness emerges like that. Well, as I was reading your book, you talked about how in AI, there's new emergent faculties that emerge. Like you teach AI a general skill skill and then all of a sudden it

learns these particular skills, we don't know how or why it emerged, could that explain the origin of consciousness? That somehow it just emerges from complexity in a way we can't explain? Is that plausible? Why or why not? Well, I know Michael Shermer. I've debated him several times and. The big barrier here is that we have no idea what consciousness is. And it's a very relevant. It's called the hard problem in psychology.

It's very relevant to ask it because the amazing thing about human beings like ourselves is that God has united consciousness with humanities, put consciousness together with intelligence. Now, in AI, you've got intelligence without consciousness. And until somebody tells me what it is in scientific terms and they can build it, I remain totally skeptical. I think the word emergent is a very misleading or can be a very misleading word. And I always ask, it emerges how?

Does it emerge naturally from what you've got, or does it need a catalyst, or does it need additional intellectual and intelligent input and so on? I remember once having a spat with Dawkins in a public meeting very many years ago where he talked about word processing being an emergent phenomenon of a computer. And I said, it emerges only by very clever programming from the human intelligence. In fact, it's a very good example of intelligent design.

It doesn't emerge on its own at all. And I think we've got to push back on that kind of emergence that can cover a multitude of evils. And it's used by many people. And sometimes they have to say, well, it does emerge, but you need a catalyst or you need an extra input of information or you need this and you need that and you need the other thing.

So I'm very leery of its use on its own. And neither Michael Shermer nor anybody else has the faintest idea how anything that is material can carry something on it, in it, around it, that is aware of itself. We just know nothing. And until we know something from a scientific attitude, I remain even more skeptical of that than Michael Shermer is of the Christian faith. That's really fair. In some ways, I think emergent is a somewhat fancy word to say we have no

explanation how this phenomena emerges. It just emerges. It's really like magic as I see it. And I think there's difference between an effect and between a cause. Now we could unpack that further and you have a great section in your book on that, but I appreciate that you draw out. I talk with my students a lot.

I teach class at Biola and I talk about things like critical theory, consumerism. These are actually worldviews that answer life's biggest questions. And AI often does the same thing. Where did we come from? It has an explanation. What does it mean to be human? Where are we going in the future?

Can we have eternal life? What's wrong with the world? So let's go back to the beginning because you talk about this novel by the famous Dan Brown called Origin, and he envisions this mathematical model that explains the origin of life. Could deeper understandings of AI and a similar mathematical model help us understand how life could emerge naturalistically.

I doubt it very much. I think the AI might help us to see how life could emerge by creation, by an intelligence, because it may well reveal to us just some of the deeper layers of the complexity of life. I think it may well reveal that. This subject actually interests me. I've written another book in detail about the shift in biological thinking that is questioning the simplistic mechanisms that are attributed to Darwin and his followers, the neo-Darwinian synthesis, and world-class biologists who are not Christians by any means,

but who just don't think that neo-Darwinism is fit for purpose. That's a very interesting space to be watching at the moment. It's called The Third Way of Biology, and my book on it is Cosmic Chemistry, Do God and Science Mix? And people, some of your watchers or listeners might be interested in that.

So AI, which of course becomes more sophisticated because of the input of very sophisticated minds that are developing it may reveal certain things that will interest us about the nature of life. But they will, I think, move us steadily further away from any idea that life can emerge naturalistically. Here again, you see, we just don't know what life really is. It's very difficult to define.

And it's another area where the very big things that stare us in the face are the most difficult to define. And that's just the way things are. And we need to be humble from a scientific perspective and just saying, look, we don't actually understand it. And we need to avoid using language that is, as you said with the word emergent, tantamount to saying, I haven't a clue.

Hmm. One of the points you draw on page 39, you said the Financial Times hailed the work of AI with a headline that said, AI discovers antibiotics to treat drug resistant diseases. You said, yeah, as the authors point out, this was not so much a victory for AI, but for human cognition. so much a victory for AI, but for human cognition. So if AI could somehow concoct a way to make life from non-life, this wouldn't show that life emerged naturalistically. It would show that it needs intelligence to do so,

which doesn't mirror what we see in nature. So these kinds of insights that you point out, I think are really, really helpful and valuable in this debate. Now we talked about how AI, your claim is, and it makes sense, that at most it could reveal how sophisticated and complex life is. That's where we came from.

How about where we are going? This is another chapter you have in the book. Can AI explain or fix where we're going? And this is where kind of transhumanism comes in. Maybe explain what that is and what you think AI could potentially accomplish in that regard. Sure. This is an important topic and the main person associated with it is not a scientist at all. Is the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari in his book Homo Deus, which means the man who is God or the God man or something like that. And that very title reveals to us what he thinks. He really supports a transhumanist agenda. And the idea, as the name suggests,

is that we move past the purely human era that we're in at the moment, and we go beyond it. We get superpowers. We develop all sorts of cognitive abilities that we haven't had before. We sharpen our eyesight so we can see like eagles and all this kind of thing that they promise.

What is very interesting to my mind is This is a very ancient idea. You see, the choice of the word deus in the title, God in the title, is quite deliberate. Because Harari talks about the timeline of creatures, if you like. But he says, well, we've managed to get the idea of the god if you like. But he says, well, we've managed to get past the evolutionary stage of animals and we've become thinking humans.

So now he says the age of natural selection is over. The next era is going to be the era of intelligent design, where we take over and reshape evolution and control it to produce what we want in the future. And his idea that we end up by producing gods with a small G. Now, when I read that originally, I thought, this is a very ancient heresy really.

And it's to be taken very seriously because of, particularly what the Bible has to say about it, because it goes right back to the very beginning in Genesis 3. The very first assault on the human beings to drive a wedge between them and God was where God's enemy suggested, look, if you eat that forbidden fruit, you shall be as God's knowing good and evil. And as we all know, they fell for it and didn't realize that the knowledge of good and evil is not knowledge

in itself, it's the kind of knowledge you just don't want to have because it brings death, destruction, and everything else into the world. And that grasping for divinity is something embedded in the fabric of human history. We see it surface even in biblical times in the way in which emperors started to insist that they were treated as gods.

You meet that particularly in the Book of Daniel. You meet it very much in the Roman Empire. And Paul, when commenting on this in Two Thessalonians, he has got this very interesting statement where he warns the people in the first century. He said, look, there's going to be a time come when a man of lawlessness, an extremely powerful leader, will arise who sits in the temple claiming to be God.

Now, without going into the details, he says, look, this, what will lead to that is already operating in your society. Now, that's the bit that really grabs me. Paul is saying, look down into the future, he doesn't say when, but he links it with the return of Christ. He says there will arise this leader who claims to be God. But watch it, because that very trend is visible

in your society today. And it's very interesting that he did that, because according to the history in the Book of Acts, Paul was only in Thessalonica for three weeks. And yet, he was teaching people straight out of paganism about these events in the future because there were seeds of that thinking being sown in his own day, and how much more today. And it seems to me that what Harari says fits And it seems to me that what her Rari says fits very neatly into that kind of thing that here we now have the technology to turn humans into gods. And on the journey to that, of course, we've had examples, horrific examples of attempts to re-engineer humans. We had the Nazis in Germany.

We had Stalin in Russia. And dear knows what has happened in China. But we move steadily towards that kind of situation where humans are not content to be model 101, so to speak, but want to turn themselves into gods. And that is a very dangerous idea, it seems to me. And one of the people that saw this and taught me it many years ago was C.S. Lewis.

And we can go into what he said, if you wish, but it seems to be that we need to be very wary of any attempt to turn human beings using technology, drugs, and all the rest of it into little gods, because it is likely to be absolutely disastrous for one clear reason. The reason the Nazi experiment failed and the Soviet experiment failed was

they tried to build utopia without facing the moral problem of human sin and rebellion against God and you can't do it. John, this is one of the most pointed parts of your book because there's always been a promise of a new man in Marxism. Even in Freudianism, there's a promise of a new man if we free ourselves from kind of the, you know, we embrace sexual libertinism, so to speak.

We see it, the Nazis promising a new man. And it never works because you said there's sin built into the world built in our bodies and there is a fixed human nature. So what would you say, how can and should we embrace transhumanism without going too far? What are some of the principles that should shape how much we can benefit from this without making the kind of mistake that you're talking about? Well, I think there are two things here. and benefit from this without making the kind of mistake that you're talking about?

Well, I think there are two things here. There's first of all enhancement and then radical redesign. Let me give you an example. I'm looking at you and I can see you clearly right now because I'm wearing glasses. And those could have been glasses that you wouldn't see because they would just be sitting on my eyeballs. And presumably in the future, they'll get more and more sophisticated.

That is an enhancement to my vision, which has deteriorated with age. That's one thing. And of course, that's to be welcomed. But what that isn't doing is re-specifying what it means to be a human being. And C.S. Lewis, in 1940, he wrote a book called The Abolition of Man that I think everyone should read.

Agreed. Because he saw what would happen if there came a day when a group of scientists could radically alter human beings in the sense that what they did would modify the specification of human beings into the future. In other words, in technical language, we would call it today altering the germ line or changing the human germ line.

And Lewis made a chilling statement when he said, what would be produced by that would not be human beings. It would be artifacts. And there's this sentence in the book, the final triumph of these scientists and humanity would be the abolition of man. In other words, it would be a step down rather than a step up. And that is what I fear.

And I know, and I suspect most of us think that there's somewhere in the world for experiments on the human germ line are going on. There is a way of thinking that unfortunately is embraced by people who've not got a very strong moral compass that if something can be done, it should be done. And experimentation on human fetuses and all this kind of thing to alter the germline. Dear knows what has already happened. And it's a bit like the Tower of Babel, which interests me greatly because in Genesis, about which I've just written a book,

on Abraham at the Tower of Babel, that was a project to reach the sky and by using technology and human brilliance. And you remember that God came down to see it. It didn't quite reach heaven, so he had to come down, which is rather amusing point that the text makes very clearly. And scattered them. And there's a quite a chilling statement in there where God says nothing will be impossible to them,

that we don't know the limits of where people are going to go. I fear them and we need to be aware of that. But we need to see that the nearer people come to trying to play God with their intelligence, which is God given the more disastrous it's going to be for humanity. And it doesn't surprise me that, interestingly enough, when atheists put up an AGI scenario of superintelligence, many of those superintelligences they think about are not benign. They are evil. And Max Tegmark is a classic example of a brilliant physicist. And he has in his book Life 3.0 a whole.

Whole group of possible AGI scenarios, but several of them involve the word God. And it is eerily like some of the things that scripture says about the future. And that, by the way, gave me a reason when I noticed it to actually bring before the general public some aspects of biblical teaching that are not normally aired in public And I think that's a very important point. And I think that's a very important point. And I think that's a very important point.

And I think that's a very important point. And I think that's a very important point. And I think that's a very important point. And I think that's a very important point. And I think that's a very important point. And I think that's a very important point. And I think that's a very important point. And I think that's a very important point.

And I think that's a very important point. And I think that's a very important point. governed by a person who's an economic controller of the entire planet. And if he wants us to take that seriously as he seems to, why not take seriously a much older scenario that resembles it, but for which there's much more evidence. That distinction you made between enhancement and repair is huge. So God has given us the cultural commission to fix a broken world Enhancement and repair what human beings are is not playing God But when we try to change what it means to be human then we're playing God

That distinction is so valuable. I hope people will remember that now you have a statement in your book I want to ask you about. You talk about how kind of this new emerging generation, sometimes referred to as Gen Alpha, is really the first generation being raised in a culture immersed with AI. So I think about my older son, and when he was maybe, I don't know, eight years old or so, social social media maybe four to six years old social media really became popular so he's kind of the social media generation

so we look back now as a culture and go oh maybe this was not such a good idea for mental health for relationships for attention span now that there's a new generation my youngest son is about the same age that AI with chat GPT has become ubiquitous within culture do you my youngest son is about the same age that AI with chat GPT has become ubiquitous within culture. Do you have any sense or projections of how this might affect a new generation?

Where in five or ten years we might look back and go, oh, we didn't see this coming. Maybe this was not so wise to embed ourselves in this the way we now see about social media. Any thoughts what that might look like? Well, as you say in the last part of your statement, we have allowed social media to develop to such an extent that it is affecting the actual wiring of children's brains. And governments are scared stiff of what's going to come out of that, shortening their attention spans, altering their ability, stopping them reading books.

Even adults have been stopped. But the first frightening thing is what's happening with children's attachment to devices. What is the figure? Sometimes up to nine hours a day. And that cannot but affect kids. I watched some of them yesterday, three or four of them, just walking down the street blindly, all looking at their phones, a group of them together,

but they're not talking to one another. They're looking at their phones. And a lot of the stuff, you see, that they get on their phones that's constantly being suggested to them is AI-driven. And that is frightening because I'm afraid there's a lot of commercial pressure being put on kids. And that is affecting them deeply. They get sucked into a kind of commercial whirlwind where they demand this and that the other thing of their parents who can't afford it often but that's only part of it the

Manipulation of the human mind I fear and one of the most awful things I think that's happening is the ubiquity of pornography is the ubiquity of pornography, sucking kids in and destroying their lives and robbing them of their childhood and all this kind of thing. And I don't know what it's like in the US, but they're talking in our government now, banning smartphones before the age of 16. How they're going to do that? I just don't know.

But serious people who are not even Christian, but just decent living people see that there's a whirlwind that's going to reap a disaster just happening in front of us. And it's interested me greatly the effect of some of the experiments of desperate parents. One in the UK where a mother persuaded 11 other mothers to remove the smartphones for their kids and take them away for a week in the outdoors.

And they came back utterly transformed. They didn't really want to use the smartphones anymore, et cetera, et cetera. And they were just saying that to ban these things or get rid of them in some way, but give kids something to do so that the awful word boredom doesn't come to the fore. Now, if that's what social media turned into virtual reality that's AI powered. So that especially children, but not only children, come to enjoy what they call.

The are much more than our L, which is real life. And that's what social media has done. children come to enjoy what they call VR much more than RL, which is real life. And you get people like Sherry Turkle, I think she's at MIT, writing, and her books are quite scary when they uncover exactly what is happening. So I think we've got a huge problem with education. How people are going to cope with it, I don't know. CHAT GPT, of course, on the surface has, first of all,

teachers began to react and said, well, we'll not be able to check essays anymore. What kids write will simply be got off the chat GPT. And a lot of that is happening. But teachers are split over it. I questioned a whole class of senior teachers where I was leading a seminar and half of them were quite happy for the kids to use GPT If they're clever enough to use it let them the other half said no way mmm, so

We're into a huge new set of very difficult ethical problems as this technology Becomes more and more sophisticated and we mustn't forget that there are massive commercial enterprises behind it. They call it this capitalistic notion of when we use a smartphone to order a book, say, we really don't realize that this information has been sold on to third parties without our permission. And that raises all kinds of ethical problems. So it's very difficult to know exactly what to do. And even if you believe you know what to do to implement it is is hugely impossible. They're hugely difficult. So I think it's an area where serious minded Christians ought to be getting together and discussing these things in their churches and in their groups and so on and listening to people who are involved in this industry, because it seems to me it's a perfectly legitimate area for a Christian to work,

because we need scientists who understand the science, but also are able to sit at the ethical table. Otherwise, dear knows what will get programmed into these machines. One last question for you, if that's okay. And you could probably answer this question in like three hours, but maybe just give us your quick take on this. This is on page 11 in your book, and it jumped out to me. You said, while I'm convinced that God will more than survive science, I seriously question whether atheism will do the same.

Is there something about AI that you think is challenging atheism? Tell us what you meant by that and then we'll wrap up. Well, what I meant by that was, and I often have fun with it when meeting scientists, I ask them what they do their science with. And they begin to describe an experiment. I say, oh, no, no, no, no.

Oh, you mean my, and they're about to say mind when they realize that mind isn't politically correct. So they say brain. I actually, for the record, believe brain and mind are very different. But anyway, I say, well, okay, you do your science with your brain. Give me the brief story, the brief history of the brain. And what in the end they will say is something like the brain is the end product of a mindless, unguided process.

So I then say to them, now, I want you to be honest about this. The computer you use in your laboratory if you knew It was the end product of a mindless unguided process. Would you use it? Now I have asked many very clever people that question. I've always got the same answer No, I would not. Well, I said, you have a problem, a very deep problem, because you are using your brain, which is, as you say, the end product of a mindless, unguided process. And it undermines rationality.

That's, I think that atheism and science don't sit well together because atheism taken to its logical consequence tells you that story about the brain that according to most people is doing the thinking. And that is really doing what, and again, I'm indebted to Lewis. He saw this ages ago. He did. That if you take that view, you're not only shooting yourself in the foot,

that's painful, you're actually shooting yourself in the brain, which is fatal. You're undermining rationality. Now, if a worldview, atheism, has as one of its consequences, undermining human rationality, then it's contradicting itself because you reach that view by thinking, at least I would hope you do. So you're destroying thought. And that self-contradiction just destroys the whole thing.

And that's what I mean, that faith in God sits very well with science. The founders of modern science were all believers in God. And that tells us something that faith and atheism does not sit well with science because it really removes any reason for trusting your mind to do science. That's what I meant by that. your mind to do science. That's what I meant by that. I love it. Well, John, just so you know,

I have an unofficial scorecard that I keep when I interview an apologist from the UK, and it's about how soon and how often they cite fellow UK apologist, CS Lewis. So I'm gonna have to go back and compare your notes with Justin Briarly, who who I interviewed recently and see who won Well all all kidding aside your book is fantastic. It's called 2084 I want all my viewers and listeners to pick up the expanded and updated edition which came out the end of

2024 I was talking with my mom last night and she watches everything that I do, by the way, shout out mom, I don't think I've ever done that on my show. This was one of the books she stopped and she said, as soon as you're done, can I please read it and talk to you about it? And that's exactly the response I hope a lot of people do. Not only was it interesting, but you weeded through a biblical worldview to the questions that are being asked by AI

in a way that I thought was brilliant. Eye-opening so at least non-Christians could say, oh, I see why Christians see the world the way that they do and feel challenged in their worldview. But I think you would open up for Christians to realize this isn't just a tool in our culture. This carries ideas about what it means to be human, what's broken in the world, how we fix it, and we need to have vigilance biblically and spiritually how we think about it and approach it. So your book 2084 and the AI Revolution is fantastic. I hope folks will pick it up.

Thank you for coming and teaching a class in our program at Biola University Talbot School of Theology. Loved having you. For those of you watching, if you thought about studying apologetics, we had a whole class on AI this year by one of our experts in the philosophy of science. Dr. John Lennox is the kind of quality and caliber we bring in to expose our students to information below.

We would love to have you part of the program. Dr. Lanix, thanks for streaming in all the way across the Atlantic. Really enjoyed it. Just God bless you and your family and your ministry. Well, thank you very much indeed. It was a sheer delight talking with you. And God bless you and the work you do there. Bye bye.