Artificial Intelligence & Christianity with John Lennox, Author of "2084"

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today, we're talking to John, author of the book 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity. And we discuss how AI is impacting society today and in the future, why it's extremely important and difficult to define strong ethical lines in the creation of AI, and how John weaves his Christian beliefs into thinking about the future of science and technology.

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:30) All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(John Lennox at 00:00:39) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:40) This is the Modern CTO Podcast. Could you go ahead and give me a brief background of who you are, your education, and the book?

(John Lennox at 00:00:59) Well, let's take one question at a time, please. Okay. What's the first question you'd like to ask?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:08) Why are you competent to speak on this?

(John Lennox at 00:01:11) Oh, well, I'm an emeritus professor of mathematics at Oxford. And I've been interested in the whole relationship of science to philosophy to theology for most of my life, actually. And the question of artificial intelligence, of course, is enormously important because certain aspects of it raise the question of exactly what implications it has for human identity. And as I hope a Christian thinker, I'm very interested in human identity. And so I've been involved in these things for a long time.

(John Lennox at 00:01:53) I think if you look at the subject in general, you'll find there are different kinds of people writing about AI. There are, first of all, the people that design the systems, and then there are people that use the systems and develop applications for them. But because artificial intelligence raises huge ethical and philosophical questions, then there are the rest of us who are interested in its implications. And one of the big problems that is obvious once you think about it is that the technology always moves faster than the ethical underpinnings. And that's why I'm interested at the level of the public understanding of science and ethics.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:38) What are some of the ethical issues that are on your mind today?

(John Lennox at 00:02:42) Well, the ethical issues depend on what we're talking about. There are two kinds of artificial intelligence, and it's important to distinguish them. There's the AI that's actually working at the moment, which we call narrow AI. Would you like me to explain what that is?

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:03) Yeah.

(John Lennox at 00:03:03) Narrow AI is a system that involves a computer and a single thing that normally takes human intelligence to do. That's why it's called artificial intelligence. It's not real intelligence in the sense that it's not coupled with consciousness. But the machine does something that it normally takes a human intelligence to do. For example, recognizing faces in a crowd, driving a self-driving car, giving you a recommendation on Amazon.

(John Lennox at 00:03:45) Those are all narrow AI systems. Artificial general intelligence is the other kind, and that is the subject of a lot of science fiction and speculation because we're nowhere near there yet. And that is constructing a system that could do anything that a human being can do and more and faster. And, of course, the science fiction experts love that kind of thing. The idea of creating a superintelligence, uploading people's brains onto a machine, all that kind of stuff.

(John Lennox at 00:04:22) But if you stick with the AI that's actually up and working at the moment, then it raises huge problems as well as doing some wonderful stuff. Let's take the wonderful stuff first. Here's a system that has a database consisting of, let's say, a million photographs of people's lungs, and they're labeled with lung diseases by the best doctors in the world. That's the database. And then they take a photograph of your lungs or my lungs, and the machine, the algorithm, compares your photograph with the million.

(John Lennox at 00:05:02) And it very rapidly produces a diagnosis. And these days, that will be better than you'll get in your local hospital anywhere in the world. So diagnostic techniques are a fantastic use of these kinds of recognition-type algorithms. So that's one case. But you see, take something directly related to that.

(John Lennox at 00:05:30) That's not picking out X-ray pictures, but picking out human beings, their faces, facial recognition. A police force finds that very useful in picking out terrorists in a football crowd. But in our world today, facial recognition is being used in some parts of the world to suppress minority ethnic communities. And the surveillance technologies in the hands of a good government can be useful, protect you from crime. But in the hands of a despotic government, they can be used to oppress people.

(John Lennox at 00:06:07) So clearly, that raises obvious ethical questions. Where do you use it? Where do you not use it? And I often say to people that artificial intelligence is like a knife. A sharp knife you can use for surgery or you can use it to murder somebody.

(John Lennox at 00:06:24) And so when you get into this area, you very rapidly discover that things have an upside and a downside like every other piece of technology. Another example is that automation and AI systems can remove people's jobs. Somebody has estimated that within about twenty years, maybe a third of all jobs in the U.S. will be automated, and that's very scary. Now, of course, predictions of that kind are notoriously riddled with assumptions and all that kind of thing. But any industrial revolution, and AI is a major industrial revolution, any industrial revolution means that there'll be job losses.

(John Lennox at 00:07:14) Other people argue, well, on the other hand, there are going to be lots of job opportunities. But now here's the problem. It's all very well saying that in a highly educated part of the world, where people can retrain and do these jobs. But I was in South Africa a couple of years ago talking about AI to a number of leaders in the community, and they said the big problem is here. It's all very well to say there are going to be new jobs, but we don't have the educational infrastructure to train people for them.

(John Lennox at 00:07:49) So huge problems and huge opportunities.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:55) I want to ask you what the answer is, but I'm sure there's not a simple answer.

(John Lennox at 00:07:59) There are never simple answers to these things. And it's obviously clear that the more we can educate people in these disciplines, the better we'll be able to handle it. But, inevitably, there will be job losses just as there were when the steam engine was invented.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:20) Yeah. Man, you know, one of the things that's been on my mind as you were talking is about three years ago, I started—I'm 34 for context. I think that's important because I can tell in my development. I'm very different than I was in my early twenties. So that's where I am now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:40) And I started having these thoughts about, you know, what are the humans building? Right? If you were to stand back and look at a collection of ants, you could see that they're all clearly working towards one goal. But I believe, you know, how do you think about that? And does that connect with, you know, our desire to want to build this incredible intelligence?

(John Lennox at 00:09:04) Well, it could because if you're moving now to the other kind of artificial intelligence that fills the science fiction books, but not only the science fiction books. I must mention that because some of our world class leading thinkers, like our Astronomer Royal, for example, in the United Kingdom, Lord Rees, he's very clear that in the future, we're going to find that the intelligences are very different from us. For example, let me just give you a typical quote of Lord Rees. He says that abstract thinking by biological brains has underpinned the emergence of all culture and science. But this activity, spanning tens of millennia at most, would be a brief precursor to the more powerful intellects of the inorganic posthuman era.

(John Lennox at 00:10:08) So in the far future, he says, it won't be the minds of humans, but those machines that will most fully understand the cosmos. So there's someone who believes that we're going to have a posthuman, post-biological future. And that is the hope of many people. They feel that biology has problems because the biosphere perishes. We die.

(John Lennox at 00:10:35) And they'd like to somehow transplant human intelligence onto silicon so it endures forever. Now I think it's most helpful to focus your question, to look at the work that has major influence in the world, and that's the work of Yuval Noah Harari, who is an Israeli historian. And he's written two runaway bestselling books. The first is called Sapiens, and the second is called Homo Deus, the God man or the man who's God. And if you ask what are people building and what are they striving after, I think the short answer is they're striving to be gods.

(John Lennox at 00:11:20) And Harari admits this. And he says that the twenty-first century, there are two major agenda items in this century. Number one is to overcome death as a physical process. And so although people may die, they don't have to die. That's his view.

(John Lennox at 00:11:46) We'll solve it by medical advance. But the second one is to increase human happiness. Now that rings a bell with everybody because it's one of the major interests as I travel around the world talking in universities. They all want to know what the good life is. What is human well-being?

(John Lennox at 00:12:08) And Harari's second agenda item is to increase human happiness by transforming humanity by biological engineering, by cyborg engineering, by enhancing humans by means of drugs, and all this kind of thing so that we shall become, and I quote him, essentially as gods. Now that's a very ancient idea, the idea of humans becoming gods. It's in the Bible. It was the original temptation. You shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

(John Lennox at 00:12:46) And right through history, the Tower of Babel is one of the classic examples of people trying to reach heaven in some sense or other. And all through history, you've had leading emperors who are playing God. And so in the human psyche, there is this desire to rise and become as gods. And that's where I, as a Christian, want to say a whole lot of things about the fact that they've got it wrong. But we can come to that in a moment or two.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:20) Yeah. Whenever you want.

(John Lennox at 00:13:22) Well, what I want to say to many people is this, that when they tell me about these two agenda items, I say to them, you're too late. And that surprises them a bit. They say, what do you mean you're too late? Well, I say, the problem of physical death, first of all, has already been solved. It's been solved by the resurrection of Christ from the dead twenty centuries ago.

(John Lennox at 00:13:50) And that shows that the death barrier has been conquered. And I happen to believe that, not simply as a Christian, but as a scientist. And, of course, that could lead to very long discussion, which it often does. So I said that's number one. But secondly, the idea of preserving life forever and increasing human happiness or uploading our brains onto something permanent, anything like that, actually, there's something far better on offer and much more credible.

(John Lennox at 00:14:22) Because Jesus Christ said that those people who trusted him and who repented and faced the mess they've made of their own lives and maybe the lives of others, and came to commit their lives to him as Lord, they would receive a new kind of life, a new power. They would receive peace with God, and they would eventually be, if I might use modern terminology, uploaded into a realm of eternal perfection where they would develop all the abilities God has given them. And I say if you put that scenario alongside the AGI speculative scenario, I know which one I prefer because I know which one has much more evidence going for it. So it seems to me, let me sum this up for you in a very provocative way. Here's an attempt to turn humans into gods.

(John Lennox at 00:15:21) The heart of the Christian message is the exact opposite of that. It's God becoming human, that we in turn may become children of God. And that's a fantastic message to speak into a world where people do want happiness. They do want peace. They do want longevity.

(John Lennox at 00:15:41) They do want some sort of hope for the future. And I believe the Christian message is more relevant than ever, especially in an age of artificial intelligence.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:51) Okay. I've got questions. So let's say God created us in his image. Correct? And that might explain some of our desire to build heaven, I guess, to build it in an artificial sort of way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:07) If those things aren't true, you know, tell me no. But if they are true, do you think that's what, you know, one of the purposes that we're supposed to do? Like, we're supposed to build this perfect place that we can go, or no?

(John Lennox at 00:16:20) That's a perceptive question, actually. It's quite an interesting question to think around. Let me put it this way. I encourage my fellow Christians, if they're scientifically bright, to go into AI. Because I think, like everything else, because it has a good and moral and very helpful side helping humanity, then it ought to be done.

(John Lennox at 00:16:46) But I also encourage people to go into it with their moral antennae working so that they can contribute to making sure that the artificial intelligence systems, and there are many of them, they're not just one AI, there are many AIs, that those that are developed are actually beneficent because it's pretty obvious, and this is what scares people, that if too much control, particularly in the military sphere, is given to machines that make decisions autonomously, then if they're programmed with the wrong kind of stuff, we're in for trouble. And that's what many of our leading thinkers fear. So in answer to your question, I would say we are made in the image of God. He created us to be creators ourselves. And therefore developments in medicine, technology, and everywhere else are to be welcomed.

(John Lennox at 00:17:50) But the difficulty is that it's so easy to forget the ethical and moral dimension. And that's why you'll discover in the AI literature, increasingly, there is huge concern about policing this stuff and trying to get nations to agree about what kind of ethical principles are we going to build into these systems. So your question is perfectly valid, and I think God wants us to construct things. But let me put it this way. Human beings were created in God's image to be stewards of the earth and to develop it in collaboration and in fellowship with him.

(John Lennox at 00:18:38) The tragedy of the original problem was that human beings rebelled against God. They wanted to build their Babel. They wanted to build their heaven and earth without God. Now every attempt to do that, to build a utopia bypassing ethical questions, has led to colossal bloodshed. Just look at the twentieth century, and unfortunately, now in the twenty-first.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:04) I mean, it's happening today, right now.

(John Lennox at 00:19:07) Yes. Exactly. It is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:09) So with your knowledge of biblical teachings and your experience with having, you know, been alive today, do you think that what we're experiencing with the rise and falls of countries and the rise and fall of dictators, is anything new? Or do you think it's the same thing that was happening back in the Bible, like, in Egypt and so on?

(John Lennox at 00:19:30) Sure. It's the same thing that's happening, only they have greater technology and can inflict much more damage with it. But the question to be asked is, what is the driving force behind that? And I myself fear that behind a lot of AI and behind a lot of what's going on in the world today is a rebellion against God. Disregard of the value of our fellow human beings shows very much that we do not believe that we're made in the image of God.

(John Lennox at 00:20:04) I learned that very early on. You know, if I believe that you have been made in the image of God, I'd be very careful how I treat you, and vice versa. And so if that's not happening, it shows that people, whatever they profess, whatever religious badge they wear, they're very far from the God of the Bible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:26) Do you think it's possible that, you know, like you said earlier about the knife, right, it can be a blessing or it can be a tool for destruction. Do you think that quite possibly, given, you know, your previous comments about AI and people turning from God and that being developed, do you think that would develop underlying infrastructure for it to—the good that comes from that bad could be the tools and the infrastructure to actually make something good with good intentions?

(John Lennox at 00:20:55) Well, I think that AI will do something good. It has already done a lot that's good. For example, the development of vaccines has been speeded up massively by artificial intelligence. But one needs to be careful here of making an argument that because something good can come out of something bad, that justifies doing the bad. I mean, you can get into a very deep ethical dilemma there, but that's probably not what you meant.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:28) No. I mean, from an observational standpoint. Like, if you're watching bad happen on a larger scale than you can independently as an individual control.

(John Lennox at 00:21:38) Who would know? I mean, these hypothetical questions are very difficult to answer. We live in a very complex world. And we're getting so clever nowadays that we either do a lot of good or we do a lot of bad.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:55) Overall, are you optimistic?

(John Lennox at 00:21:57) I think it's too simplistic. I'm optimistic about some things and very pessimistic about others because you made the point yourself that what's happening today is very much like what's happened in the past. The Bible indicates that there will be wars and rumors of wars. Christ himself said in the first century, and we're seeing that. But he said the end is not yet. And I expect certain aspects of what happens in the world to get worse.

(John Lennox at 00:22:31) But eventually, I believe God will intervene and Christ will return. That's another huge topic on its own so that there will eventually be a perfect rule in peace. But lots of things can happen until then. And in the meantime, I think we just have to be neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but realistic, if possible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:58) How do we do that?

(John Lennox at 00:23:00) Well, I think the important thing is having an anchor in life. And the anchor that—and I'm more than twice as old as you are, just to let you into a secret. Quite a bit more than twice as old as you are.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:14) How old are you, John?

(John Lennox at 00:23:16) 78.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:18) You've got a lot of wisdom and experience, my friend.

(John Lennox at 00:23:21) Well, I don't know about that. But the thing is, I know whom I believed. And to quote the Bible itself, I'm persuaded that he is looking after me, and he's able to keep what I've committed to him until that future day. And therefore, I feel I stand on a rock, and it gives me a safe place to be honest about myself and about the world around me. And I feel called to communicate into that space in as friendly a way as I can, but truthfully, what message I believe is true.

(John Lennox at 00:24:01) I think Christianity is not only helpful, but it's actually true. And that God is interested in giving people a much larger dimension of life than they have by nature through learning to trust God. Because humanity went wrong in the original problem by failing to trust God. They couldn't trust what he said. And so I found in life that trusting what God says, trusting his word is the key to being able to navigate all the problems.

(John Lennox at 00:24:39) That doesn't mean you're not going to die of COVID or a terrorist bomb or anything like that, but it does mean that you've got a hope that transcends death, and that's enormously important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:53) Why do you think we're programmed like that, to want there to be something after death?

(John Lennox at 00:24:59) Now wait a minute. Why do you think we're programmed to want? That sounds like determinism to me. And I'm not convinced that we're deterministically programmed at all.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:12) Let's use desire instead. Like, I desire to know many other people, religions, different countries in the world. You see it. I think I tend to find things are more true when I see them emerge independently of each other globally. And independently of each other globally, people desire for something after death.

(John Lennox at 00:25:32) Oh, yes, they do. But let me ask you a question then. Why are you programmed to desire to eat?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:39) I don't know.

(John Lennox at 00:25:40) To desire to eat?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:41) Smart one. I just ask you questions. Well, but it's necessary.

(John Lennox at 00:25:48) Is that the fact that you have a desire for food would be very strange in a world in which food did not exist. That's a good question. That we have a desire for transcendence would be very strange in a world where there's no such thing as transcendence. And that's where I have a violent disagreement with my atheist friends, and there are many of those. They see that desire, and they put it down to some sort of Freudian thing.

(John Lennox at 00:26:21) You just desire it, and that's why you think it exists. I say no. There's another explanation which makes more sense: that we desire because it actually does exist and is attainable just like food. But you know that some people can be deprived of food, and they starve to death.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:42) Yes. I have been around the church for my entire life. There was a time in my twenties where I wasn't at all, but I have never heard that perspective of it. So thank you for that. The whole hunger concept and your—I've literally of all the content I've consumed, I've never heard that before. That's interesting. I really like that. I'm gonna make a note of that.

(John Lennox at 00:27:07) Oh, good. I'm delighted. Well, because it's to take note of this conversation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:13) Well, it's a strong argument. Right?

(John Lennox at 00:27:15) I think it's a very powerful argument. And I'll tell you who it's due to. It's not original to me. It's due to CS Lewis. And I happen to be old enough to have heard CS Lewis actually directly in Cambridge in 1962. There's a little bit of history for you. Lewis makes this point. And when I first heard it, I was younger than you when I first heard it, it really stuck with me as being a very important argument. You see, this idea that people say your religion is wish fulfillment and you have a desire for a father figure in the sky. It sounds marvelous, and there's a very simple answer to it.

(John Lennox at 00:28:00) You know, in Germany, I am a German speaker and reader, and there's a man called Lutz who is a psychiatrist. And he makes the following point very well, I think. He says, look. If there is no god, then Freud has a marvelous argument. And it's true.

(John Lennox at 00:28:24) If there is no God, then religion is a wish fulfillment, et cetera. But he said, of course, if there is a God, then atheism is wish fulfillment. Exactly the same argument shows you that atheism, the desire not to have anything to do with God or the desire that God doesn't exist, is equally a wish fulfillment. So he said, on the substantive question, whether God exists or not, Freud can't help you nor can any of the others. They're not even addressing that question.

(John Lennox at 00:28:56) And I found Lewis's analysis when I was a teenager very helpful indeed. And I've studied, of course, much more. I've never seen any reason to back down on that particular argument that I used with you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:13) No. That's a good one. Are people ever surprised when they find out that, you know, you're brilliant scientist, mathematician, and you also believe in God?

(John Lennox at 00:29:22) Well, they are, and they shouldn't be. Because I point out to them that the rise of modern science—take the big pioneers, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Clerk Maxwell, Babbage, Faraday. They were all believers in God. And that faith in God didn't hinder their science. It was the motor that drove it.

(John Lennox at 00:29:44) And Lewis, again, you see, as usual, has something very pithy to say about it. He said that men became scientific because they expected law in nature, and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver. You see, to me, it's science and faith and God go beautifully together, but science and atheism don't go very well together. But that's a subject that I do—well, take a typical conversation. I often ask scientists for a bit of fun.

(John Lennox at 00:30:20) I said to them, what do you do science with? And they talk about some machine or other. And I say, no. I mean, oh, they said, you mean your brain or your mind? Many of them don't believe in the mind. I do, but that's another matter. And I say, okay. Let's take it. You do science with your brain. Give me the brief history of the brain.

(John Lennox at 00:30:41) And often they say to me, well, the brain is the end product of a mindless, unguided process, a chance process, et cetera. And I say, and you trust it? I say, I want you to be honest with the following question. If you knew that the computer you use every day was the end product of a mindless, unguided process, would you trust it? Now I've asked dozens of world leading scientists that question, and every one of them has said, no.

(John Lennox at 00:31:14) I would not. So I say, you have a problem. Either you're taking a crazy leap in the dark or there's something wrong with your argument. What atheism does, taken to its logical conclusion, is to undermine your trust in the rationality you need to do any thinking at all, let alone science. So atheism undermines science, and CS Lewis saw that as did even Nature, the arch atheist.

(John Lennox at 00:31:49) So it seems to me that, one, science and God go very well together, and science and atheism don't. My problem is so few atheists seem to see that. They'll trust their mind, and then they'll tell me their mind is not reliable. Well, that's just absurd.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:11) I've lived life many different ways. In my twenties, I'd grown up in a Christian church and it was non-denominational. And then, you know, I'd seen that there's other religions and other countries and other schools of thought. So most of my twenties was exploring these different religions, these different understandings, and figure out what's common between them. And so that was my personal journey.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:39) And one of the things that I found after—I came full circle, right? So then in my city in the United States, the Christian community was the one community that I could plug into the easiest because at first, I was just, you know, spiritually, wanted to be around other spiritual people, and that was the most, you know, relaxed, accepting community I could find. You know, good luck trying to find an atheist meetup. I don't think they exist. So, I came full circle with this, found it was really good, you know, to have a family and raise a family in church.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:16) But living like that is super hard and you do it and it feels really good when you do it. But, how do you—I mean, going around and trying to sell people on living life harder. I face that as an entrepreneur, you know, and I eventually realized you can't really convince people. You just kind of have to let them walk their path and when they're ready, they're ready. But, what do you think about that? About how it's a really difficult path, but it's a really rewarding path living in the way that the Bible describes.

(John Lennox at 00:33:53) I think that's exactly right. And that's what Christ and the apostles told us to expect. It's enormously rewarding, but there's no guarantee it's going to be easy. And I think that one of the things that motivates me is the conviction that it's actually true. I want to live for something that is true and rewarding.

(John Lennox at 00:34:20) But something that's not just a philosophy, but a relationship with a person. And that personal side of Christianity has been enormously important to me because many people, sadly, they see Christianity as one religion among others. And to them, religion is buildings, it's rituals, it's trying to keep a set of rules, and they can find that frustrating. Even more so they can find it a kind of slavery, which it is. Because true freedom comes about when we come to realize that God is not a theory but a person.

(John Lennox at 00:35:01) And when we discover that Christ makes us free in the true sense when we come to trust him. All those things need to be explained. And what I discover is that many people think because they think of Christianity as a religion, they think that we have to follow a prescribed set of rules in the hope that God will one day accept us. And I discover many people, even professing Christians, have that view. And, of course, they find everything an absolute slavery.

(John Lennox at 00:35:37) And often, they just chuck it up when they get the first possible opportunity. They haven't understood that the unique thing about Christianity is God is prepared to accept us as we are at the beginning of our journey. We don't have to wait until the end because the basis of salvation is not my merit or what I can do, but it's what Christ has done. And the issue is, am I prepared to accept it? And, you know, many people in the world will tell you they're prepared to work for God, but they're not prepared to trust God because they haven't really understood this message.

(John Lennox at 00:36:17) And that's hugely important because it makes Christianity unique among all other religions. I often say to people, you know, Jesus Christ competes with no one because he offers me something nobody else offers me. He offers me eternal life here and now, forgiveness here and now, certainty of the future here and now because it doesn't depend on my merit. And if you do what I've done during my life, I get to know people of many religious beliefs and philosophical traditions. And I ask them, what is the path for you?

(John Lennox at 00:36:58) And for the vast majority of people is, well, I've got these rules, and I try to follow them. And I'll end up with some kind of judgment where God will either accept me or reject me according to what I've done. And they say, sure. Do you believe that? And I say, not at all. I don't believe that at all because nothing I can do can change the things that I have done wrong. I need something much deeper than that, and then I explain to them what the gospel is. And that's a hugely important thing because people get it upside down. Christianity for me is a relationship with a God who loves me and who's given me certainty at the beginning of my journey. And I'm not working for God, so to speak, in order to gain acceptance.

(John Lennox at 00:37:50) I'm doing it because I got the acceptance. That's a very different thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:55) You are very intelligent. I like the way that you think because I'm picking up on all sorts of new ideas and thoughts and concepts. And, you know, to make it personal, my sister's atheist, so we talk about stuff and, you know, she just seems so saddled. Just like—

(John Lennox at 00:38:18) I feel that some of these ideas as we come to the end of this discussion now, I hope that some of these ideas might encourage you and you use them. And I'd just like to say that I have a large website, johnnex.org. And I've even got a film which is recently done. I don't know whether you know about that, a documentary film in which I interact with somebody rather famous in your country, Kevin Sorbo, Hercules. And he's the star of Andromeda and Hercules.

(John Lennox at 00:38:51) And it's called Against the Tide. And if you look up againstthetidemovie.com, it's a full-length documentary filmed in Oxford and in Israel dealing with a lot of these issues, but particularly the issues of science and God and, secondly, the issues of the truth of Christianity. So some of your viewers might be interested in that. It's available for streaming.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:16) Oh, nice. Yes. I am definitely going to check that out because I want to hear more of your ideas and thoughts and watch you bounce them off of other smart people. But this has been fantastic meeting you, John. I really appreciate it. Is there anything—people will tell people to go buy the book. We'll put the link in the show notes so people can find it. We'll tell people to go watch the movie. Anything else we wanna leave them with?

(John Lennox at 00:39:39) No. Just thank them for watching and thank you for having me on. And I trust that by opening up these ideas, I say to people often, look, ask your questions. God is interested in your questions. And then make up your mind on the basis of evidence. I'm a scientist, so evidence is very important. But you don't trust just anybody in this world. You've got a reason to do so. So I encourage people, if they've never done so before, as adults to start to read something like the gospel of John and ask the questions of the text.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:25) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn, or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.