Within Reason - #151 John Lennox - What Nearly Dying Taught Me About God

Episode Date: April 13, 2026

Get all sides of every story and be better informed at https://ground.news/AlexOC - subscribe for 40% off unlimited access.For early, ad-free access to videos, and to support the channel, subscribe to my Substack: https://www.alexoconnor.com.-John Lennox is a Northern Irish mathematician, bioethicist, and Christian apologist originally from Northern Ireland. He has written many books on religion, ethics, the relationship between science and God, and has had public debates with atheists including Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. -Exclusive discount: Listeners to my show can get 30% Off John Lennox’s autobiography, My Story when shopping directly from his publishers. Visit https://spckpublishing.co.uk/my-story and enter AOC30 at checkout to get 30% off.  - TIMESTAMPS00:00 - How Pressure Can Produce the Best Work02:29 - Does the Incarnation Make Sense?06:22 - John’s Richard Dawkins Debate14:39 - What Did the New Atheists Get Wrong About God?26:21 - Science Cannot Explain Everything31:22 - What Did the New Atheists Get Right?35:18 - Why Does God Hide From So Many People?44:36 - Why Does God Allow Arbitrary Suffering?56:25 - Is Faith “Belief Without Evidence”?1:00:33 - How Could God Punish a Mere Lack of Faith?1:08:14 - How Christopher Hitchens Agreed with Jesus1:13:03 - Does Christianity Cause Evil?

John Lanox, welcome back to the show. Thank you very much, Alex. How are you? I'm good, better than I deserve, actually. But I've lost a bit of weights as I last saw you. So I'm actually feeling in good form. That's good. I was really glad to sit down with you last time

and have a conversation which we were just talking about. It attracted a lot of attention. It's got more than a million views on the main video. And interestingly, it's a moment near the end that seems to have captured people's attention where I, silly of me, I sort of bring up the problem of evil when we've sort of got about maybe five minutes left in the tank and you say, oh, well, that's maybe a conversation for another time, but I'll give you one thing. And people really sort of took to that. That seems to be the main thing that people enjoyed about the podcast. That's interesting. Interesting. I find that sometimes when you are sort of making an offhand comment with not very much time and you're forced to make something very succinctly, it can be some of the most effective rhetoric. And this also happened to you with your first debate. with Richard Dawkins, didn't it? It did indeed. Towards the end, we got a message that neither of us expected, that we'd only got two minutes left.

And in fact, we'd been told in advance that we had nine minutes to make a concluding speech. And, of course, I'd spent hours in doing this. And two minutes, wrap it up, finish, you see. So I decided to go for the heart of Christianity, which was the really, resurrection. And again, that bit went viral. You're quite right. People paid attention to it because Dawkins reacted very strongly against it and said, how petty. We've been talking all about great philosophical ideas and so on. And now we come to the resurrection of Jesus. I almost remember his exact words. It's so unworthy of the universe. And I remember thinking on that, if the resurrection actually happened, it's one of the biggest things because death is the ultimate mystery and it comes to us all. But you're right. It did. It caught them at the end. And in fact, this has happened several other times where a question has come almost out of left field. And I've had to think very rapidly,

what do I say? Go for the one central argument that I would want to say anyway. And that's what people focus on. Yeah, and that moment with Dawkins is representative of what happens sometimes where somebody will like make a criticism of a world view, like say they criticize Christianity. And the Christian, rather than saying, no, no, no, that's not true. They sort of just go, yeah, but it's not a criticism. So in the same way that like, you know, a Muslim might say, oh, you have a God, but your God died, did he? Oh, he became a human. And you're just like, yeah. And Dawkins says, oh, what, so this sort of grand transcendent God enters into human affairs? And you're like, yes, he did. But can you understand why Dawkins would see,

and why anybody who's not a Christian, essentially, would see this ultimate transcendence, suddenly becoming interested in, you know, the behaviors of one species at a particular time in history, getting sort of involved in almost like a political affair would seem a little bit. sort of strange? Oh, I can. In fact, you immediately make me think of an incident not far from here where I was invited to address five or six hundred physicists and experts at a laboratory just south of Oxford at a lunchtime and the big questions, God and science and so on. And afterwards, a professor of physics from Oxford here came up to me, very friendly and He said, you know, I found that most interesting, but I discern that you're a Christian.

He was pretty sharp, you see. He said, that obliges you to believe that God became human. He raised this question. Can you explain that to me? And I looked at it and I said, well, I said, tell you what, that's of a quid pro quo. Let me ask you something simpler. tell me what consciousness is. And there was dead silence for a moment.

He said, I don't really know. Well, I said, let me try something easier. What is energy? And he said, well, we can use it. We can measure it. That wasn't my question. I said, what is it? And I said, be careful with your answer because I've read Richard Feynman.

And he said, we don't really know. And then I said this. I said, tell me, you don't. know what either consciousness or energy are, do you believe in them? And he said, yes, I do. I said, why? Why do you believe in things? You don't know what they are. So that was a bit of a struggle. And I said, I expect part of the reason is because somehow these concepts have enough meaning to give you a sense of they have explanatory power. He said, that's right. Now I said, those were easier questions than the one you asked me.

And if you can't explain energy and consciousness, do you think I'm going to be able to explain to you how God can become human? Of course I can't. However, I believe in it because, as I consider all the evidence I face, it's the only explanation that makes sense of all the rest. He said, I'll buy that. let's go on talking. So we had a marvelous conversation from it. And I do understand that very well. I was

reflecting on it just the other day. What a huge thing it is actually to believe this. And yet I do. And here I am at the age of 82. And in one sense, my faith is stronger than ever, mostly because I've listened carefully to people who take opposing views or make inquiries like you do. I try my best. And you've written an autobiography, although you don't like the phrase autobiography, do you? Well, auto is self. Yes. And, you know, it's interesting.

I reflected for a long time because people kept asking me, you must write your story. Yeah. Because they knew that bits of it were not in the public domain at all, really. especially my earlier life travels behind the Iron Curtin, Russia, Ukraine, and so on. And then I came across a statement in the Book of Acts, the history of early Christianity by Luke, where Paul visited a church. And the phrase goes something like this. He explained to them what the Lord had done with them.

And that caught me. I thought, well, if Paul can go to a church as an appointment, apostle and feel free. And it's not full of pride and bombast and all the rest of it, just to relate what he believed, of course, that the Lord had done with them. Perhaps I can do the same. And that broke the damn. So I started to write my autobiography, which has just been printed called My Story, an intellectual and spiritual biography. That's right. It will be linked in the description. It It comes out on the 16th of April, which maybe in the past, by the time this goes out, perhaps not. Either way, the link is down below.

And I think for my atheist listeners, the most interesting parts might be your recounting of the various debates that you had with new atheists. We spoke a bit about this the last time you're on my show. But the details around how these things are organized, I think people have an idea that, you know, you've got someone like Richard Dawkins and someone like yourself. you're both sort of desperate to debate each other and you find people to put it together when really a lot of the time it's some ambitious event organizer who comes to you and says, you know, I've got this debate idea and you go, I don't know, maybe, I'll go on then. And next thing you know you find yourself in front of. Yeah, that's exactly what happened.

I unfortunately, when I was at Cambridge, I didn't get involved in the debating society. We didn't have a tradition at school. So I'd never done a debate. Yeah. And the suggestion came from someone else who'd heard me speak on these topics. And I instantly thought, no, no, I'm not the person to do that. And I don't think Dawkins was very keen either. But Larry Taunton, who was from Alabama of all places, a historian,

he really wanted to give, I quote, the deep south. a taste of the Oxford God debate. That's the way it was put. And in the end, he persuaded both of us. And it was with some reluctance. And I can remember evidence of that. I'd never met Dawkins before. Oxford's a big place.

I'm in a different subject and so on. But we met in the green room. And as we walked towards the stage for that debate, he said to me, you know, I don't debate. I'm not sure what that meant. If it was, I don't debate people like you or I don't debate at all, because I knew he did some debate. Well, I said, if it's any comfort to you, Richard, what I intend to do is to try to put into the space, the audience space tonight, some positive evidence for the truth of the Christian worldview to counteract your atheists. And he very friendly replied, I'll buy that.

And so we went into the rest of his history. So it was very much organized by others, as were the rest of the debates. In fact, the big debates, almost all of them, were organized by Larry Taunton. Yeah. And you were even like a last-minute sub in for Dinesh Denech to Sousa versus Christopher Hitchens. That's correct. Denech pulls out and you sort of happen to be in town. That's right. I was in Birmingham, Alabama. It was most strange.

Yeah. Because I'd already debated Christopher at the Edinburgh Festival, which again was an astonishing thing. The organizer of the Edinburgh Festival said they wanted to start it with a God debate, which surprised me. Yeah. And Dawkins, of course, turned up with that. And Christopher, when he was told he'd lost the debate for the first time in his life, apparently. And I'm not saying that with any pride. It's just that it abused me.

Yeah, you mean literally like they took a vote. Well, they did. And at the beginning, Christopher and I hit it off very well when we first met because I challenged him with a question. I said, why do you get all your arguments from mainly one source? And he was surprised. He said, do I? I said, yes, which source? Tom Payne?

And he said, you're right. And that just changed the chemistry between us. And we had a really great off-camera conversation. Well, the moderator was a well-known TV presenter for Radio 4 and all the rest of it. And he said, what about a vote? And I said, well, I'm indifferent to voting. I'm interested in the ideas. Oh, we must have a vote.

Christopher. Oh, yes, we'll have a vote. So he said as moderator at the beginning, the thesis was the new Europe should prefer the new atheism, which when I first heard it, I thought, I'm not sure they know what they're asking. Because the new Europe was created by the fall of the Berlin Wall, which was erected by atheism. And I thought that was a great gift to me, but I kept it under my hat of course. And so we had a vote. hands up just were you for the motion or against it. And then the same thing was repeated at the end.

And it was quite clear that the shift had gone to my surprise very much so, and everybody's surprise to my side. And the moderator said, Christopher, shall we have a recount? And I could hear him say, because he's just beside me. No, I think Lennox has it. And I got up and shook hands with Christopher passing him at his chair at the table. And he said, I want a rematch. No voting this time.

And that, when I stood in in Birmingham for Denise Desusa, that was the rematch and there was no vote. Yeah. We'll get back to the show in just a moment. But first, I've just seen that Sam Altman has urged urgent global AI regulation at a summit. New Delhi. I'm looking at today's sponsor, Ground News. It's a news aggregation source, which collects thousands of local and international news sources all in one place, so you can compare how the same story is being reported on across the political spectrum. Right now, the coverage is leaning to the right. 47% of the sources reporting on this are right-leaning,

and only 11% of them lean to the left. Crucially, of course, this means that if you only typically read left-leaning news, you could easily miss this story. But of course, that could be subject to change, to change, and if it is, I'll be the first to know about it, thanks to using Ground News. I can also directly compare different headlines from the different sources, as well as look at their factuality rating, and even see who owns the sources, which is quite important. Ground News even has a dedicated blind spot tap, which specifically seeks out stories that you would otherwise miss based on the news that you normally read. So cut through media bias and get a better grip on what's really going on in the world by going to

ground. News forward slash Alex O.C. Or by scanning the QR code that's on your screen. Use my link to get 40% off their unlimited access vantage plan. And with that said, back to the show. I like how in the biography, you don't just like recount the blow by blows of the debates because they're still online and you can watch them. Yes, right. And many people listening to this will have already listened to all of those debates.

And they do kind of start merging into one. You can't remember exactly what points were made where. But having done all of that and, seen new atheism run its course, and it's now no longer like the talk of the town. In retrospect, what do you think is the main thing that the new atheists got wrong about God? I think what they got wrong, I'd say two factors. The about God of your question, I think is very perceptive. They did get things wrong about God.

But they got wrong ways to talk about these things, and they decided that aggression and mockery would be the best way to deal with it. And that was a fatal mistake, it seems to me, especially for people that claimed to have some kind of intellectual pretension. Ad hominin arguments, mockery and all that get nowhere. But they tried that very forcibly. But what they got wrong about God, I think if I had to come out with one point, was relegating the God of the Bible to be the kind of what I would call a God of the Gaps, gods of the ancient world. We don't understand lightning, so we postulate a God of lightning, who will disappear once we do a rigorous scientific analysis of lightening. In other words, God is a placeholder for the things we don't yet understand from a rational or scientific point of view. And I think that was a huge mistake.

And I puzzled over this for a long time. It was Stephen Hawking that really enabled me to see what was going on. Because his kind of formulation towards the end of his life was that you had to choose between science and God. and I thought that was really odd because I could see very clearly and learned as a teenager from serious sources like Alfred North Whitehead filtered through CS Lewis, yes, but they were serious sources. That there was a deep connection between the rise of modern science in the 16th and 17th centuries and the biblical worldview. And I thought this is very strange.

Here's Hawking in Newton's chair. And Newton didn't make that mistake. In fact, when he wrote the Principia Mathematica, which is arguably the most famous book in the history of science, the early editions at least carried with them an invitation to thinking people. And Newton hoped it would convince thinking people that there was a deity. And the thought behind that was, this is what I understand of the universe.

And it's what I understand leads me to believe in an intelligent creator behind it. Now, Hawking was saying you've got to choose between science and God, but suddenly the penny dropped. And I realized something very simple that I should have realized years before. And that is, if you define God to be a God of the gaps, that is a placeholder for the things you don't yet understand. If that's your definition of God, then you have to choose between God and science by definition. And once that penny had dropped, and I often used to amuse myself in a way by saying to audiences, of course, you've all read the first line in the Bible. In the beginning, God created the bits of the universe we don't yet understand, which puts the point, created the heavens and the earth. and that is really grammatically a merism.

It spans everything. That has created everything. The bits we do and a bits we don't. But here we're sitting in a room with famous paintings, some of them by Hockney. And as you look at them, if you understand about art, I don't understand much,

but I like looking at art. If you're really trained in it, you can see much more of the gene. of the artist because you understand more of the way art works than a person who can't. And it's exactly that with my view of the universe. The more I understand of it and the way in which is mathematically describable, for example, the more those things point me towards a creator. They don't prove the existence.

Proof is in the mathematical sense we don't get anywhere. But they do give evidence. They are pointers. And so I think that was a huge mistake, painting God as the God of the Gaps. And the one that's related to it is misunderstanding what faith is and redefining it as believing where you know there's no evidence. Sure. Which led to the most ridiculous sort of statements by Christopher Hutchins, for example, our faith is not a faith, our belief is not a belief. He was wrestling with the idea that Dawkins mainly had caused a shift in redefining faith,

which is an ordinary word. It's not a religious word. It simply means trust belief and leads to the first logical question, what are the grounds for your believing that to blind faith, which is believing where there's no evidence and which is dangerous. And so there was that massive. output of pressure on people that, here's Lennox, he's a man of faith, that means he believes there's no evidence, there's no point in talking to him. It was a very clever move, but it

backfired because I think more serious thinkers began to see that Einstein was right when he spoke about faith, and it wasn't faith in God. I cannot conceive, he once wrote, of a genuine scientist without that faith. He meant every scientist must believe that science can be done, or to put it in his way, every scientist must believe in the rational intelligibility of the universe. You can't do science without that. And Polkinghorn, John Polkinghorn,

taught me quantum mechanics at Cambridge. And in his books, he kept emphasizing this, that physics is powerless to explain its faith. And he used the word faith unashamedly, it said so, in the mathematical intelligibility of the universe because you've got to trust that, believe that, have faith in that before you can do any science at all. Yeah. And so that was a huge mistake. And I think people have begun to realize that at younger people.

In fact, I've just brought out a couple of weeks ago a new book for young people. Science and God, do you have to choose? Yeah. I think for me that the moment of reckoning was as an undergraduate being introduced to the problem of induction from David Hume. Yes. I remember at the time nearly making a provocative video about it that was going to be called something like, you know, yes, I'm a person of faith. Because I wanted to say, I'd suddenly realized that, although it's quite an obvious point to me now, there are all kinds of things. which we believe that we don't have any evidence for.

And you can list them off easily, things like the existence of the external world or of other minds or whatnot. But the problem of induction in particular was so empirical. And it came from such an empiricist, just sort of scientist, atheist, you know, heroic figure of philosophy, just throwing up his hands and saying, we have no, like, justification for this. And yet I believe it. That made me realize, oh, okay, so we do that all the time. The question then is, like, what becomes a legitimate kind of faith and what becomes an illegitimate kind of faith? And the problem with the new atheists, I think, is that they were a bit careless in setting their criteria.

A bit like, you remember, like, logical positivism was a huge movement in the 20th century that said, for a statement to be meaningful, it must either be empirically verifiable or, like, analytically, mathematically true by definition. And it was really popular for a while. And ultimately it falls because it fails by its own standard. Because the statement that statements must be empirically verifiable or mathematically true is not empirically verifiable nor mathematically true. And in hindsight, you look at it and you go, you just set the bar too high for yourself. And I think what the new atheists did was they said, we won't believe anything without sufficient scientific evidence.

And they just set the bar too high and left themselves open to attacks from people who said, well, go on then, prove the existence of the external world. Prove induction. Prove the existence of other minds. Prove that maths will work in five minutes from now. And you just can't do these things. Yes, that's right. I would encourage you, by the way, to make that video.

I think it could be real fun. I think I might do that actually still. Because this logical incoherence of statements that sound very plausible has come back in full force. And it's still around with us in the form of scientism. Yeah, sure. Science is the only way to truth. But that's not a statement of science. It's a meta-scientific statement about science.

So if it's true, it's false. Yes. It goes too far. And I, it's interesting that Richard Dawkins and I both have a hero in science. And that's the late Sir Peter Medawar in Oxford who won the Nobel Prize. And he wrote a very interesting book that I think every scientist should read of the limits of science. And he points out that it's obvious that science can't answer all questions. And he points to the questions of a child.

Where do I come from? Where am I going to? What's the meaning of life? And he said, we must turn to religion and literature and so on for the answers to those things. And the subtext of that, the implication of that, I think is hugely important for the debate against the late New Atheists, if I might call them that. Yeah, right. And that is, that science is not coextensive with rationality. You know, if it were, we'd have to shut half the faculties in this University of Oxford town, which would be a serious loss for this Bodlin college.

It would have stopped C.S. Lewis dead because it would have been no... English faculty for him to belong to. No history, no linguistics, no languages, no history, no literature and so on. There had only been natural sciences. It is such a nonsense. And yet, it is believed by the most seriously impressive of people of science. And I find that very difficult to understand. I think it comes from, and look, we're being very, I'm being very friendly to the Christian position here.

And sometimes I get criticisms from my audience that I don't push back on guests enough. And I think it depends on the nature of the conversation. Yes. I'm just interested in hearing where you're coming from. But we will talk about, you know, what the new atheists got right and maybe talk about some of their objections. But I think the place where this particularly comes from is a misunderstanding, in my view, of what science does and what scientific laws are. I think that's right. That's absolutely right.

important. Yeah. I think science, I've been making a lot of noise in a different context recently about how science doesn't really explain anything, I think it describes. That's hugely important, Alex. That's hugely important. And it was, I think, Fitkenstein made a very profound statement about it. He said the laws of nature explain nothing.

They describe. Yes. And they're not causes either. And Hawking made this mistake in his book, which prompted me to write a book, God and Stephen Hawking. The idea that the laws of nature could create something. It's a bit like saying that Newton's laws of motion caused billiard balls to hurtle across the table. Yes. That kind of fundamental misunderstanding leads me to think that we need to get back to where Scotland was centuries ago

where every student was taught a bit of philosophy. and taught about these things, about the problem of induction, about the nature of science. They're actually very important because there are a lot of confusion. I think you're dead right there. At the very least, those kinds of things like, you know, I've not found much practical like applicability of the problem of induction to my daily life. But learning about that helps you to realize that there are just these huge foundational gaps. And it stops you, I think, from, it's a way of taking the log out of your own eye. It stops you from pointing the finger and saying, you know, you have irrational beliefs.

But like, you know, if science just describes and scientific laws are descriptions of regular occurrences, I sometimes put it by saying that like things don't fall to the ground because of the law of gravity. We have the law of gravity because things fall to the ground. You know what I mean? And I think that changes everything because if laws just describe, as you say, it makes no sense to say that they are somehow the core. of the things they describe. And the analogy I've used, which was sort of inspired by something C.S. Lewis said, although it's a different point,

is that I kind of imagine people, maybe I've told you about this, but I imagine people discovering a book of Shakespearean sonnets and trying to sort of be, and they don't know what it is. And they're like, let's investigate this weird book that we found. And they start looking at it,

and they start noticing things. They're like, well, I've noticed that there's a big version of a letter and a small version of a letter. and that at the beginning of each line it uses the big letter and that's the law of capitalization and then they discover the law of punctuation and grammar

and if they're really clever they might discover like iambic pentameter they discover the rhythm of the and what they're coming up with are the laws of literacy right and they're able to predict when I turn the page I bet it's going to follow these laws and it does and they've discovered the laws of literacy and then someone comes along and says

so where did the book come from like what is this book and they say well we don't know yet but look at all the progress we're making discovering the laws of literacy. I'm sure one day they'll explain the origin of the book. It would be more than just optimism. It would be an actual category error to think that the laws of literacy will one day describe, even describe, let alone explain the origin of the book. But I think that's kind of what people do when they expect that the laws of science, which are descriptions of events in the universe, will one day explain the cause of the universe, which gives rise to those phenomena. I think your illustration is excellent. I hadn't heard it before.

And it works very well because it's perfectly intelligible. Well done without. Thanks. It just, it's certainly, I think analogies are so useful in this regard. I mean, they're limited in scope, of course. But I think the key point to get across is what you said. And I hadn't heard it put that way, which is like to say that a scientific law is a cause is a bit like saying Newton's laws of motion, like cause billiard balls to move. move. They don't. They do describe the way they'll move when they're put in motion, but they don't

put them in motion, you know. You still need something, as Hawking says at the end of a brief history of time, he says there's still this mystery as to what something like breathes fire into the equations. And I think that mystery remains. And I think quite strongly, that's basically where the scientist, as you put it, the new atheist type goes wrong. But I am interested to you, what do you think the new atheists got right? They obviously captured people's imagination. They obviously had some sort of righteous anger about various misuses of religion, or, as they see it, you know, proper use of religion that led to bad outcomes. And although they must have been mistaken in your view about various things, they must have been on something.

One of the main things I think they got right, even in my case, was inspiring wonder about nature. Oh, yeah. Dawkins is a very good writer. Yes. And Peter Atkins with his gift of explaining he's a feisty warrior and we've classed several times.

But I enjoy reading his stuff for that reason. Anything that inspires wonder in nature and the marvels of it, it was much more in the field of it. It's interesting that we're having this kind of conversation, because what you've been talking about and I've been talking

about is the nature of explanation. That's where they were going wrong. But the what they were describing, a lot of it was absolutely brilliant. It was their explanation for the origin of it. Hawking, there's a classic example. You mentioned the end of a brief history of time when he talks about the mind of God in that mystery. I would agree with that point. But he moved much further in later books. And the thing that really caught me was in his book where he talks of the grand design, where he talks about because, and I'm quoting this, there is a law like gravity.

The universe can and will create itself from nothing. Yes. Now, that to my mind was a multiple category area because there is a law like gravity, so there is something. The universe will create itself from nothing, flat contradiction. But then, sneak again, do laws create the universe? The answer is they don't, as you very well said. So I owe the new atheists a lot, I think, in that wonder of nature and the descriptions

and the importance of getting people to think. It's positive and negative at the same time because it's an analysis of their arguments that has helped me over many years to think much more clearly about these things and to recognize that often in the past, Christians like me were sloppy in thinking. They were using God of the Gap's argument.

And religion was doing bad things. It was in certain circles creating an anti-scientific point of view. And I fought against that very strongly in several of my books. So those are all pluses, and I want to recognize those. And I think it's very important to learn from one's opponents, if you like, because they're not opponents everywhere, not at every point. Yes. That's a huge mistake.

There's a difference between the science and the interpretation of science. And you can have an atheist Nobel Prize winner and a Christian Nobel Prize winner. Their science doesn't divide them. It's their understanding of how it fits in the bigger picture that is different. And those are things that we can discuss, but we can learn from each other. Yeah. You know, I think one of the things that the new atheists would say is that essentially there's no evidence for God. And I know, you know, we spend our lives discussing and debating the various arguments and evidences for God's existence. But one of the most powerful arguments for atheism, I suppose, is a sort of broad encompassing of this, which you might call divine hiddenness, which is to say that God seems to hide. And that means that while there may be evidence of his existence, Some people for some reason are insensitive to it. And maybe they're resistant.

Maybe they don't want it to be true or whatever. But it seems to me that there is at least one person in the world who genuinely wants to know God and just can't believe it. Just doesn't. And maybe it's because they've been listening to too much Richard Dawkins and Hitchens. But again, that's kind of not their fault. If that's just the culture they grew up in and that's what they were convinced by, you don't choose what to be convinced by. You just are or you're not. And so there's this problem of why some people seem not to want to meet God at all.

And they get, you know, blinding flashes of revelation. They get burning bushes and appearances and dreams and all this kind of stuff. And then there are those who spend their lives crying out for a sign. Yes. And they don't seem to get one. It seems arbitrary. And if God exists, maybe a little bit cruel. I think there is a real mystery there.

I'm very sympathetic to that. because it is a question that I asked myself a lot because it was asked of me a lot. Here I am coming from Northern Ireland and I arrive in Cambridge and almost the first thing I was asked when people heard me speak with the Northern Irish accent was, do you believe in God? Do you go to church? And then I remember the first one and it happened very soon early on. He said, oh, sorry, sorry, you're Irish, you Irish all believe in God. you fight about. In other words, it's a cultural phenomenon. If you were born somewhere else

in another culture, you wouldn't have these beliefs. And I think to a certain extent that, of course, is true. We are all influenced by our culture and the worldview of our upbringing. But what has helped me enormously in that, it hasn't solved the problem. There is a residual problem here, Alex. I'm with you on that. Is that it's possible for people to change their worldview. And I've seen that happen quite often. Secondly, it was by realizing that this was a problem that forced me in a way, and it was force to be open and vulnerable and allow counter arguments into my personal space to investigate

them without being afraid. Because there was a time I was afraid. I remember very clearly walking up and down Kings Parade in Cambridge and I passed Mowbray's bookshop. And in the window there was a book. The title was Why I Am Not a Christian by Burton Russell. Yes. And I walked up and down. Dare I buy that book. Dare I buy it. I bought it. And it was such a help to my faith. because I realized that Russell, sadly, seems to have very little contact with genuine Christianity. The argument seems to have been...

No, it wasn't very good. But I think you're right. And I like the sensitivity with which you approach the question. There are people that don't want there to be a God and say so, and some of them are brilliant scientists. In fact, the philosopher of physics, what's his name, Nagel. Thomas Nagel. Thomas Nagel, New York, wrote an essay on this.

I don't really want there to be a god. It's very honest. But yet he sees the difficulties in naturalism and wrote a whole book about it. So there are those that don't want there to be a god. But there are others that you sense are crying out and why don't they believe? Now, one interesting side light on this,

and it might be just a suggestion of someone you might be interested to interview. He's the only person in the world I know who holds simultaneously three chairs, Professor of Nanotechnology, Professor of Computer Science and Professor of Chemistry, James Tour of Rice University. And week on week, he has a challenge on the internet. It's fascinating. And his challenge is this, if you would like to know why I believe in the physical resurrection of Jesus is a very specific thing, I will meet you. And week after week, he's meeting people with exactly the same kind of sense of wanting to find out and crying out and all this kind of thing.

I'll not spoil it by telling you what the result is, but it is fascinating. He's unique in my experience. And as I travel around, and I'm sure as you travel around, the great difficulty is, it's very difficult to see into a person's experience. I visited Siberia quite a lot, and I was invited on one occasion to take part in a very high-powered conference, organized by the Club of Rome, no less. I mentioned this in my book. And I was invited to give a talk, and I gave it. It was a short talk. And there was someone there from South America, a politician, and he lost his temper.

In the premier session, there was four or five hundred of us. And he grabbed the microphone. He wouldn't wait his turn, got up and denounced me as being very dangerous indeed. It was an amazing situation. It was electrifying. So he went on and on and on saying that this kind of talk would inspire revolution if we believed in all this kind of stuff, you see. So when he'd finished, I said to the chairman, look, give me two minutes.

Oh, she said, no, no, you can't speak anymore. I said, look, two minutes and I'd stop. And I remember saying that I looked at him straight and addressed him. I said, you know, the God you don't believe in, I don't believe in either, is God of the Gaps kind of stuff. And secondly, I said, I'm on your side when you say that religion can be very dangerous. And I made some quip about, I suppose, that you would disbelieve in, a watchmaker once you understood how watch worked. And that caught him.

And there was silence and the thing went on. Afterwards he came and he said, we need to talk. I said, I think we do and I'd be very happy to talk. I said, you've had a very bad experience. I'm afraid of Christianity, haven't you? And he was quiet for a while. He said, I've had an awful experience.

And it was abuse, you know, by people who were professing Christian clerics and so on. He said, how did you know? I said, I'd be frank with you, because what you were saying up front there was completely irrational. So I reckon there was something deep. And we had a long talk and we parted his friends. Over those few days, we had a long conversation. And that was one of the sharpest examples of someone who, just was boiling with rage because of negative religious experience. And this is a tragedy, Alex,

the way in which people have suffered. And it's one ground. It's not the only round. And there are many different ones, but it's so difficult to see down into people's hearts and minds to know whether they have a genuine objection. And I think some people have a genuine objection. We started this conversation with it, that I meet people all through my life who say, look, I'd love to be able to believe like you do, but I can't. My family were murdered in the Holocaust or something like this. I sympathize with that. I don't trivialize that because I think that's the hard objection. It is really hard.

But I don't think atheism answers it. I think Christianity doesn't solve it like a question to be. but gives us a way in to cope with it, as I said in our last interview. Yeah, well, sometimes you say, you know, the problem of evil is the biggest problem for both Christians and atheists. And there is this line that sort of says, you know, if you're an atheist and you say that there's a problem of evil, you need to be able to account for where evil comes from. Yes, or what evil is.

Yeah, and I think that's fair enough, which is why I'm always careful to talk about what I'd rather call like the problem of suffering. Yes, that's okay. I just wouldn't predict the, it's not that there would be no suffering whatsoever, but it's the, the arbitrariness of it, the intensity. That's the hard bit. Yes. The apparent arbitrariness of it. Yes, absolutely.

And I know that there are people who, and the problem of evil and divine hiddenness are kind of versions of the same problem. It is. Which is why does God allow bad things to happen? And I think that in individual cases, there are things you can say. but on the whole I cannot I find it difficult to believe that there isn't at least one

person who sincerely just cannot be convinced that God exists and there's no there's no boiling rage there's no hatred there's no resistance they just can't believe it and I also believe that there's at least one person

who has suffered arbitrary gratuitous suffering that could have easily been avoided had it been in accordance with the will of the sustainer of the universe. I find those two very difficult to disbelieve, and I also find it very difficult to square with the existence of a God who loves us all and wants to come to know us all. And therefore, we have to find some kind of way in. I share that question with you. I'd be totally open. The level of one's own personal.

experience then becomes important. And I think I may have raised this last time, perhaps we didn't have time. It's because this is a real issue and not a trivial issue. The question for me is

is there any evidence oblique or indirect evidence of any kind that I can trust God with it Now that's as hard a question because you all know the undergraduate type of argument surely a good God would is Lucretius problem

and all of that David Hume raised it and all the rest and we never get anywhere. Yes. Ever. And so I'm a math petition and when math petitions have tried for a few hundred years to answer a question they can't. They very sensibly try to change the question

And so I changed the question to that equally difficult one. Is there any evidence that we can trust God with it? And that's where my personal experience, based on the revelation and scripture of the life of Jesus and the way he responded not only to other suffering, but his own suffering, that's where I see the way in. And that's where I see people who are really serious. suffering being helped. What I mean by that, Alex, is this. There are two aspects and perspectives on this. The perspective we have at the moment sitting here is observing suffering. It's one thing to observe it. It's another thing to experience it. Now, most people are a mixture. They say gratuitous

suffering here. They're suffering maybe a toothache themselves. But those two perspectives, are different to a certain extent. And one needs intellectual answers, the other needs pastoral answers. And it seems to be that we need to have a pastoral understanding, which is, from my perspective, a deep sympathy recognizing the depth of the objection you've raised, that it is real.

It's not pretend. People aren't pretending. And the way you formulated interests me, because you're the only one that's put it that way, and that is, I can't imagine that there isn't a person like this. Well, I can't go with you. I can't either. So how does one approach people like that? But there's no generic person.

They're individuals, and I find that all the time. Right. People constantly ask me, what would you say to a person who? Yeah. I said, unless I know that person, I wouldn't know what to say to them. Yeah. I think people are too quick to provide what I would call a generic answer to a question. And it's meaningless because we're all individuals and our psychology, our emotional experience, goes very deep.

And the key thing, it seems to me, that has guided me all my life, I must take you seriously. what you say, how you act, how you feel, how you think. And I must open myself up to the questions that are moving you at their deepest. To some of them, I will have no immediate answer. It would be foolish to claim. But I'll go away and think about those things in the hope that even within that context with a suffering person, I can show sufficient empathy to perhaps open a new window of opportunity to them.

Like in New Zealand, when I got there just after the earthquake, and I had to give a whole lot of talks on this topic, and it wasn't easy, because natural disasters are harder than moral disasters. You know, we understand war and bombs and... But earthquakes are different. Acts of God. Yes, that's right. and I spoke on this business about this other type of question,

is there enough evidence to trust God? And as I finished one talk in the biggest congregation, this church had had for years in the Christchurch where the earthquake happened, a note was pushed into my hand as I left the platform. And I was told a lady had passed it in, and it just said this, I lost my husband in the earthquake. You have shown the first ray of light that I have had on this, and she signed it. I was deeply moved by that.

She didn't get a solution in that sense. But she felt she'd seen a way in. And to my mind, Alex, it really is one of the evidences of the truth of Christianity, the array of people throughout history. that have in the deepest of suffering on all kinds of circumstances, how it is possible that even persecution refined the church and people were stronger. I'm amazed at that.

And I've met some people who've shown immense courage, particularly in Siberia. People were in the gulag and all this kind of thing. And they told me how God had helped them to face it. Now, you have to listen to people seriously. I remember one chapter, who really, in a sense, humiliated me if I'm open about it. He was a very short chap for this.

And he told me he'd been put in the gulag for seven years because of his faith. He was teaching young people. And he just looked up at me and he said, you couldn't face that, could you? well I was a I just I was so embarrassed I said no I couldn't

and then he smiled I'd never forget his smile he said nor could I but he said you know I discovered something I said what was that well he said when I went into the gulag I would faint at the sight of my own blood

if I cut myself shaving and I saw things there that no man should ever have to see in terms of Gutsu it as cruelty. But you know what he said? I discovered that God comes in and he acts in the situation, not before it. And that is stuck with me for all of my life because it resonates with what Jesus said to his disciples when he told them they'd be brought before courts, they'd be tried, they'd be persecuted. And that they would know in that hour. And I, I'd think there's something, there's enough evidence in my mind personally talking to people, to who it has happened, that this relationship with God is so real that in one sense it comes in to encourage people subjectively in situations that they cannot plan for, that are gratuitous,

that are horrible, and supports them. To my mind, that's part of the evidence. And it's what I would expect to happen if Christianity is true. It still doesn't completely answer your question. Yeah, I mean, because the cynic in me wants to say, well, if religion is just a sort of psychological cope, then that's exactly what you'd expect, isn't it? That it would show up in times of need and offer people without providing a rational solution because it's not true and it can't. it provides this evolutionary psychological purpose of, you know, preventing people from falling into despair. Well, of course, I agree with that completely. And that's why I think you need both the subjective and the objective rational side. It's the whole person. And I've tried as best I can through my life to devote myself, particularly to that rational side, because it's often that that gets knocked down first. And the new atheist did some of them quite a good job. in knocking away the irrationality of some arguments that, sadly, Christians used to use, and I hope use a lot less.

So it's tightened up, I think, the whole position. And also, the broader level of academic philosophy, you've had developments where Christian philosophers have risen in the rank, so to speak, to seriously influence the whole discipline. I think of people like Alvin Plantinga and... and so on. And that is another, I believe, a partial product, William Lane Craig, folk like that who have been impelled to take philosophy and science and so on seriously because they've had to face these challenges. Yeah. And that's a good thing to my mind. I think it's worth pointing out that, you know, you're not claiming to have a solution here. I suppose we're pointing to a kind of a recognition of the problem in Christianity

which is to say this alone isn't going to convince you that Christianity is true or something but it's going to say that if you've got other good reason to believe that it's true this might not be enough to overcome those reasons and in a way I sometimes think that's what faith is like if I'm asked to define faith the way that I see it being used most

especially when it's used so to speak legitimately in a religious context, it's often something like not having any evidence for the thing believed in the moment, but having a bunch of background evidence that informs it. So like, you know, people often say, well, you trust, I mean, you just put this glass of water on a table and you trust that the table won't collapse. You have no evidence. You've never seen this table before, presumably. Maybe you have. You know, it might have been in Mordland College for a long time, but you trust that it won't collapse. And although you have no evidence of that,

you've got evidence that other tables haven't collapsed, that you've got good reason to believe that Mordling College probably would replace a table that collapsed, you know, that kind of stuff. So you kind of do have evidence. It's just like background evidence that informs a position. But it's hugely important. I think this is a fundamental thing to grasp.

Because in life, I discover, that you come to a point where you know you're being asked, and I'm speaking subjectively here, to trust God for a situation you've never been in before. But it's very much like the trust between me and my wife. You can face a new situation because although you've no specific evidence for this situation, you've had a lifetime of it before,

in other situations. In other words, you know, you would say, I trust that person. And therefore, in this situation, I'm not going to believe a wild speculation about her or something like this. And I think that's absolutely right, that evidences are of different kinds. And with people, as this thing from trusting facts, trusting people, it's a much broader, a more cumulative type of thing. There are reasons for trusting people that may be very subtle and so on, which is why I asked Dawkins in the first debate, I've just suddenly thought of it. I haven't thought about it for years. If he trusted his wife and he had evidence, and he tried to back away from it. He said, leave my wife out of it. Yes, I know. But it was so funny because I think he realized that evidence-based faith is the only kind of faith worth having, even though you don't have the specific evidence. in that instance. And I'm interested in the way in which the New Testament virtually defines faith at the end of John's Gospel, where John writes this, Jesus did many other signs, semi-on, semiotics, signs that point to something that are not

written in this book. But these are written, so he's collected these signs, a number of them. these are written that you might believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, those are two facts, and that believing you might have life in his name, that's the experience. So there's the factual stuff about who he is, who he was, what he did, but then there's a commitment level. Yes. And it's a commitment to a person. And it's therefore very important to my mind not to isolate faith and reductionistically claim that it's only to do with facts or propositions. But actually, at its most important, it's to do with a person, as I put it sometimes, God is not a proposition.

God is personal. And therefore, we react to God at all levels, intellectually, moral. spiritually, emotionally and all the rest of it. We must be prepared for that. But we know about that because we know about trusting persons. We know why we trust people and we know why we don't trust them.

We sometimes get it wrong, of course. Yes, but then it's like you can't, it's seemingly, often at least, choose what you have faith in. And what I mean by that is like, you know, if I just really didn't trust, like say a rickety bridge or something and I wanted to cross it

and I said I don't have faith that that bridge won't collapse under me and I think that's kind of reasonable I think that's fair enough and yet throughout the Gospels there are occasions where people are healed by Jesus and Jesus will say things like it's your faith that healed you

it's almost say it wasn't me it was your faith and there are moments where when Peter walks on the water he starts sinking because he doesn't have a faith and it's almost like faith is rewarded like if you if you have enough faith in this Jesus guy then you know you get to be cured of your of your you know broken limbs or your blindness or whatever and you're no longer a leper because you had enough faith and yet it seems to me again almost like a bit unfair it's like saying that well if I walk across that bridge

with all of my reservations then it will collapse but if I just have enough faith that it will stay up, then it will. That seems a bit unfair, because I can't just sort of muster that faith out of nowhere. Well, of course not. You'd be foolish to do so. Yeah, so that's what I mean. So then why is it that Jesus seems to reward faith by

by providing this healing, but only to those who have that background? I think it is more complex than that. I think what is being said there is that their trust is an essential ingredient in it. And Jesus is

affirming that but the power for the healing came from him and remember Peter on the water the case you mentioned he was invited to come to Jesus

of the water and Jesus was already supported by the water your rickety bridge isn't quite Jesus isn't necessarily inviting you to go that rickety bridge

and in fact the difference between your illustration and Peter and the Water is hugely important because in the history of Christianity, people have done the craziest things thinking that God would catch them as they fell, so to speak, and he didn't. We have a name for that, theologically. It's called putting God to the test in a negative sense. In other words, God, you promised to to save me, whatever happens, so I'm going to jump off this precipice. Which was a temptation put to Jesus in the desert, if you remember.

So I think there is a real difference, which is why I am, as a Christian, very nervous of people, taking it upon themselves, arrogating to themselves, the idea, well, God has told me that you should do X. That is a very dangerous thing, it seems to me. We need to be so careful of that. And that is one of the sides, the unacceptable sides, I think, of religion when it comes to interfere in people's lives in ways that can do huge damage. You know, if you've got enough faith, you'll be cured of that cancer. And then it doesn't happen. And they're left with a God that doesn't fulfill his promises.

Now, that's a special area, but it's actually important because I've had to talk to people who've been desperately. devastated in their faith because they've been encouraged to make unrealistic decisions about their lives. Faith is actually, trust is complex in all of its levels, and it's dynamic in the sense that it grows through life. And in that sense, I would say, although it's a very subjective statement, that my faith in Christ and God is much deeper than it was years ago, but it's also a lot more realistic. I think sometimes Christians don't realize the corollary of what they say when they attribute good things to God. When they say, you know, I believe that God, you know, cured my illness, or I believe that, you know, it's providence that. that allowed me to be where I am today or whatnot.

The sort of implication of that is that in all those cases where somebody isn't cured, God decided not to. You write about this too. After the Old Dawkins debate, you were taken quite ill in hospital and you thought you might be dying. I nearly died. Yeah. I recorded that for the very reason that you've raised it now.

Yeah. In that what I usually say is people say, well, are you grateful to God for that? I say I am, but I realize that in that very same year, my sister lost her 22-year-old daughter to a brain tumor. Now, I need to be very careful how I describe my own reaction because I need to be able to say that to her as well. In other words, you can become very narrow. focused on yourself and isn't God good to me and all this kind of thing. We must realize, it's back to what you mentioned earlier, Barb Wild Beauty. Yes, thankful to God, he's given me an extra lease of life, which I'm very aware of sitting in front of you, because medically I should

have died on that occasion. As the surgeon, he said, I don't know what to say to you. He should be dead. He actually used those words. I said, why? Well, he said, you're right car in the article. Artory wasn't, nothing was going through it. He said, you should have had a massive heart attack. And he said, if you'd had any survival, which is unlikely, you'd have had 5% quality of life. But he said, no damage you can go home tomorrow. Well, the relief was immense. I said goodbye to my wife. And that's interesting, too, in that context. She was at the door they were running down the corridor of the JR here. And I said goodbye to her because I didn't think I'd see her again, not on this earth.

But both of us had complete peace. Now, that's a testimony in a way from a near-death experience. And I couldn't explain that to you. Calm as anything. Yeah. And he threw me on the table. He said, do you want to watch? I can remember it so clearly.

I said, yes, it could see. And there was nothing moving. And he said, I have to work quick, dead silence for 40 minutes. And suddenly on the screen above me, I could see blood flowing everywhere. He said, we're in. And that was it. So you're absolutely right. We must be sensitive.

And that kind of selfish, God is good to me. And God will do things for you. If you've got enough faith, that is very dangerous. stuff and you don't get it in the New Testament. No, no. I think, yeah, we'd probably both agree that the that the biggest thing Christianity gets wrong is just forgetting the message of Jesus. And you said this to Christopher Hitchens, like, he rails against the abuses of religion. I mean, the abuses that religion has participated in by sort of killing and wars and oppression,

all this kind of stuff. And you sort of say, I agree. And one of the biggest critics of the misuse of clerical authority in history was Jesus of Nazareth. I know. And so why aren't you on his side, you know? Yes, Christopher said to me afterwards, that was heavy stuff. I said, Christopher, it was right. You ought to be on his side in that sense because he, of all people, was on your side in denouncing false religion.

And it is an aspect that the new atheist. got partly right. What I mean by that, Alex, is they got right that bit, but they didn't do what they should really have done. And what John Gray did at his book, the Black Book of Communism, denounce atheism for the extremes of its persecution. They're pretty silent about that. And John Gray, who's an atheist, actually, wrote very powerfully about that. It is a black mass. Yeah. And we need to balance it up.

Yeah. Though, of course, someone like Hitchens would say that, and, Ann Dawkins with him, that, yes, atheists have done great evil, but never, like, motivated by atheism. They don't sort of burst in and go, in the name of no God, whereas the belief in the, it's like the inversion of the Dostoevsky thing. It's without God, anything, with God, anything is permissible, because you have this divine permission on atheism, at best, you're sort of, you're neutral. You could commit evil. You could do good. And either way, you don't believe you have God on your side. The danger is when it's motivated.

I'm not sure that they were right about that. Certainly Soljinnitsyn wouldn't have agreed with them. And in my travels in Russia, I asked a lot of Russian intellectuals and others about that question. And they said, no, no, no, this destruction was done in the name of atheism, a lot of it, you cannot say it wasn't done in the name of God. And you remember Soljanitzen's famous speech in America when he came out. If you ask me, he said, why a hundred million of my compatriots perished, we have forgotten God. Well, it was more than that. They denied God, and they perpetuated their pogroms and persecutions of Christians, certainly Stalin did, because of atheism.

And, well, I just think that that was an attempt by the new atheist to smooth out something that they didn't like an atheism. But I think historically they weren't right. And I think also perhaps they overplay the extent to which so-called religious conflicts are religious. Oh, massively overplay it. There's a book in German, it's not in English, called Tolerance and Gewalt, Tolerance and Violence by a German author called Angenant, I think it's about that thick. And he does an investigation of that. That's a conclusion he comes to from a historian's point of view. Yeah.

That it's seriously overplayed, even in the case of the Inquisition, all that kind of thing. Really? Yeah, that it is overplayed. And that again is what John Gray provided a corrective to, pointing out the atheistic regimes that have behind so much violence in the 20th century. It's very sad. Yeah. But we got to get back, I think, now in the 21st century,

and try our best, I think, to put into the public space. at least I feel that there is a plurality of worldviews. And I like to think that Christianity can sit at the table as well. Yeah. And that we can be open and encourage people to think and give the evidence from our perspective and trust people to be able to make up their own minds. I think so. And that's what I said to Richard Dawkins and said I agreed with that.

Yeah. I remember, do you ever see the Christopher Hitchens, Tony Blair debate? No, I didn't. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a something, or it's something about, maybe it's just God's existence. I'm getting confused, because Tony Blair is a Catholic as far as I know, but he, um, at one point they're discussing. I mean, Tony, Tony, I mean, Tony Blair is quite integral in the Good Friday Agreement, right? And Tony Blair mentions the influence of his sort of belief in God in trying to overcome the troubles.

And Hitchens gets up and he says, it's very touching of Tony Blair to say that his belief in God helped him overcome this religious divide. Well, where does the religious divide come from, he says, and everyone starts applauding? Because it's, oh, it's this brilliant point. Oh, yeah, religion solving the problems of religion. But, you know, I'm just thinking about it now, and it's like, Christopher Hitchens of all people should know that the troubles was not a theological conflict. He should know that. You know, it just wasn't.

If you were trying to solve, imagine going back in time and really being a politician trying to solve the troubles. And you think, well, the first thing we should do is get everyone to agree on the nature of the Eucharist. Yes. It's laughable. Yes. It's nonsense. It's so clearly not what it's about. And yet it becomes labeled as a religious conflict.

And I think one thing to keep in mind for our listeners is that it may be true that a great deal of evil is done. That could only have been done with the belief that God is on your side. But if that's true, it's because there's this knowledge that, you know, whatever God condones must be good. In other words, you're sort of assuming that God must be good. such that even when people do evil, the only way they can justify it is by imagining that it's somehow... I sort of think of it's as if, like, you know, kids who have a real respect for their mother, they do something bad and they say something like, no, no, no, like mum said it was okay. They're not saying that because their mother is evil.

They're saying it because their mother is good and knowing that that will help them to do the evil thing if they can genuinely believe that the good thing made them do so. that Christ was put on trial and that we have record of why. Because the interesting thing, I believe I talked to Christopher about this, that he was accused of being a terrorist fomenting evil.

And the Roman proctor declared him guiltless of that. And the reason why is hugely important. Pilots saw him as a political threat to Rome and asked him, was he a king? Are you a king then? he said. Well, you've said so. But I'm not a king in the way you mean.

And Jesus went on to explain. And for me, this has been so important. Coming from Northern Ireland and being accused of all, how could I be a Christian with this sort of background. Jesus said, my kingdom is not of this world. Otherwise, my servants would have been fighting that I shouldn't have been delivered to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from here. And then he went on to say what it was.

This is the positive side I find so important. To this end, I was born. To this end, I came into the world, said Jesus, to bear witness to the truth. And Pilate, perhaps not so cynically as people think, said what is truth, and went out and said Jesus was innocent. Now, I've thought a great deal about that, because that cameo is actually truth speaking to power, which is a very big issue. And let me put it this way, and I think we'll have to wrap up around this point. the one thing that you cannot impose on people by power is truth, especially if it's truth about forgiveness,

peace with God, a new power to live, a new Lord to serve, who will lead us and guide us in life, and will give us promises in the sense of dealing with our guilt and so on. You can't impose truth like that by violence. And I think Pidot realized that, which is why he said Jesus was innocent.

In other words, people that take up AK-47, swords, bombs, anything, to defend Christ in his message are not following him, they're disobeying him. And I think that's a very important message into a situation where people readily blame religions and particular Christianity for war and violence, Christ can't be blamed for it. Disobedience to Christ can, but that's another story.

John Lennox, the biography will be linked in the description. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so very much. I've enjoyed this as always.