Editor’s Notes: In this thought-provoking interview, David Perell sits down with Oxford Professor John Lennox to explore the profound intersection of faith, science, and the rapid rise of artificial intelligence. Lennox delves into the concept of a “word-based universe,” arguing that the complexity of mathematics and biology points toward a divine mind rather than mere material chance. The discussion examines the ethical risks of AI, framing it as humanity’s modern attempt to “make God” while emphasizing the vital importance of preserving wonder and spiritual meaning. This conversation offers a deep philosophical perspective for anyone interested in the future of technology and the core of human identity. (Aug 20, 2025)
TRANSCRIPT:
The Word-Based Universe
DAVID PERELL: Well, the thing I want to talk about — I want to talk about AI later, but what I want to start off with is John 1:1 about the word. “In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God,” and we live in this word-based universe. I want to obviously talk about words, talk about writing, but I think that’s a good jumping off point. Why is that such a profound idea?
JOHN LENNOX: The idea that this is a word-based universe has been profoundly important in my own life because of the pressure of naturalism or materialism, trying to argue the exact opposite. Because words that carry meaning are a very high level thing in human experience.
The very fact that in two main areas we find that word base, I think poses a fatal threat to the materialistic interpretation of the universe. The first is in mathematics, which is my field. In the language of mathematics — it is a language, it’s the most precise language we’ve got — we can encapsulate some of the ways in which the universe behaves, notably going back to Kepler and Newton and Clark Maxwell and so on. And it’s proved to be a brilliant tool for understanding part of the way in which the universe is and works.
And then secondly, research in biology has brought us to the longest word of any kind that we’ve ever discovered, which is the human genome, the genetic code, 3.4 billion letters long. They’re chemical letters, of course, but they function precisely as a word with meaning because they code for various proteins and all the rest of it.
So in those two major disciplines — physics, chemistry — we have mathematics underpinning them. And in biology we’ve got this fundamental word. It is the fact that in all our human experience, words come from minds. You only have to see the word “exit” above a door. It’s only four letters. But if you ask for the origin of that, people will explain it in terms of — well, this sign had to be made, and may have been made by automated machinery, but somewhere there’s a mind that has chosen to put a word that means “exit” up there.
So if we attribute mind to words of four letters long, it’s rather curious when we come to a word of 3.4 billion letters long that we say it happens by chance and necessity. That, to my mind, is nonsense. And I prefer an explanation that makes sense to one that doesn’t make any sense.
Shaped by Scripture and a Brilliant Mentor
DAVID PERELL: Right. And as you’ve gone about reading Scripture, spending time in the poetry of the Psalms, the literature of the Old Testament, how do you feel like that has rubbed off on your own writing?
JOHN LENNOX: That’s very hard to measure. We are influenced by many things in our own writing. But what I probably need to explain is I had a genius of a mentor. I’m publicly trained in the sciences, but privately trained in the humanities. And my mentor for 50 years was the late Professor David Gooding, who was a classicist and a world authority on the Septuagint, which is the Greek version of the Old Testament.
It was he who showed me how biblical literature worked and how it worked actually in common with some of the classical writings. That fascinated me. I’ve always been interested in grammar. I was very keen on Latin at school, and I’ve always been keen on languages of any kind, starting with mathematics and modern languages. But the way in which ideas are communicated in literature — getting some of the clues of the methodology that the ancient writers used — was hugely important, and then seeing it in Scripture.
I actually did many studies with him, including the ideas and thoughts for many years that led to my most recent book on Revelation. So a lot of it rubbed off. It must have rubbed off.
DAVID PERELL: What did he see about ancient literature? You were talking about the ways that it was almost in conversation with other literature. What did he see that you were missing?
JOHN LENNOX: What I had not come across before was probably two things. One was structure and the other is thought flow.
If we take any book like the book I’ve just written, it’s split into chapters, and that’s to help people know when they can stop and go to sleep. Usually those chapters are arranged around some kind of scheme — they might be geographical, they might follow the way in which history moves, or they might be any kind of thing that gives you a coherent joining together of ideas. Now, we do it the simple way to help people who are simple-minded: we label our chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4.
But in the ancient world they didn’t do that. They were more sophisticated and therefore much more interesting, in that they divided their writing up often by using a repeated phrase. The classic example in the New Testament is in the Gospel of Matthew, where Matthew at intervals uses a phrase that is a variation on the following theme: “And it came to pass when Jesus had finished these sayings, he went into the villages of Galilee.” Or, “And it came to pass when Jesus had finished this teaching, he came down the mountain.” That kind of thing, repeated four or five times.
What he taught me was: when you see something like that, you should seize on it, because it’s highly likely that it is a major division marker.
So you don’t simply ask, “What does this parable mean?” You ask a prior question: “What does it say?” He contended, quite rightly I believe, that most of the failure to understand what Scripture means is not taking enough time to see what it says. So you take time to see what it says, and then you can ask the meaning question. That will involve asking: why is this bit of Scripture, or that parable, or that incident here and not there? Why is it in the place it is? What part of a cumulative argument, if there is one, is it contributing?
The moment I saw that, I was hooked. I was 18 years old in Cambridge. She invited me to do a Bible study, and that one evening — being shown that — completely blew away all my preconceptions. And I got going.
How Do We Know Scripture Is God-Breathed?
DAVID PERELL: Yeah, it’s funny — something very similar. I feel like I’m in the process of having that revelation that you had many years ago. There are a few things that have really struck me. The way that we talk about it is observation, interpretation, application. So often when people read the Scriptures, they jump to, “What should I do?” And so often it’s just: what words are repeated? Why is this book being written?
It’s funny — the reading of Scripture for me has been very elementary in terms of the methodology, but very intense in terms of the depth and intensity with which we’ve done it. And it gets me to ask — I guess I’m going to play kind of a devil’s advocate here, even though I’m a believer — but how do we know that something is God-breathed when it’s written?
I think of 2 Timothy 3:16: “All scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching, rebuking, training, and correcting in righteousness.” But how do we know that? Can we actually examine the text and know that it’s God-breathed? Or is there another way that we can validate that?
JOHN LENNOX: I think that question has many aspects to it. What constitutes knowledge? Is one asking to feel that it’s God-breathed, or to have some inner sense that it’s God-breathed? I’ll give you my take on it.
I understand from Scripture that God is prepared to speak through His Word to those that take it seriously. And Christ promised his disciples that he would reveal Himself to them. One of the actual cases of revealing Himself to them was in that upper room. It’s very interesting because it has to do with words — they kept asking him all sorts of questions, and suddenly it came to a point where Philip said to him, “Show us the Father.” And Jesus quietly said, “Philip, don’t you realize that he that has seen me has seen the Father? The words that I’m speaking, they are the Father speaking.”
And there comes over — I suspect Philip and the others — that awesome sense that they had been sensing God as way out there somewhere, but now they’re right up against Him. They’ve reached the Father as near as they’re going to get. And the words that Jesus is saying are authenticating that fact.
That, it seems to me, indicates how we should approach Scripture. I remember — if I can tell it in terms of an anecdote — my mentor asked me once, “Why do you study Scripture?” Well, I said, at the moment I’ve got several Bible studies to do and I’m preaching here and there. “Oh,” he said, “well, that’s all right, I suppose, but that’s not why I study Scripture.” I was quite taken aback, so I said, “Why do you study Scripture?” He said, “To get to know God.”
Now, that’s a completely different level of attitude. And it shook me at the time. I learned a very big lesson through that — that if this really is God’s Word, then logically you would expect God to authenticate Himself through it. Not by arguments about it, or details of its authenticity from the perspective of documentary evidence and all of that, which is important and very useful, but that God actually speaks through it. That’s a level above everything else.
It seems to me that in the end, that’s the only level worthwhile. And it’s been critical for my life as a Christian — that sensing of God speaking. Now, how to define that is a bit like trying to define the beauty of a countryside scene. It’s almost impossible, but you know it when it happens.
Of course, we could deceive ourselves, and the psychoanalysts will make hay with all this kind of thing. But in the end, it is up to our own maturity and judgment whether we really sense God speaking in such a way that we know it’s true and know what He expects us to do on the basis of it.
So I think that’s quite complicated — obviously, because reality is always complicated — but nevertheless, it’s what I expect. And therefore, if you go to Scripture not so much because you’re under pressure to produce a talk or an article, but because you actually want to get to know God, that, to my mind, is the key answer to your question.
The Cultivation of Wonder
DAVID PERELL: You use the word “awesome” — to be awestruck. And it’s related to words like mystery and wonder. As I think of my own thinking, what is the core discipline of my thinking life that exists now that didn’t exist five years ago? I think it’s the cultivation of wonder. I think I used to very much feel that the world ended with my ability to explain something, and now I don’t feel that way.
JOHN LENNOX: Good.
DAVID PERELL: I have more questions than answers. But I think a belief in God has opened me up to new portals of wonder.
JOHN LENNOX: Well, that runs parallel to what C.S. Lewis said years ago. Something like, “I believe in the sun, not because I see its light — it’s dangerous to look at directly — but because in its light, I see everything else.” In other words, faith in God, instead of closing inquiry down, opens it up and introduces a dimension of wonder.
One of the very sad things I find about the media today — there are some wonderful television documentaries about the world and the universe done by people like David Attenborough. And yet, just when you had hoped they would say, “What an awesome God to be responsible for this,” there’s nothing. They see it, but yet they don’t see it. There’s a blindness. And the blindness comes at the level that you mentioned fleetingly, which is people being content with some level of explanation without realizing that explanation has many different levels.
DAVID PERELL: What do you mean?
Explanation Has Many Levels
JOHN LENNOX: What I mean by that is, if you want to explain a motor car engine — or an automobile engine, as you say in your country — you could resort to physics and automobile engineering and all of that, and you’d have a scientific explanation. But you could also talk about Henry Ford, and that’s a different kind of explanation. It’s in terms of an agent with a purpose.
And I often say to people, when they ask me, “Does science conflict with God as an explanation?” I say, absolutely not. Science no more conflicts with God as an explanation for the universe than Henry Ford conflicts with physics, chemistry, and automobile engineering as an explanation for the automobile. They’re complementary.
The thing about explanation — and I’m fascinated by it, and I’ve written quite a bit about it — is that it’s often less complete than you think. Let me give an example of that from science. I wasn’t very well taught physics as a young person, and I thought that the law of gravity explained gravity.
DAVID PERELL: But —
The Two Hemispheres of the Brain and the Loss of Meaning
JOHN LENNOX: But it doesn’t. Even Newton realized that. He uttered a famous Latin phrase about non fingo hypothesi — “I don’t make hypotheses.” In other words, I don’t know what gravity is. But I can give you a mathematical formulation that will enable you to calculate its effect. But that is not to say what it is.
In fact, no one, even now — you can ask your own Nobel Prize winner, Richard Feynman, although he’s dead, he was one of the best in California — nobody knows what gravity is. And so even a scientific explanation apparently isn’t complete in itself. Explanation has many, many different levels. And there’s a huge literature devoted to explanation, which is sufficient certainly for me to be very wary when someone says, “I’ve got the explanation of that.” The notion that their level of explanation excludes the God explanation is, in fact, stupid.
DAVID PERELL: What do you think happened in the world where we’ve closed this window into wonder and awe, and this invitation that we all have to sort of stare and ask what’s going on there? Maybe there’s something more going on there that we don’t know. Because it feels like by embracing this myopia, we’ve constrained ourselves in terms of ideas, stories, whatever it is that we can actually access.
JOHN LENNOX: I’m sure that’s the case, but it’s very complex to explain historically. It has to do with the Enlightenment and the elevation of reason, and the bad behavior of professing Christians who brought the God hypothesis into disrepute and were anti-science to a certain extent. There are all kinds of things involved in it.
But I like the explanation that Iain McGilchrist is giving of this in his books, notably his most recent one, The Matter with Things. He points out that, in his terms as a neuroscientist, we’ve got two halves to our brain. One, roughly speaking, is the science side — finding out what things are. And then there’s the other half, the right side of the brain, that looks at what things mean. He said if you look at us now, we’ve ended up in a universe where we know how almost everything works, but we know the meaning of nothing.
That’s a very powerful point. It was also picked up by our late Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks, who is always worth reading — very much worth reading. He wrote a little book on science and religion. He put McGilchrist’s idea this way: science takes things apart to see how they work; religion puts them together to see what they mean.
McGilchrist’s thesis is that for 500 years or so, we have put such emphasis on the left side of the brain that we’ve omitted the right side. And therefore we live in a universe where we understand how almost everything works and the meaning of nothing. He therefore calls for space for the transcendent, for the wonderful, for the beautiful, and for God.
I understand where he’s coming from. This attitude of a little bit less of the left brain means that he’s a bit skeptical about biblical doctrine. And he told me that himself.
DAVID PERELL: Skeptical about biblical doctrine, yes, because it
JOHN LENNOX: seems too left-brained. But of course, so is his research that led to that book, which shouldn’t make him all that skeptical.
But I like Iain’s thinking because that analysis — and there’s a lot of pushback on it these days, obviously, because it is a scientific argument against materialism and people don’t like that. A religious argument against materialism, well, they just laugh at that. But coming from within neuroscience, that’s a very different matter.
It seems to me it’s almost easier to puncture that balloon because we live in the information age, and information — whatever it is, and that’s difficult — is not material. It’s usually carried on a material substrate. The information on those pages is carried on a material substrate of paper and ink, but it itself is not material. So that means there are non-material entities in the universe. Well, that’s the end of materialism as a philosophy, as far as I’m concerned. As simple as that. But that gets obfuscated in a lot of the discussion.
Poetry, Metaphor, and the Language of Scripture
DAVID PERELL: My pastor, a few months ago, asked me, “Why does God speak to us in poetry?” I was stupefied by the question. I still am. It’s one of the things I’m trying to grapple with. And as I was reading your new book on Revelation, you’re talking about literature — how something is said is as important as what is said. And I think there’s a real writing lesson in here, that the style is as important as the substance.
JOHN LENNOX: Well, the relative importance we can talk about. But the fact of both being very important is clear, because some parts of Scripture are written deliberately to be imagined. Food for the imagination is a hugely important part of human life. And that’s where poetry and music come in and supply something to feed the right side of our brain — to put it in McGilchrist’s terms — and open up our minds to having stepping stones of imaginative words and metaphors and similes and all kinds of figures of speech that lead us along into a world pointed to by those things, and represented by those things in an imaginative way.
The sad tragedy is, I find that young people don’t learn the grammar of their own language and they don’t understand metaphors and similes. So they make huge mistakes about them, especially when it comes to the Book of Revelation. A typical attitude is, “Oh, that book’s full of symbols. Therefore, it is essentially fantastical and meaningless.”
CS Lewis — I learned a lot about the English language from CS Lewis — pointed out that similes and metaphors are used to stand for realities and point to realities. And we can illustrate that easily.
There are people on a very extreme edge of not understanding literature who say that there are no metaphors in Scripture — you must take it literally. This is possibly the best way to explain this. I say, “Oh, really? Jesus said, ‘I am the door.’ Do you take that literally?” Well, it just discombobulates some people. They don’t know what to say.
Jesus is not a literal door. And here’s the point that is hugely important: he’s not a literal door made of wood or metal. He’s a real door. He’s a real doorway into a spiritual experience of God. And the difference matters. “Literal” is a useless word — almost useless — because the base literal level is not used all that much.
It is used in the beginning: “God created the heavens and the earth.” Well, those are the actual heavens and earth, the literal heavens and earth that physicists study. But then, “And God said, let there be light.” What do you mean? Has he got a voice box and lungs? Well, no, he’s spirit. So immediately there, you’re in the realm of the metaphorical. But “God said” is not fantasy. God communicates in ways we don’t fully understand. We have no idea what it means to utter what is in some sense a word, and a world is created. We have no notion of how that works. But metaphorical language enriches and provides a stepping stone.
And the same is true in the Book of Revelation — very true. Because there are masses of symbols and metaphors, but all of them stand for realities without exception. And that is one of the basic things I’m talking about in my book.
DAVID PERELL: Well, help me get specific. When you say “stand for realities,” the one that I’ve sort of been captivated by is that Jesus comes back with a sword, but the sword is in his mouth.
JOHN LENNOX: Yes.
DAVID PERELL: So what’s going on there when you
JOHN LENNOX: say “stands for reality”? That’s clearly very surreal as you watch that sword. But Scripture helps you to interpret it. “The word of God is like a two-edged sword.” And the sword in his mouth is seen in the vision in chapter one, where he is dressed as a judge.
The sword is not the only surreal item — eyes like a flame of fire, that’s pretty surreal too. And what subsequently happens is that in the letters to the seven churches, one of the items in the description of Christ is applied to that church. “These things says he with eyes like a flame of fire.” And when you read what is in the letter to that church, it is a critique of the way they’re behaving. In other words, these eyes are seeing what’s going on, and they need to repent.
And it’s the same with the sword. “If you don’t repent,” he says to another church, “I will come and war against you with the sword of my mouth.” And if you interpret that in terms of the biblical language itself, he’s going to come and apply the sword of his word and deal with them — very much as Paul said to Corinth, “If you don’t repent, I’m going to come and sort this out.” So I don’t think there’s any difficulty in understanding all of those things as standing for realities.
Writing, Self-Criticism, and the Art of Autobiography
DAVID PERELL: Tell me about this — as you’re writing, how do you think about both making an argument and criticizing yourself? I know you like the Feynman line where he says, “Always bend over backwards to understand and criticize your own work, because the easiest person to fool is yourself.”
JOHN LENNOX: Yeah, that’s right.
DAVID PERELL: So how do you go about doing this in the writing process?
JOHN LENNOX: Well, there are several basic principles, I think. There’s the Feynman principle, but there’s another principle, and that is I ask myself when I’m writing: how can this be understood?
DAVID PERELL: How can this be understood?
JOHN LENNOX: And the next question is: how could it be misunderstood? And that is a hugely helpful thing — far more helpful than the first question. Usually you know what you mean to convey by writing. But if you ask, “How could this be misunderstood?” — let me give you a very simple example.
You want to talk about God as Father. You don’t realize that in your audience is a young woman whose concept of father is someone who comes home drunk every night and abuses her mother and possibly herself. And therefore her concept of father is entirely different. So you will have to go into that. “How could I be misunderstood?” — and correct it by being open with the fact that not everybody’s experience of father is the same. I find that hugely important.
The next thing is: don’t be so proud as not to allow people to read what you’ve written.
DAVID PERELL: What do you mean?
JOHN LENNOX: Allow people to read your stuff before you publish it, and ask for the best criticism. For example, I’m doing at the moment an autobiography. An autobiography is tricky because it’s got the word auto in it — self. And one of the great difficulties is, of course, that you’re writing about yourself. How do you avoid the pitfalls connected with that?
So I spoke to the publishing company and said, “I want your very best editor, who’s going to be really critical.” And I’ve got the very best editor, which has been very painful but very useful.
DAVID PERELL: What have they told you?
JOHN LENNOX: Oh, all kinds of things.
DAVID PERELL: What have you learned about autobiography now that you didn’t know?
JOHN LENNOX: Simple things. The danger of being episodical. If you’re a person who has done a lot of speaking, the danger is you get tired of trying to construct the story and you say, “Well, I went to Leipzig and I spoke on X, and then I went to Berlin and I spoke on Y, and then I went to Chemnitz and I spoke on Z.” And it becomes episodical — there’s no depth, there’s only length.
And it’s difficult, of course, sometimes. You mentioned the Veritas Forum earlier, and I’ve done a lot of talks there. So I could say, “When I went to Texas on Tuesday and I spoke at Austin, and then I went to Denver on Wednesday,” et cetera, et cetera — and that becomes boring in the end, unless there are some individual, specific things that happened during those times that flesh it out into something interesting.
So my particular editor is ruthless with that kind of stuff and just points it out to me — “Leave this out, or put it in an appendix.” So I’ve learned a lot from critics, and I have friends who will read and criticize what I’m going to do.
Revelation, Artificial Intelligence, and the Question of Fear
DAVID PERELL: Let’s move into Revelation. You’ve just written a new book about the Book of Revelation, but also how it intersects with AI. And I guess I’ll just start off with a very base-level question, which is: are you scared of what’s happening with
The Fear of AI and the Loss of Control
JOHN LENNOX: AI — yes and no. I think there are many things I’m scared of. Knives — a good knife, a sharp knife, can be used for surgery. It can also be used for murder. And in this country at the moment, we’ve got an epidemic of knife crime. Young kids, 14, 15, killing their mates in class. So one could say, yes, I’m scared of knives because many people are being damaged and maimed for life or killed.
But I know that’s not the actual thrust of your question. It’s whether there’s a degree of fundamental anxiety about the future that is raised by AI. And that is certainly the case.
I’m grateful for some of the things that AI can do and do brilliantly. The solution of the protein folding problem by Demis Hassabis of DeepMind is a work of utter genius. It used to take a PhD five years to work out how one protein folded. His program for DeepMind dealt with 200,000 in a day or two. It’s a completely new game.
But I think there are two kinds of AI and we have to separate them. There’s the ordinary stuff that’s actually working at the moment, which is narrow AI. A narrow AI system does one thing and one thing alone that normally requires human intelligence — like spotting disease in X-rays — and is brilliant at it now, much better than your average doctor at recognizing diseases from X-ray photographs. And that’s wonderful. There are all kinds of examples, because AI is not just one thing. There are millions of different AI systems, and most of the ones operating at the moment are narrow AI, even ChatGPT with all its successes.
But what I notice is that among the thought leaders, some of them seem to be running scared. They’re highly intelligent people, and they are scared — particularly of what is called the control problem — that we lose control, that something’s going on in some of these very advanced systems that we don’t quite understand and haven’t quite tamed. And therefore you get lots of hype and speculation. Can we build an AI that will refuse to be turned off? Is AI going to destroy us in the end?
You get serious-minded physicists like Max Tegmark — is he at Princeton or MIT, I can’t remember which — but Max Tegmark has written a book called Life 3.0. He has a dozen different scenarios for the future: benevolent AI, despotic AI, all of this on a grand scale. But the thing he pays closest attention to is AI managing to leverage some of Amazon’s systems and turn into a totalitarian world economic government that has the whole world under its control.
He describes it in detail, and then he says that this sort of government could insist on all its citizens wearing a bracelet — with the functionality of an Apple Watch and a lot more — that would listen to everything the wearer said, watch everything they did. And if they stepped out of line, out of the party line, it could inject the wearer with a lethal toxin and kill them.
Now, what is fascinating to me about that — and it’s not only Tegmark writing about it, and he’s a seriously good physicist — is that it parallels almost exactly some of the predictions of the Book of Revelation, particularly about what I call the monster. It’s often called the beast. I think “monster” is a better word. Where no one can buy or sell unless they have the mark, and the mark has to be in the right hand or their forehead — it doesn’t say exactly what it is — and they’re killed if they go out of line. Well, that’s identical with what some of these people are predicting.
I went to a lecture by Peter Thiel recently, and I asked him the following question. I said, “Peter, do I understand you correctly, that as you look at technology, you see it moving towards totalitarianism in terms of surveillance techniques — which are all rolled out all over China and so on?” He said yes. And I said, “Secondly, as you look at the biblical scriptures, do you detect something that parallels that and therefore gives it added credence?” And he said he did. So that was interesting, because sometimes he’s not the easiest to understand.
It seems to me a number of people right at the top — Geoffrey Hinton, for example, who’s the godfather of AI — he stepped out of Google so that he could criticize, and he has revised his opinions to a much shorter time scale until AI could put us into real danger. Elon Musk, of course, is famous for doing the same thing. Some of these people who are quite knowledgeable about technology are scared of what will happen.
I spoke to a leading player in this field not long ago, and I said, “Do you think something’s going on that they’re not telling us?” And he thought about it, and he said, “I think you may well be right, from what I observe and hear.” And the scary thing is —
DAVID PERELL: Wait, what sort of something going on?
JOHN LENNOX: Well, he couldn’t say, of course, because he didn’t know. But there’s something going on that leads to these people being scared. And of course, then you have the parallel thing — the idea of building God. The notion of data religion and AI religion, and Harari saying, “If you want to know about religion, go to Silicon Valley, not to the church.”
AI as Idolatry: Made in the Image of Humans
DAVID PERELL: Well, I was thinking of Psalm 115:8, which says, “Those who make them become like them, so do all who trust in them.” That we’re making this AI in the image of humans, not in the image of God.
JOHN LENNOX: Oh, that’s absolutely right.
DAVID PERELL: And it’s — I mean, this is idolatry left and right.
JOHN LENNOX: Yes, it is. And that’s another trajectory through it. I separate a whole lot of trajectories, and the trouble is they get confused.
The first is to make super-intelligent humans who are like gods with a small “g.” That’s Harari. And that’s to be done in one of two ways. First of all, to enhance existing humans — re-engineer their genetics and all the rest. The second way is to start with a non-biological base like silicon and build some sort of entity that is created by human beings but will transcend them. Those are the two main avenues, and some people are trying to do them together.
But then there arises the question immediately: Is this playing God? Is this another Tower of Babel? And it looks very much like it — a towering desire to reach to heaven. I’ve read quite a lot about skyscrapers in connection with my books on Genesis. It’s very interesting.
DAVID PERELL: I mean, it’s literally the oldest story in the book.
JOHN LENNOX: If you read some of the literature on skyscrapers, you’ll come across this quote: “Behind every skyscraper there’s an even greater ego.” That puts it very neatly.
And there are all these trends. What I see Scripture giving us is not so much identifications that you can say with absolute precision — “this is what this is” — but you can say with some precision what it represents, what it stands for.
People have speculated through history as to what the beast or the monster is. It’s been almost everybody — from the Popes to Hitler to Stalin to Mao, etc. They’re all interested in who it is. People don’t seem to be interested in what Scripture actually says. Scripture tells us what it is — the number 666. It is the number of a man. That’s the hideous thing about it. Scripture tells us exactly what it is. It’s a human being. And that’s what’s utterly scary about it. This is a human being.
And in the plain, straightforward language of 2 Thessalonians, Paul told young Christians that there would be a man of lawlessness who would claim to be God. That fits in perfectly with the scenes in the Book of Revelation.
And when contemporary physicists and thinkers are talking about this, it’s high time that we take seriously the biblical insight into it. My argument is very simple, and it doesn’t arise first in my book on Revelation. I wrote a book called 2084. And in that book I said, look, if we are prepared to take seriously the kind of argument that Tegmark makes, that Harari makes, and a whole host of other people make — well, I’d like to say, why don’t we go back and take seriously the biblical account, which parallels them eerily closely, and for which there is far more evidence of its truth.
And then, just the final point there: the irony of the whole thing is that this race for AI superintelligence is the race to make God and be God. The biblical message is that God became human. It goes in the reverse direction. And I think that’s a very powerful idea.
What Does It Mean to Be Human?
DAVID PERELL: No kidding. And it leads me to my next question. Watching the LLMs, in many ways, become smarter than me —
JOHN LENNOX: Yes.
DAVID PERELL: In certain respects —
JOHN LENNOX: In certain respects.
DAVID PERELL: Thank you. But it’s been dejecting, and it’s made me ask — what does it mean to be a productive member of society? What does it mean to be a human being? And that’s what I want to ask you about. How has watching what has unfolded over the last many years changed your conception of what it means to be a human?
JOHN LENNOX: Well, it’s that question that got me into the soul field. I was asked some years ago to give a lecture on AI — an introduction to a conference of Christian leaders. And I said, “I’m not an expert. Get an expert.” They said, “You misunderstand. We want you to talk about what Genesis says about what it means to be human, and let that be the basis of our day’s discussion.”
So I started preparing, and very rapidly I saw this is going to need a lot of work. I did the talk because I do have some ideas on Genesis, but that’s what led to my first 2084. There are two 2084s, four years apart — one last year and one in 2020. It’s just going so fast.
And it is that which concerns people — the redefinition of humanity. Now, C.S. Lewis is one of the people who saw this very clearly. There are two books I say every believer ought to read. One is The Abolition of Man, and the other is That Hideous Strength — the third of his science fiction books. And he saw, presciently, in 1940, where all this philosophy was leading — to human beings eventually producing not a human being, but an artifact. And he has this chilling sentence: “The final triumph of humanity will be the abolition of man,” because what they produce is not a human, it’s an artifact. They will have meddled with what we now call the germline of humanity and altered it.
And therefore, it seems to me that it’s very important to get back to Genesis and fill Christian minds with the early chapters of Genesis, because from the point of view of our moral existence and status, Genesis 1:26 undergirds all of Western civilization. And we’re still going on that capital.
DAVID PERELL: And that’s the idea of imago dei.
Imago Dei and the Attack on Human Dignity
JOHN LENNOX: Yes — God made human beings in His image. He didn’t make the stars in His image. They show His glory, but they’re not in His image. That’s a very different thing. You are more important than a star, actually.
So exploring that imago dei, I think, is a very, very important thing — but not exploring it in a vacuum. Exploring it in the context of these attempts. Because many of the drivers of this superintelligence, this creating-God project, are atheists. You can’t help noticing that. And so it is an attack, in that sense, on God — His uniqueness, His creatorial dignity, His glory, and all of that. Of course it is.
And what Scripture tells you from the beginning is that the biggest thing you’re going to be up against is the original lie: “You shall be as God” — if you deny God and His word. So we’re back to where we started — the word-based universe.
In Genesis 1, you have the Word as the base of creation: “And God said… and God said.” But in Genesis 3, you have the denial of the word by the snake, bringing catastrophe into the world. And it’s the talking snake. It’s amazing that people listen to talking snakes — that suggested, “You shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”
There’s a famous snake path at UC San Diego — I don’t know whether you know about it. It’s a big snake in the form of a path. It goes up the hill, and its mouth stops at the entrance to the university library.
DAVID PERELL: Okay.
The Danger of AI and the Ethics of Technology
JOHN LENNOX: And there’s a little Garden of Eden at the bottom and the snake coils around it. And the whole idea is the humans are encouraged to leave innocence and get knowledge. The university library and I was speaking there to Veritas World and I took a big risk. I said to them, “I have never seen such a blatant misunderstanding of one of the most important messages in the world.”
Shocked silence.
I said, “This is the misunderstanding that God prevented them from eating a tree of knowledge of good and evil. And you’ve changed that to the tree of knowledge. It wasn’t a tree of knowledge. There was lots of knowledge in the garden. In fact, science started there. God said name the animals. It was full of knowledge. The tree of knowledge of good and evil — that’s a knowledge you don’t want.”
Well, I nearly caused a riot, I think. But anyway, it’s very interesting because that storytelling in terms of an artist’s representation of this so-called snake path — and it’s famous, you can look it up — is an example, to my mind, of how art can lie powerfully and get across the exact opposite message from what the original was meant to convey.
Using AI as a Servant, Not a Master
DAVID PERELL: Yeah. So I guess there’s two things going on here. One is the building of AI, which we’ve spoken about. I’m curious to know, do you use AI and if so, how do you think about it? Is it, “This is how I would use it to think better, to write better,” versus, “I think the whole thing is like a demonic force and I’m going to keep that away from me”?
JOHN LENNOX: Well, I’ve got a smartphone, and if you’ve got a smartphone you can’t help using AI, because when you buy anything on Amazon it’s picking up the trail and suggesting new things to buy. So you can virtually not avoid it. And if you use a computer connected to the Internet and use Microsoft Word, you get all sorts of pop-ups that are explaining things and helping you. The days of not using it are long gone.
But it can be a servant rather than a master, and that’s the danger — of it mastering you. Now take ChatGPT. I find it quite useful for collecting ideas because it will bring to the screen knowledge that I don’t have. But it may be hallucinating and inventing that knowledge because it wants to please me. So I’m forced to do a lot of checking. But that’s okay.
I think that just as we look up Google — we don’t know much about the Babylonian empire, so we Google it, and nobody thinks twice about that — ChatGPT is just a very sophisticated form of that, which has digested, without permission often, a lot more literature.
And I say to people, “You can use it, but beware.” For example, if you’re a pastor of a church and you watch the late-night film on Saturday and then get a sermon from ChatGPT in 30 seconds before you go to bed, that is not likely to have much spiritual power, even though technically it could be accurate. If you ask ChatGPT to tell you what the doctrine of the Trinity is, it would be hard to fault it. But there’s no spiritual power in a machine. And I get tired trying to tell people — this is a machine, it doesn’t feel.
Consciousness, Deception, and the Ethics of AI
DAVID PERELL: When you say there’s no spiritual power in a machine, what do you mean?
JOHN LENNOX: Well, in the sense that it doesn’t have a spirit — it’s simply a machine. It’s sheer computing power, predictive computing power. And it hasn’t got — let me put it another way — intelligence. It simulates; it’s not real intelligence. And what God has done with human beings is to put intelligence together with consciousness. These machines are not conscious, nor are they ever likely to be, for a very simple reason: nobody knows what consciousness is. So it’s silly when people start talking about, “Oh, it’s conscious.”
There are huge questions here — philosophical, moral, and ethical. I mean, we haven’t talked about the moral and ethical side of all of this, because the danger of AI, even the stuff that’s being used now, is fearsome in terms of deep fakes and deception. And again, that would lead you back to Jesus’ own statements about his coming: “Be careful because of deception.” It’s the major problem. And now we have the Five Eyes — the top intelligence agencies in the world — warning us that the deception created by deep fakes could lead to all kinds of chaos in the world. So it’s a serious problem.
But that’s the world we’re in. And my own feeling is that Christians who are scientifically minded — it would be a good thing for them to go into AI so that they can sit at the ethics table. Because one thing is very clear: the technology moves much faster than the ethics. But the technology is partly driven, I believe, by that impulse — “we shall be as gods.” In other words, “If we can do it, we should do it, and bother the consequences.” And that’s a very dangerous attitude, because somewhere in the world someone’s going to try and do it.
On Writing, Learning, and CS Lewis
DAVID PERELL: If you were to teach a semester-long seminar on writing — writing well, thinking well — how would you structure the curriculum?
JOHN LENNOX: I have no idea. That’s the first time I’ve heard that question. You see, I’m a great believer that you teach that kind of thing by doing it.
DAVID PERELL: Writing, you mean?
JOHN LENNOX: You can’t run a course, I would say, on what writing is and how you do it without actually writing. It’s the same, it seems to me, with studying scripture. People say to me, “Tell me how to study scripture.” Well, the only way I can do that is by doing it with you. And that’s a big challenge, which is why I’m not offering courses in writing.
DAVID PERELL: Right. Do the dang thing.
JOHN LENNOX: Yes, yes, you’re going to start.
DAVID PERELL: How did you improve as a writer?
JOHN LENNOX: Well, one improves by experience and by allowing external criticism. I think that’s the main thing. And reading other people’s work — that’s hugely important. And listening and talking to people. I think we’re at an age where we do too much talking and too little listening. And I was told I had two ears and one mouth — it’s better to use them in that proportion.
But it’s true: read good literature. I mean, if ever I think I’ve attained anything in writing, I just read a Lewis book, and that brings me right down to size. His sheer genius at using words. You have those kinds of standards out there that you should hold up like a mirror to your own writing.
DAVID PERELL: Well, yeah, you were talking about the grammar of his — I think you said metaphor and illustration. Tell me about that with CS Lewis.
JOHN LENNOX: The simple and obvious thing Lewis taught me is that metaphors stand for reality. If I say, “My heart is broken,” I’m not referring to this literal pump, but I’m referring to a very real experience. Or, “The car was flying down the road” — it wasn’t literally flying; I mean it was going very fast. The metaphor stands for going fast. So it’s for a real thing, not a literal thing. And simple things like that most people have never realized. So they’re very confused when the Bible does the same thing.
DAVID PERELL: John Lennox, thank you very much.
JOHN LENNOX: Well, thank you. I’ve actually enjoyed it very much.
DAVID PERELL: Good stuff.
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