One Of The Deepest Conversations You Will Listen To About God: Dr. John Lennox (Transcript)

And it seemed to me, and obviously to other observers, that there was an affinity between the Greek idea that the cosmos had an intrinsic comprehensibility and the idea that the proper orientation for human beings ethically would be one of honest communication and investigation. And those two things snapped on top of each other.

It made me think of something that I actually learned from Richard Dawkins, and I think this is a deep idea. Dawkins wrote a very influential essay where he claimed that any organism that can function in an environment has to be a microcosm of that environment. So for example, if you were an alien biologist and you were presented with a terrestrial bird and you took the bird apart, you could infer from the bird’s structure the gravitational pull of the earth, the density of the atmosphere, the chemical composition of the atmosphere, the electromagnetic frequency that the sun light was, what would you say, most, at what electromagnetic frequencies the sun’s light was most amenable to vision, etc. You could derive a model of the environment from the physiology of the organism.

Now, I know that there were medieval ideas that were deep in Christianity, that the human soul was a microcosm of the cosmos, that it reflected the structure of reality itself. And I’ve been thinking about this in terms of how the world might be best conceptualized. So there’s a mix of ideas here. And if an organism has to be a microcosm of the cosmos in order to function, and we are a microcosm in that regard, and we are a personality that runs on a narrative, which we seem to be, then in what way is it reasonable to claim that the cosmos itself is best conceptualized as something that could be entered into relationship with personality to personality, and that that’s not the most fundamental reflection of reality?

I mean, it seems to me that that’s where Dawkins’ thought eventually points, if his proclamation that an organism has to be a microcosm, an accurate microcosm in order to survive is accurate. So now that dovetails with the idea that the logos as a personality, that would be the Judeo-Christian concept, can investigate the logos of the universe and that those things dovetail. So now, I know that’s a complicated mishmash of ideas, but I’m interested in your thoughts on that.

DR. JOHN LENNOX: Well, I think there’s a lot in that, actually, and I recall listening to you, you’ve a very interesting lecture on Genesis 1, and when you came to the statement that human beings are made in the image of God, you paused and you pointed out that this was the cornerstone of our civilization, and I agree with that entirely.

Dawkins and the Creator

I think that what Dawkins is saying actually points in the exact opposite direction to what his worldview is, which is atheism, of course. In other words, we can read off from creation something about the idea of a creator, and as you say, it dovetails perfectly. Let me put this another way. I’m a mathematician by background and a linguist. I love language, and mathematics is a very sophisticated language, but I love natural languages as well. It seems to me that where this fits together best is first in the fact that we can do science in the sense that there is a rational intelligibility to the universe, which is the foundation of modern science and is a legacy of the biblical worldview. So, the mathematical describability Einstein talked about, he couldn’t imagine any genuine scientist without faith in that.

It’s the axiom for doing science: to believe the universe is intelligible. But if you ask for the rationale behind that, why do we believe the universe is intelligible? It bears the imprint of a creator. I see that at the level of mathematics in its capacity to at least in part give us a handle on what’s out there, and also in biology, where we have at the heart of every living cell the longest word we’ve ever found, the genetic code. All of that leads me to formulate it as follows: that we live in a word-based universe, and that’s the key of the Logos for me.

A Word-Based Universe

JORDAN B PETERSON: Okay, and so what do you mean in that case? So what do you mean specifically that we live in a word-based universe? What does that mean for you on the broader conceptual landscape?

DR. JOHN LENNOX: Well, it means that this universe is not simply a product of natural, unguided forces. It is a product of a rational Creator, an intelligent Creator, and I believe even more than that, a personal Creator. Now, how I get there is only in part from a response to the universe as I find it, the point you made about each organism being a microcosm of its environment. It’s also, it seems to me, that there are two sources, two major sources of knowledge.

There is, first of all, observing the universe, science, et cetera, then there are the humanities, but there’s also the concept of revelation, in which I believe. In other words, it’s not simply the human quest for the Creator, it’s the Creator revealing Himself. So for me, the anchor point in the end is that the Logos became human and we beheld his glory. In other words, we can see exactly what this means in terms of what we can understand, that is the human being in which God encoded Himself in Christ. Now, those are big ideas, of course. They’re very deep ideas; they need unpacking, but that’s essentially where I’m coming from.

Investigating the Universe

JORDAN B PETERSON: Okay, so, all right, so let me elaborate in two directions with regards to that. So the first is that, one of the axioms of faith that’s necessary before you embark on the scientific endeavor as an individual or as a culture, which might explain why science emerged in the Judeo-Christian context and no other place, is that the universe is intrinsically intelligible. But there’s another axiom too, which is that the honest investigation of that intelligibility will be good.

And so there is this insistence in Genesis when God casts order out of chaos and creates the world; after each day of creation, He states explicitly, “And it was good,” and when He creates man, I believe He says that it is very good. And so, and the reason for that is that not only is there an order, but the order is, in its deepest sense, beneficial and positive. And the thing is, is that it’s easy and even rational, it might be easy and even rational to take the Frankenstein monster view of the investigation of the world and to say, well, even if the cosmos is intelligible, that doesn’t mean that our investigation into it is intrinsically good or that it would bear good fruit.

Now, you have to believe that the truth will set you free in order to be a scientist, because if you believed that the truth had no bearing on human flourishing, let’s say, then the whole enterprise would be pointless. And if you believe that the investigation of the complexities of material reality would lead us astray, then you’d say that that should be taboo and forbidden. But that isn’t what we decided. We decided that the revealed order would be good.

The Essence of Truth

And then I’ll add one other thing to that, which I think is also axiomatic, which is part of the Logos idea, in its deepest sense, is that we are required to explore, investigate, and communicate about everything as deeply as possible. So the idea, you have this idea in Job that is quite well developed, that no matter what God and the devil throw at you, you’re called upon to maintain your equilibrium and your faith in the intrinsic goodness of being.

And then that’s expanded in the Gospels because the trials of Christ are the most extreme trials that can be imagined. And I mean that literally. That’s partly why the story has such potency, right? It’s the worst possible sequence of events that could happen to the least possibly deserving person. And that’s an injunction to accept all of the terrible catastrophes of life full-on in this supposition that doing so is the manner in which life most abundant could reveal itself.

And if you’re a scientist, and the real scientists are like this, and I think Dawkins in this way is a real scientist, is that you’re actually committed to the truth, right? You put that above all else. And you wouldn’t do that if you didn’t believe that the logos of commitment establishes the order that is good. And I don’t think you do that without an intrinsic belief that it’s something like human beings are made in the image of God. I can’t see any escape from that rationale.

DR. JOHN LENNOX: Nor can I. And it’s interesting that when I did my debate with Dawkins at the Oxford Natural History Museum at the press conference afterwards, we were asked, was there anything that we agreed on? And there was one thing, and that is that truth exists. And that is a crucial thing. It depends that we are committed to the pursuit of truth. Otherwise, as you say, science is absolutely no point. I happen to believe that truth, of course, is not simply propositional truth, but ultimately truth as a person. And that is the very deep claim, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” And it’s interesting there that Jesus wasn’t merely saying, “I say true things.” This goes much deeper. “I am the Truth.”

And if we set up a sequence of questions about anything, what is the truth about the atom? When you can split it into elementary particles, what is the truth about those? I believe this claim is so big that it’s actually saying that at the end of the backward sequence of questions, Jesus Christ will say, “I am the Truth.” And of course, that resonates with what you were studying in Exodus. So, interestingly, “I am” is the fundamental proposition about the nature of God.

The Scientific Ethos

JORDAN B PETERSON: Right, right. So, that’s an existential proposition that has to do with that. So, Thomas, well, okay. So, when Thomas Kuhn wrote his theory of scientific revolution, I can’t remember the name of the book exactly at the moment, of the structure of scientific revolutions. Now, Kuhn did something that other philosophers of science did in the 20th century. He laid out the case for science being a coherent set of explicit statable propositions. And that’s generally what people think of as science.

But that’s not accurate nor sufficient by any stretch of the imagination. So, I’ll give you an example of this and we can expand on that. So, my graduate supervisor, Robert Pihl, was a real scientist. And what that meant was that he conducted himself in a certain way. It wasn’t a matter of the things he believed explicitly, it was a matter of the way that he conducted himself, let’s say, as a laboratory researcher. And that conduct was oriented around a variety of ethical propositions. So, he was very generous with his ideas. And what that meant was he had a lot of ideas because he would share them with his graduate students, for example, and the undergraduates, and they would respond positively.

And that would reinforce the mechanism within him that generated ideas, and then ideas would flow forth more abundantly. And so, that was part of the scientific ethos, to be generous with ideas. And then, the next part of that was, if he published his scientific research papers, he was generous in the credit he gave to his graduate student collaborators, generally listing them as the first author and putting himself in the final place, which is a convention among genuine scientists. And so, he played fair on the reputational front.

DR. JOHN LENNOX: I had a supervisor like that at Cambridge.

The Ethical Foundations of Science

JORDAN B PETERSON: Yeah, well, it’s a great good fortune. You can’t become a successful scientist without someone like that to apprentice with. Okay. So then, on the statistical analysis front, people who don’t know anything about statistics think that you take a spreadsheet of numbers and dump it into a meat grinder and crank the handle, and out comes truth. And that is 100% false because when you’re doing statistical analysis, it’s a form of critical thinking and exploration. You’re making ethical decisions at every choice point.

So, you have to figure out which data points constitute outliers, because maybe there was a measurement error, for example, while you were sampling that particular behavior. And you have to tilt the statistical investigation to some degree against the outcome that you’re hoping for to make sure that you don’t fool yourself. It’s saturated with ethical decisions. And then, all that has to be nested within the presumption, first of all, the presumption that you should not ever publish false data just to move your career forward. You know, and you might say, well, why the hell not?

And also, that you are required, on ethical grounds, to let go of your tyrannical presuppositions if the data reveals that what you’re clinging to for your own psychological reasons is wrong. And all of that, all of that’s an attitude of ethical conduct, and not a set of explicit, statable propositions.

The Moral Universe in Science

DR. JOHN LENNOX: And yeah, that is hugely important. Richard Feynman, the physicist, the Nobel Prize winner, used to say, “You must bend backwards to criticize yourself because you are the easiest person to fool.” And I’m very interested in this ethical dimension because this is over and beyond the propositions of the methodology of science.

I think it was Einstein who said, “You may talk about the ethical foundations of science, but you cannot talk about the scientific foundations of ethics.” So, this is another layer in looking at the universe. It’s rationally intelligible, but it’s also a moral universe, and ethical presuppositions and decisions infect all of our lives. And they do affect the scientific endeavor. It’s not just this passionate observation and making conclusions and theories. There’s a huge ethical dimension which raises big questions as to what the reference point is, who said so, and what are the norms behind that ethical decision-making process.

The Conjunction of Logic and Psyche

JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, it also implies that the scientific truth that’s truest and beneficial simultaneously is actually the conjunction, in this Athens-Jerusalem sense, it’s actually the conjunction of the intrinsic logic of the objective world making itself manifest to the truthful, penetrating psyche of the human observer. It’s the interaction between those two that constitute scientific truth, and not one or the other. And what the atheist materialist would like to do is to say, well, the world of facts speaks for itself. But that’s also technically untrue, because there’s an infinite number of facts. They’re certainly not all relevant. We can drown in the plethora of facts, and we certainly will do that.

And to even communicate about them, or study them, or even draw our attention to them, we have to prioritize and hierarchically arrange the facts. And we do that according to an ethic. And I think that’s actually, I think that is incontrovertible on scientific grounds, because we have seen the emergent realization in a whole variety of domains, AI not least, that there are facts, but those facts have to be prioritized. And you prioritize facts with an ethic.

DR. JOHN LENNOX: That’s absolutely right. There’s a deeper problem, it seems to me, with the atheist understanding of science. And that is this, that we do the science with our minds. Some people think the mind and the brain are the same. I leave that aside, since you’re an expert on the mind and the brain. But I often say to people, you know, what do you do science with? I’ve asked many leading scientists this. They say, well, I do it with my mind and my brain. Give me a brief account of the brain. And they say to me, well, the brain is the end product of a mindless, unguided process.

And I pause and I look them straight in the eye and I smile and I say, and you trust it. Tell me honestly, if you knew that the computer you use or the machinery you use in the lab was the end product of a mindless, unguided process, would you trust it? And the interesting thing, I’ve done a lot of experiments with this little story. I have always got the answer, no, I would not. So I say, you have a problem. In other words, your atheism is undermining the very rationality you use, not only to do science but to construct any argument whatsoever. It’s not only shooting itself in the foot; it’s worse than shooting itself in the brain.

The Revelatory Nature of Thought

JORDAN B PETERSON: Let me ask you about something you said earlier about revelation. So, I’ve also been, I’ve been very interested in the, what would you call it, the anthropological psychology of the development of thought. That’s a good way of thinking about it, is that how is it that human beings came to think?

Now, Carl Jung said something very interesting about thought, about typical thought, normative thought. And he said the typical person doesn’t think. What happens to the typical person is that thoughts appear to them, and they accept them as axiomatically true without further investigation. And so, and I, and I believe that to be the case. I think that in order to think critically, you have to set up in the theater of your imagination something that holds a proposition and defends it, and then an adversary or two adversaries that take it apart. And so you’re actually producing a collective within that will then hash out the thought.

But that’s led me down the rabbit hole of trying to understand what we mean when we say something like, “I thought,” which would be the sort of thing that scientists would say when they’re talking about how they do science. “Well, I thought up my hypothesis.” Like, you know, that’s not much of an explanation there, buddy. What do you mean you thought it up? Because you didn’t know the hypothesis, let’s say yesterday, and now you do know it. And so how did you not know it then? And how do you know it now? And how is it that that new idea manifested itself? And the answer is always going to be, well, it came to me.

And so that’s the crucial thing I want to dive into. So here’s how I think the hypothesis generation process works. And scientists very rarely talk about this. They talk about the observable data, but they don’t talk about the mechanism by which the investigative question was formulated. And that’s a huge lacunae, right? That’s a huge domain of unconsciousness.

So this is how it seems to me. It’s that, first of all, you have to have a problem. And so that’s something that calls to you generally because people are generally gripped by a problem, right? It isn’t that they choose it voluntarily, precisely. It comes knocking. They can open the door to it, but it’s something that grips them and compels them. And it has a kind of autonomy in that sense. You know, if something really besets you as a problem, you can’t shake it. It dogs you. And that seems like a kind of autonomy on the part of the problem.

And also, there’s a million problems that could beset you, but some stand out against the background, right? I think that’s equivalent to the burning bush, by the way. Anyway, so you have a problem, and you’re searching humbly for a solution. And humbly, because you have to admit that you have a problem and you have to admit that you don’t know the answer. And then if you open yourself up, whatever the hell that means, you’ll get a revelation. And the revelation will be an insight where it’ll be something that strikes you as probable or likely. And so that’s the first element. That’s the first two elements of thought.

The first element is a felt lack, and that would be an admission of personal insufficiency on some vital front. The next would be the knocking, which is, I would like to know the answer. The next part of the sequence is a revelation, as far as I can tell. And something appears to you, and it springs out of the void for all intents and purposes. And you can say, you thought it up. But you’re not saying any more than, it appeared to me. There’s no more content in those two descriptive, what would you call, approaches. And then once the revelation makes itself manifest, you can analyze it critically, or you can subject it to further empirical analysis and to the criticism of others. And it’s that whole panoply of sequence processes that make up thought. But there’s a revelatory element to that that seems to me to be irreducible. Now, the question is, from where does the revelation spring?

The Source of Revelation

DR. JOHN LENNOX: I would sympathize with that analysis very, very much. I think thought is a little bit like time. As Augustine said, “Everybody knows what time is until they try to define it.” And I certainly think that the idea that “it came to me” actually cogs in with my own experience of my limited success in mathematical research. It came to me. I think there are other dimensions, of course, as well. You’re absolutely right to try to take this question of analyzing hypotheses deeper, because things often play a role that folk wouldn’t think about, like dreams, like hunches, like intuition and all this kind of thing.

Whether it comes to a swelling up from the unconscious or all this kind of thing, because I wonder, let me step back from this one second. I wonder if we have to think in terms of different levels of revelation. For example, if I want to get to know you and you want to get to know me, it’s no use me putting you into a tomography machine and looking at your brainwaves. I will never get to know you unless you reveal yourself to me. And usually, that would be you speak to me as you are now, and I speak to you. That is partly revelation. If you never say anything, I’ll never get to know you.

Now, those words that you use are coming from inside you and they have to do with your mind and your brain and all that very sophisticated stuff that we really know very little about because we don’t even know what consciousness is.

Divine Revelation

But I wonder if, above and beyond that kind of human level of revelation or what wells up when we’ve looked at a problem or something else, what wells up in our minds, we have to have a separate category, which I would call divine revelation. Now, whether the two dovetail and flow into one another is an interesting matter, because if you go back to Genesis, one of the most interesting things is we’re told we’re made in the image of God, but it was God that told human beings to do biology, name the animals. That’s taxonomy. It’s the fundamental intellectual discipline. “I’m not going to do it for you. You do it for yourself.” And so, the capacity of human beings to think in that sense, whatever it really means, seems to me to be a reflection of their Creator and possibly an evidence, if we extrapolate it, of His existence.

The Pitfalls of Personal Credit for Revelation

JORDAN B PETERSON: Okay, so now let’s take this idea of the source of thought and the different levels of depth. Let’s explore that for a minute. So, I’m going to describe a potential pitfall down that route. So, let’s say that I’m a scientist and a bright idea strikes me, or I’m an artist and a bright intuition strikes me.

Now, I have two options when I’m considering that source. I could consider that a manifestation of the same spirit of intuition and revelation that has made itself manifest as part and parcel of the creative enterprise of all of mankind since the dawn of time, right? A continuance of that same process, which insinuates something transpersonal about it, right? It’s the operation of something transcendent. Or I can take personal credit for it and say, “I thought it up.”

Now, the problem with the latter approach, as far as I can tell, is first of all, I think it’s incautious and unwarranted because, you know, the great scientists have always said that they stand on the shoulders of giants and can see farther for that reason. We are part of a great collective creative enterprise, and God only knows how deep that goes. But then there’s also the terrible threat of self-deification that might otherwise make itself manifest. And I see that emerging in our culture. I see part of what’s happening in our culture, a kind of extension of demented Protestantism, where instead of the God that revealed itself to Moses saying, “I am what I am,” it’s the individual person who says, “I am what I am. I get to define myself. I’m the source of all wisdom and revelation, my brain, my psyche, my subjectivity,” with no humility in that regard. And I actually think that that’s a devastating cultural impropriety because it elevates the subjective intellect to the status of God. And that’s a Luciferian crime.

The Luciferian Crime of Self-Deification

DR. JOHN LENNOX: It is absolutely and specifically a Luciferian crime because the temptation, “you shall be as gods,” is in the very first pages of Genesis. And it fascinates me that the temptation came in a very clever way, giving the impression that God wants to hold you humans down. He doesn’t want you to rise to His level. “Don’t you realize if you go against His word, then you will rise in the hierarchy of being and you will be as gods, knowing good and evil?”

And what fascinates me about that, Dr. Peterson, is this. In the first section of Genesis, you have God’s word creating the universe, “and God said, and God said, and God said.” In the second part, you have God’s word in a prohibition defining morality. And the first, humans are encouraged to go against it by being promised godhood and the knowledge of good and evil. Not knowledge, of course. God wanted them to have lots of knowledge. It was the knowledge of good and evil that nobody wants.

And what I see in current society, and I very much applaud your stance on this, because it seems to me that the whole Homo Deus phenomenon, as, for example, illustrated in the book by Yuval Noah Harari on artificial intelligence, this idea of transhumanism, that actually we should go for this and turn human beings into gods, seems to me to be incredibly dangerous. And it’s the height of pride, arrogance, and it is very destructive.

Nietzsche’s Prophecy and Its Consequences

JORDAN B PETERSON: Okay, so in the late 1800s, when Nietzsche observed that God was dead, it was a very complex observation, because people like to think of that as a triumphalist proclamation by this emancipatory philosopher. And that wasn’t the case at all, because Nietzsche basically said that God was dead, and we’d killed Him, and we’ll never find enough water to wash away the blood, right? I mean, he knew it was a catastrophe. And he prophesied that three things would happen.

One would be that there’d be a wicked turn towards a kind of hopeless nihilism, because every structure of morality had fallen apart. The second would be the rise of totalitarian substitutions for God, and Nietzsche actually specified communism as a likely candidate, and also prophesied that hundreds of millions of people would die as a consequence, which was quite the damn prophecy for the mid-late 1800s. And then he also said, but the alternative is that we could create our own values, and that was the route that Nietzsche saw as the way out.

Now, there’s a couple of problems with that, technical problems, you might say. One is, while we don’t live very long, and it isn’t obvious that any of us singly is wise enough to create our own values. The second problem is, as the psychoanalysts pointed out very quickly, it isn’t obvious at all that we’re masters in our own houses, because even if you only look at the spiritual realm as equivalent to something like the unconscious, we’re all haunted beings, and we can’t necessarily trust our judgment.

And the third problem, there’s four, the third problem is that, well, who do you mean by the “we” that will create our own values? Like, which aspect of the psyche is now going to create value? Nietzsche said himself that each drive tends to philosophize in its own spirit. And so, in order for us to create our own values in some sort of transcendent sense, you have to hypothesize the hierarchical integration of the psyche towards some superordinate end, and that speaking in some voice, and it isn’t obvious to me at all that that would be a subjective voice. I think it would be akin, so what happens with Moses is when he investigates the burning bush, he goes deeper and deeper into the investigation.

And the first thing that happens is, well, his attention is attracted, the second thing is that he starts to notice that he’s treading on sacred ground, right, because he’s getting deep into the phenomenon. And the third thing that happens is that, and this is relevant to your notion of levels of revelation, is that the voice of being itself speaks to him, right, the eternal transcendent voice of being. And Moses is smart enough, he’s wise enough to know that that’s not him, right, it’s something above and beyond him. And he doesn’t take credit for it, and that’s partly why he never turns into a pharaoh in the desert, right, he separates himself from the source of sovereignty as such. And I don’t see how that can be done in the rationalist, atheist, materialist realm of conceptualization. You fall into that subjectivist trap.

Reflections on Revelation and Human Values

DR. JOHN LENNOX: Now, nor do I, and I think Nietzsche in that sense was a kind of prophet, and we’re seeing the damage done. You know, ever since I was very young, I was fascinated by the polar opposite of my Christian heritage, and that has led me to spend quite a lot of time in Russia. And I’ve talked about these kinds of things with Russian friends, many of whom suffered in the gulag, and I remember one conversation with a leading academician. He said to me, “You know, John, we thought we could get rid of God and retain a value for human beings, and we woke up too late to realize that it cannot be done.”

And it was Nietzsche that said, if you destroy God, you lose all right to the kind of values that we accept, in a sense, deep down in our Judeo-Christian culture. And what is so interesting about Moses, and I loved your discussion about that, is that he came face to face not only with the concept of transcendence but transcendence itself, and he was brought into the presence of the very glory of God. You were discussing in your round table how in Hebrew, “kavod,” glory, is associated with weight, and that leads me to think relevant to what you’ve just said about C.S. Lewis.

I’m old enough to have listened to C.S. Lewis, by the way, when I was younger, and C.S. Lewis in the 1940s saw exactly what was going to happen if a group of human beings took it into their heads to determine and redefine all future generations through genetic experimentation, and so on. And in two books, “The Abolition of Man” and “That Hideous Strength,” he spelled that out and made the point that if that happens, it is not going to liberate human beings. In fact, it’s going to abolish them because what will be created by, say, playing around with the germline, is not human beings but artifacts. And so he writes, “the final triumph of humanity scientists will be the abolition of man.” And it’s that that I fear is really permeating our culture.

The Temptation of Self-Deification

I mean, the Caesars in Rome and the Babylonian emperors who thought of themselves as gods look pretty trivial stuff compared with this insidious teaching that’s around in particularly the Western world today, that we are actually all gods and we ought to rise to this. And the only way to rise to it is to reject the transcendent completely: there is nothing above us.

JORDAN B PETERSON: Okay, so let’s delve into that a little bit, because the devil’s always in the details. And so, when I had little kids, I thought once about my son when he was about three. And, you know, there’s a terrible fragility to children, right? And I mean, adults are fragile, obviously. We all are because we’re mortal and vulnerable and prone to suffering. I thought about my three-year-old son, you know, and I thought, well, he has this terrible vulnerability. Wouldn’t it be good if that could be ameliorated?

Now, you can do that two ways. You can institute protective mechanisms that shield them from the depredations of the world. Or you can strive to make them into the sort of competent people that can take the world on their own, right? And it’s akin to the gospel ideas, I would say, that, you know, you can learn to handle serpents, and that’s your best defense against serpents. That way, you get to have the benefits of being and develop into someone simultaneously capable of bearing the weight of being, let’s say. And I don’t know if you can have being without it having a weight, you know? I don’t even know. It’s like, it’s possible that mortal limitation is the price you pay for being. I don’t know how things are constructed.

Dostoevsky’s Insight on Suffering and Maturation

DR. JOHN LENNOX: It could well be. What you’re saying reminds me of Dostoevsky, who said that he couldn’t imagine a great person who had not known some kind of suffering. And what we try to do with our children is somehow to limit that. But we realize that part of their maturing has to do with how they learn to handle life. And we don’t want to leave them defenseless, do we? So, what you’re raising is a very big set of questions.

Now, you mentioned that transhumanism attempts to solve some of this vulnerability. And of course, some things are very good. I wear glasses, and they enhance my vision, and they’re very important. But this idea of Harari’s, where he sets two agenda items for the 21st century. Firstly, to abolish physical death, to solve it as a technical medical problem, and then to enhance human happiness by genetic engineering and cyborg engineering and so forth.

I take a very radical view of that. When people hold out this promise to me, I simply say to them, “You’re too late.” The problem of physical death was solved 20 centuries ago, because I think there’s strong evidence that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. And the problem, therefore, of developing some kind of immortality was simultaneously solved with that, because Christ promises to those that trust him and follow him, that he will eventually raise them from the dead. And that will be the best uploading you can ever imagine of brains, body, and everything else. So I take a very radical view that the transhumanist ideal is bound to fail, and there are deeper reasons behind that as well.

The Biological Truism and the Future’s Unpredictability

JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, so there’s also a biological truism on the genetic front. And so, for example, and it’s summed up in the phrase, “there is no breeding for evolutionary fitness.” Like you cannot rationally breed a variant of cattle, for example, that are going to be more successful at surviving in the ecology of cattle. It’s not possible. And part of the reason for that, as far as I can tell, it’s a deep problem.

Part of the reason for that is that the horizon of the future actually transforms unpredictably, like actually unpredictably, technically unpredictably. It’s not deterministic. And what that means is that you cannot make a rational calculation that will determine a priori what direction evolution should go in, in order to be more successful. And it’s also for that reason that what the evolutionary process does is capitalize on actual random chance in order to produce variants that can meet the transforming horizon of the future.

And so, now, the theory has been forever that genetic mutation is random. And part of the reason for that is that part of its mechanism, there are a variety, one of its mechanisms is the damage of DNA molecules by cosmic rays, which is definitely random. But you know, there was a study published a year ago, or two years ago, in Nature. This is so interesting and bears on our issues here, that even though the mechanism of variability at the DNA molecule level is truly random, there are repair mechanisms that fix damage to DNA molecules. And there’s a hierarchy of genes such that some genes are so crucial to morphological development that if they mutate, death is virtually certain, or severe limitation, right, on the reproductive front, virtually certain.

Whereas there are other variations that are permissible within the realm of likely survivability. And the accuracy of the repair mechanisms is proportionate to the importance of the genetic code. The genes that are most crucial to survival are repaired with 100% accuracy. So, there’s room for variation at the fringe.

The Fallacy of Self-Engineered Evolution

Now, the reason I brought that up is partly because there’s an implication in the futurist, post-humanist types, that they could breed a better person by rational means. But that means accepting the proposition a priori, that you can compute what constitutes better rationally, that you actually know enough about that. And that’s also a derivation of the notion that we can create our own values. And I don’t think any of that’s actually tenable.

I think it’s likely to produce all sorts of catastrophic, unpredicted outcomes. That’s much more likely, like those would be mutations that are counterproductive in every way, so to speak. That’s much more likely than the notion that we’re going to hit the target more squarely by mucking about with our Luciferian rationality.

Questioning Evolutionary Assumptions

DR. JOHN LENNOX: I think that’s absolutely right. But it raises a number of other questions because the tacit assumption against a lot of this, and it was formulated recently, that evolution has brought us to where we are in the present and intelligent design will bring us to our stated goal in the future. And I, like you, I deny the second proposition.

But the first is beginning to look very shaky indeed. Now, I’m not a biologist, but I do study a lot of the recent developments called the third wave in biology, which are associated with systems biology, Denis Noble and James Shapiro and so on, who now question seriously the whole Darwinian scheme, the neo-Darwinist explanation, because although it still accounts for variation, they’re now pretty clear it accounts for very little else. And statements like Lin Margula saying that it’s dead. And my colleague here, Denis Noble, who founded systems biology, says that it’s not fit for purpose. It doesn’t need to be modified and therefore replaced.

And therefore, I suppose part of my skepticism comes from mathematics. We’ve always been skeptical about the idea that random processes can increase information as distinct from variant. So I have huge problems with this, which is why I wrote a book about it recently.

The Dangers of Pursuing a Superhuman Future

So the two problems are, for me, one, I do not really believe that Darwinian evolution does all that people think it does. It certainly does something. But secondly, that looking towards the future, the idea that we will take it into our hands and intelligently move towards the goal of a superhuman, I think is immensely dangerous because it’s the creation of God. And there’s a lovely little quote from a conference recently that I picked up, a biology conference, and a student was there and she said, “Oh, it sounds as if you’re creating God” to the speaker. And he says, “Exactly, that is exactly what we’re trying to do.” And I do think that’s doomed to failure for the reasons that you have been so explicit about.

The Limits of Technological Transcendence

JORDAN B PETERSON: Yeah, well, you know, you might aim at creating God, but that doesn’t mean that the transcendent entity that you produce will be God.

DR. JOHN LENNOX: Absolutely not.

JORDAN B PETERSON: So, right, right. I mean, you’d have to have a fair bit of hubris to assume that you would hit the target that exactly. So I’ve been thinking about, you know, you mentioned when we were talking about the dangers of transhumanism and the abolition of man, you know, you rightly pointed out very rapidly that, well, you know, you have reading glasses and you’re pretty damn happy with that. You have these prostheses that help you ameliorate your vulnerability and you wouldn’t give them up and you do recognize them as positive goods. And, you know, you could say with a fair bit of credibility that the fact that you have reading glasses is one way that you’ve transcended your mortal limitation. Now, not entirely.

Ethical Considerations in Scientific Advancement

Now we’re faced with the problem of given our advanced technological capability, there are a variety of biological limitations that in principle we could transcend. And then we might say, well, which of those should we transcend? And so I have a complicated answer to that. You tell me what you think about this.

You know, I thought a long while back about the problem of lying, you know, because it’s reasonable for a young child or a young adult for that matter to ask the question, well, why shouldn’t I just lie all the time if I can get what I want and I can avoid unpleasant responsibility by doing so? And every child knows this, which is and every adult for that matter, which is why we lie, because we assume that we can shirk off a certain unpleasant responsibility or we can gain an opportunity. And, like, what the hell? Why not do it?

The Moral Imperative for Truth

And so I thought about that for a long time. It’s like, well, what exactly is the problem here? And then I realized, you know, when you’ll be times in your life where very, very complicated dilemmas will confront you like life and death situations, and you’ll be suffering. And so will the people around you. And that will be no joke. And then you bloody well better be. You better have a clear head at that moment, because if you make the wrong decision, you’re going to take the catastrophe that surrounds you and you’re really going to turn it into something indistinguishable from hell.

And then you might say, well, how can you be sure that you have a clear head when the storms come? And the answer is, well, how about if you don’t allow the detritus in your vision to accumulate voluntarily? Right. How about you don’t blind yourself with lies? How about you don’t pollute the very mechanism that orients you in the world so that you have something to rely on when the difficulties come?

Navigating the Post-Human Realm with Wisdom

And I would say maybe it’s the same thing on the moral front. Right. Because maybe the answer to what should our limitations be on the scientific front isn’t a list of prohibitions in the explicit knowledge realm, but something like we should bloody well be sure that if we’re going to be good scientists, that we’re truly ethically oriented so that when a technological possibility makes itself manifest to us, we have enough wisdom to judge whether or not that’s a direction that wise people would walk down.

So I read this book a while back. It was written by a KGB agent, and he purported to have knowledge of chemical weapons research program in the former Soviet Union. And the goal of the program was to generate a hybrid of Ebola and smallpox and then to aerosolize it for large-scale distribution. And he reported that the Soviets had killed a number of people, 500 or so, accidentally as a release of some of the chemical compounds or biological compounds this lab had been producing.

But, you know, it made me think, because technically, scientifically, outside the realm of ethics and subjective value, there’s no reason why, how might we breed an Ebola-smallpox hybrid. There’s no reason that that’s not a valid scientific question, right, from the perspective of the pure facts. If the facts have no value, then any fact is worth pursuing, any knowledge is worth pursuing.

The Ethical Dilemma of Scientific Exploration

But if you’re sensible and you look at something like that, you think, well, if you’re an ethical scientist and you think something like, should I hybridize smallpox and Ebola, the answer should be no, right? That’s just a road you’re not going to walk down. And if you have any wisdom, it’s going to be obvious that that’s a bad road.

And so, it also seems to me that in order to deal with the catastrophic possibilities of the post-human realm, that we’re going to have to become wise enough as scientists not to make that sort of egregious Luciferian error. And I don’t think we can do that by abandoning our traditional metaphysics. I think that won’t work, to say the least.

DR. JOHN LENNOX: Absolutely, it won’t work because what we’re raising now is a parallel question to the question of truth. It’s the question of the existence of the concept of right and wrong and defining them. And if you’ve got no transcendent reference point, you end up with Dostoevsky rightly saying, “If God does not exist, then everything is permissible.” He didn’t mean that atheists couldn’t behave, of course they can, but he meant there’s no rational justification for distinguishing between right and wrong. And we’ve got to face that.

The Inconsistency of the Lie

On the question of lying, it’s very interesting to me that the whole condition humaine arose from the lie originally, “you shall be as gods knowing good and evil.” And you were talking about people thinking, why shouldn’t I lie and so on? Well, of course, one of the arguments is that people who take that view, if you lie to them and accuse them of something they don’t believe to be true, for instance, accuse them of murder or theft or something like that, you’ll soon see that they believe in truth and they want the truth about themselves to be known. So it’s entirely inconsistent.

Of course, it’s up to them to take that view if they want to, but it’s not one of those things that follows one of your rules of life, that you want to be able to apply to others what you apply to yourself.

Transcendence and Moral Guidelines

JORDAN B PETERSON: So that knowing good and evil, so I think the Luciferian temptation is that part of that offering of becoming as gods is to offer to people the possibility of defining good and evil as subjective creatures, right?

So, the prohibition that God places on humanity in Genesis is to not eat of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. And it’s a very complicated narrative trope, but one of the implications is that there are moral guidelines that are absolute that aren’t within the human realm of the knowledge, it’s partly the knowledge, the ability to manipulate, the ability to change, or even to define.

The fundamental moral propositions are transcendent of axiomatic, and they’re not in the proper domain of human maneuver. It’s something like that, and the serpent says to man, “No, you can take it all, you can have full knowledge even of the moral axioms,” and that seems to be something that’s off limits if the game of being itself is to progress without catastrophe. It’s something like that.

The Importance of Vertical Morality

DR. JOHN LENNOX: I think it’s exactly like that, because what is interesting about Genesis is that the first encounter we have with morality in the pages of Genesis, morality is defined not horizontally between humans, but vertically between humans and God, and that’s crucial. It’s God that defines it ultimately, so there is a transcendence from the very beginning. And it’s the loss of that transcendence that we’re seeing damaging our culture today, because we’ve lost that common sense of values that, however distorted it has been over the centuries, that we did owe to the biblical tradition, and now we wander in total confusion.

And it interests me greatly that the pressure, particularly of young people today, is to look inside for answers to these questions, when what we need to be teaching them is, “No, look outside, and have your mind open to the fact that transcendence is real, and that there is a God, and there is something bigger, there’s something more than materialism is giving you.”

Sources of Moral Knowledge

JORDAN B PETERSON: Okay, so let’s take that apart a bit. You could imagine that there could be three sources of moral knowledge, that’s the kind of knowledge that orients you in the world, and one source could be the subjective. Now, we’ve already talked about the limitations there, is that, well, you don’t live very long, and what the hell do you know, and what do you mean by the subjective, like which part of you. And then there’s the danger of elevating yourself to the status of final moral arbiter, which is a kind of Luciferian presumption.

Okay, so those seem like bad pitfalls. The next objection, you might say, is like, okay, well, you can’t do it just subjectively, “I am who I am,” which is certainly the proclamation in our culture. You could do it by consensus, you know, and that’s more of a view that, well, the group gets together and sort of decides by general agreement what right and wrong is, and that can shift with time and place. But as long as everybody is willing to abide by the same principles, then we can define them canonically as good, or as good.

The Perils of Consensus

But the problem with that is, you run…

DR. JOHN LENNOX: Yeah, go on, there’s a huge problem with that. You tell me what your problem with it is, and then I’ll tell you mine.

JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, my problem with that is the Nazi Germany problem. It’s like, well, what the hell happens when the whole herd stampedes towards hell? If you’re a consensus person and there’s nothing else there, it’s like, well, there’s no hell, that’s consensus, and so the consensus by definition is right. And so if everyone decides that no Jews would be better, who the hell are you to stand in the way? And, you know, if you’re willing to stand up and say, well, you should stand in the way, well, right, so upon what grounds do you make that claim? Because it’s not merely subjective, so that brings us back to the problem of transcendent morality. Okay, so you were going to talk about the problems of consensus.

The Utilitarianism Dilemma

DR. JOHN LENNOX: Yes, it’s exactly right. That is the problem with utilitarianism. Treating others as you want them to treat you, and by consensus is fine if you’ve got equal centers of power. If you’ve got a whole lot of equal centers of power vying with one another, then you can say, if you don’t do this, I won’t do that. But the very interesting thing about the case in point you mentioned, Nazi Germany, Hitler, in his political youth, made treaties, but he tore them up once he had the power.

And if people say, “You shouldn’t do that,” he said, “What do you mean you shouldn’t? I’ve got the power.” So it doesn’t answer the question, why ought you to go with the herd and murder so many Jews? And that’s a huge weakness. It’s all right if you’re dividing ice cream among children, then utilitarianism is fine. Give an equal amount to all of them or you’ll be in trouble. But at the higher level, it’s shot through with this problem of the total absence of any transcendence. The “oughtness” has to come from above.

The Fallacy of Might Makes Right

JORDAN B PETERSON: Okay, so now you talked about power there, you know, and one of the radical claims of the postmodern types, especially people like Foucault, is that the fundamental motivating drive of humanity, and perhaps the cosmos itself, is power. Now, you know, I think everything Foucault thought about everything is to be taken with a gigantic grain of salt, because, you know, he was quite the awful creature. And I think he had every reason for putting forward the proposition that there’s nothing other than power, because that justified everything he did that was done purely on the basis of power.

But there’s another problem that emerges with that proclamation, which is a kind of self-evident problem. And I would think this is something the rationalists have a very difficult time with, which is, if I can compel you to do something, why don’t the next two propositions follow logically? First of all, if I can compel you, the mere fact that I can indicates precisely that I’m actually a better man than you, because if you were better than me, you could compel me. And of course, this is might makes right, but might makes right is a very powerful doctrine. And almost all the pre-Christian pagan societies operated on that basis, in the most fundamental manner.

And the aristocratic justification was something like, well, you’re a peasant, and the cosmos has established that you’re a peasant, and I’m an aristocrat, and so screw you. And actually, morally speaking, because if you weren’t a useless slug, you wouldn’t be a peasant. And that’s a very, very difficult argument to generate a counter-proposition too and the corollary argument is well if I can force you, clearly I’m more powerful than you are, and that means, but I have every moral right to do so, and in fact you don’t even get to object because you’re too lowly to object. And that’s the way of the world, man.

Questioning the Basis of Values

DR. JOHN LENNOX: Yeah, but it reflects a series of values that needs to be questioned. Where do these values come from? To argue that the cosmos made me an aristocrat and you a serf is a very tenuous argument. And in the end, it seems to me that we’ve got to ask ourselves the fundamental question, what basis have we for valuing human beings as unique?

And again, I refer to your comment on Genesis. We’re made in the image of God. That gives us huge dignity and value. It was something my parents got across to me when I was very young. And as a Christian, even at the bigger level, the idea that there’s a higher value even than the created value, which is the whole topic of Exodus. And I was utterly fascinated by your conversations on Exodus, because the valuation of people that is reflected in the Passover lamb and the sacrifice, in that God accepts them on the basis of a sacrifice.

And it seems to me, that actually leads me, now that I think of it, into another direction. One of the problems of establishing rules of any kind seems to me that many of them bypass the heart of Exodus. It’s very noticeable that the law of the commandments comes after the Passover sacrifice, after the redemption.

The Foundation of Sacrifice in Christianity

In the New Testament, the parallel thing for Christians is the sacrifice is first; the acceptance is settled. It’s not on the basis of your moral behavior or life, but that empowers you to live so that the moral commandments in the letters of Paul, for example, come after the discussion of the sacrifice that gives you a true value. Now, that is something that is lacking at the heart of our culture.

We have no answer, ultimately, to the big questions of guilt and the whole problem. Nobody likes the word sin, but that’s what it is: the moral damage we cause to ourselves and other people. And setting up rules and regulations is hugely important. We need them. They’re in the New Testament and in the Old Testament. But I notice that one of the major messages of Exodus is first, redemption. And redemption is by the blood of the Passover lamb, to put it in biblical language, and then the teaching. And the same exactly in the New Testament.

Genesis and the Concept of Sacrifice

JORDAN B PETERSON: Let’s delve into that. Well, so what appears to happen, as far as I can tell, in the post-paradise lost transition in Genesis is that human beings are called upon to sacrifice, right? And you see that particularly in the story of Cain and Abel, because two patterns of sacrifice are laid out in that story. And one is genuine sacrifice, and that’s Abel. And the other is half-hearted, self-deceptive, instrumental sacrifice, and that’s Cain.

Not only does that not go very well for Cain, it engenders bitter, murderous resentment, and then eventually the horrors of war. Because Tubal Cain, who’s Cain’s descendant, is the first artificer of weapons of war. And it’s after that story that the flood comes, and also the Tower of Babel. And so, there are two forms of sacrifice outlined.

The Necessity of Sacrifice in Focus

And someone reading that who’s a rationalist might object, well, why is sacrifice necessary? And I think that’s actually an utterly clueless rejoinder. And here’s why. So, for example, if you’re going to be a scientist, you know, there was a woman, I think her name was Barbara McClintock, and she spent her whole life studying variations of color in so-called Indian corn. And the consequence of that was she discovered a variety of facts about genetic structure that led to technological improvements in cancer treatment, but she labored in isolation for decades.

Now, you might say, well, what was her sacrifice? And that’s pretty obvious. Her sacrifice was that there was a trillion things in the world she could have been interested in and pursued. And she sacrificed every single one of them to the curiosity that made itself manifest in relationship to this strange genetic anomaly.

The Maturation Through Sacrifice

Right? And the thing is, every time you focus your attention on one thing, instead of the multitude of other things, you’re making a sacrifice. Okay, so you have to sacrifice in order to attend and act. There’s no way out of it. And so then the next question emerges. Here’s another element of sacrifice. If you’re immature, there’s only the present. As you become more mature, there’s the future at longer and longer durations, and there’s other people. And so what you do as you mature is you sacrifice you and the present to the future and everyone else. And if you don’t do that, then you stay dangerously immature and psychopathic, right? Because you’re completely self-centered and narcissistic. And so that’s not good for you because narcissistic psychopaths tend to fail, and it’s certainly not good for everyone else.

The Ultimate Sacrifice and Its Meaning

So you have to sacrifice to attend and act, and you have to sacrifice to mature. And then you might say, well, what’s the sacrifice that’s most pleasing to God? And the answer to that has to be something like, well, yourself, right? You have to offer up everything to what’s transcendent. And I think that is the sacrifice that you described that’s an a priori act before the coming of the law, right? It’s the willingness to lay, it’s the willingness to voluntarily lay everything on the line in the pursuit of truth and life more abundant, something like that. And I think that is the pattern that’s laid out in the Christian story. It looks to me like that’s the pattern.

Reflections on Different Kinds of Sacrifice

DR. JOHN LENNOX: Yeah. Well, let me comment on that. I’m very interested that you mentioned Barbara McClintock, because actually she discovered the so-called jumping gene, and she really was a pioneer that’s led to this third wave of biology I mentioned earlier. That’s just a point aside, but it’s extremely interesting. She was a pioneer, and she sacrificed a great deal.

But it seems to me that we may need to think in terms of different kinds of sacrifice. You see, at the heart of Christianity is not my sacrifice, but God’s sacrifice on my part, a sacrifice that I could not have made, but that sacrifice demands my sacrifice. “Offer up your body as a living sacrifice” is what Paul says to me as a Christian, but I’m prepared to do that. The power to do that comes from the fact that my acceptance of God depends on a sacrifice that’s entirely outside of me, but can be appropriated by me, and that is when Christ died and rose again.

Maternal Sacrifice and Its Deeper Meaning

Now, this goes very deep, but it goes to the heart of God doing something so that He can forgive me and deal with the guilt that I’ve incurred by messed-up behavior and all the rest of it. That’s one thing. Now, in response to that, yes, of course, we’re called upon to sacrifice. There are all these different levels. A mother sacrifices for her child. She doesn’t sacrifice to some God. She gives up her time and her energy and sometimes slaves very hard working to make ends meet for the children. So, she’s given her all in that sense and at that level, but there’s a much more fundamental level that deals with the problem of human relationship with God that’s gone wrong ever since Genesis 3.

The Ethical Implications of Sacrifice

JORDAN B PETERSON: So, you mentioned that the mothers, the maternal sacrifice, and so there were archaic societies where people sacrificed their children to the gods, and that meant in some sense that they were giving up something that was valuable and vital to please fate. But what we have come to regard as the appropriate sacrifice on the part of the mother is, as you pointed out, it’s herself to her child. And there’s something deeper there in that, which is that it’s the voluntary sacrifice of the more powerful, and that would be the mother in this case, to the least powerful, and so that’s the service of the higher to the lower. As the exemplar of the highest form of service, that’s the proper form of sacrifice.

And I saw the Pieta when I was at St. Peter’s the couple of times I’ve been there, that great Michelangelo statue, and that really is emblematic to me of something approximating the female crucifixion, because you have Christ offering his own being in this cataclysmic way to the insigencies of being, let’s say, but you have Mary making an offering that’s of equivalent pain in some ways, right, because I think it’s a toss-up whether having yourself destroyed by the mob, for example, is a more painful experience than the experience of a mother watching her child be torn apart by the ravenous mob, right.

But we would also say, I think to the degree that we have any sense, that a mother who is performing her role properly, she offers herself to the glorious adventure of her child, right, she puts herself secondary to her child’s needs. But she’s also doing that in a way that offers the child to enter upon the full adventure of the world, and that would mean the voluntary acceptance of something like suffering and death, right, because that’s the destiny of everyone.

The Dual Nature of Maternal Sacrifice

Now, a mother could try to protect her child against that and against the knowledge of that, but that turns her into, well, a devouring mother, right? Someone who destroys the burgeoning ability of the child to thrive. So, there’s a dual acceptance of sacrifice on the part of the properly behaving mother. She has to sacrifice herself to the child, especially in infancy, but then she has to be willing to let the child go to be broken by the world. And that is the route to, well, as you pointed out, that’s part of the divine pattern. It seems to be part of the divine pattern of eternal salvation. It’s something like that.

It’s very paradoxical, right, because it means you have to take the full weight of mortality onto yourself voluntarily and maintain your moral orientation, and that that’s actually the key to, well, that’s the key to paradise, I suppose. That’s one way of thinking about it. That’s a key to reacquiring what you lost in childhood.

Embracing Mortality with Hope

DR. JOHN LENNOX: Yeah. Taking the full weight of morality and mortality upon yourself is hugely important. It’s transformed, of course, if we believe that death is not the end. And as I am convinced that Christ rose from the dead, this introduces up, for me, a huge new world of possibility. That I am mortal, that death is, physical death, that is, is not going to be the end. So as I get older, my own personal orientation towards the future gets brighter and brighter, because I know that whatever happens, if I am taken by cancer or COVID or anything else, that there has been a new life that I already possess, according to the New Testament, a power within me that enables me to live but will also raise me from the dead on the last day. And that’s a huge hope.

Of course, it’s the central Christian hope, and it would be unfortunate not to hear that side of Christianity. And I feel many people today don’t listen to the whole, in a sense, the whole meta-narrative that Christianity offers, because they would see in it that there’s a real prospect for the future, that it does answer the problem of physical death in a much better way than the possibly pseudo-promises of transhumanist engineering.

Voluntary Exposure to Fear

JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, all right, let me approach that psychologically, to some degree. When you’re talking about anything that’s theological, the psychological can only make inroads to a certain depth. But look, one of the things that psychologists have agreed upon on the clinical front for the last five or six decades, I would say, so quite a long time, is that if you voluntarily, if you can voluntarily get your clients to expose themselves to the things that they’re afraid of and are avoiding as they’re making their way to their destination.

That makes them braver and more competent. It’s not exactly that it reduces their fear. It produces within them a revelation of their own strength. So, for example, if you take a woman who’s agoraphobic and who is afraid of getting on an elevator because she thinks she’ll have a heart attack on the elevator and be unable to get to a hospital and will die stupidly and loudly in front of the crowd in the elevator, because that’s the typical agoraphobic fantasy. You can teach her to reacquaint herself with elevators through graduated exposure, right? And so you’re basically taking the thing that she’s most afraid of and then feeding it to her in graduated doses.

Theological Insights on Facing Fear

Now, what happens is she not only becomes able to take the elevator, but a lot of fears that had beset her also vanished simultaneously. And the reason for that is that she sees that when she encounters something she thought was beyond her capability, there’s something within her that reveals itself that’s bigger than the fear.

DR. JOHN LENNOX: Oh, but there’s also a theological aspect to that. I mean, I think that psychological insight is very important. That’s another example of it is, of course, if someone’s afraid of flying, you need to get them onto a plane. You need to equate them with the actual reality of which they are afraid. But you also get that in situations theologically where people are afraid of the future. And why is that? Because they don’t know enough about what God offers to people to conquer those fears. It doesn’t mean they’ll disappear completely, but it means that they can orientate themselves and come to terms with those things. So I would take that insight absolutely because I use it all the time myself with other people.

The Power of Faith in Overcoming Fear

JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, then people shrink away if they don’t have that faith. And so on the mythological front, you see this reflected in the dragon encounter stories that Tolkien made so famous, for example. And the idea is that if you can find the dragon that lurks in the deepest cavern, that’s where the gold is hoarded.

And so the Christian notion of resurrection is an extension of that corpus of ideas because it’s predicated on the notion that if you forthrightly confronted the whole panoply of the horrors of death in its multiple forms, death and betrayal and the catastrophe of the mob, if you faced all of that, what you would see as a consequence is not so much eternal darkness as the eternal resurrection of the light. And it’s a limit case, right?

And it’s hard for me to know what to make of that, again, on the psychological front, because it’s a truism, definitely, both in the narrative domain and in the practical clinical domain, is that if people can find it within themselves to voluntarily shoulder the burden of confronting what they’re afraid of, they definitely get braver and more competent. And some of that’s because they get informed about themselves, but there are also even biological transformations that take place.

You know, if you voluntarily face a stressor, entirely different psychophysiological systems are manifest in you as a consequence of the voluntary confrontation, that would be manifest if it was imposed on you involuntarily. It’s a whole different spirit that inhabits you. That’s a very good way of thinking about it. It’s genuinely a different spirit that inhabits you, and it makes itself manifest all the way from the cellular level upward. And the habitual practice of that attitude of voluntary confrontation can switch on new genes. It doesn’t happen conceptually; it actually transforms you physiologically, and we have no idea what the limit of that is.

DR. JOHN LENNOX: There’s a very interesting, in fact, brilliant illustration of that principle in the New Testament, in the famous story of the man Lazarus and his two sisters. Jesus is with his disciples in Galilee, a long way from where they lived, and they send him a message and say that Lazarus, the one you love, is ill. He was a friend of Jesus, and Jesus doesn’t do anything to come to them and allows the man to die.

And in that situation, he says to his disciples, “Let’s now go to them,” and explains that Lazarus is actually dead. And they get really scared, and they say, “Are you going to go to Judea again? Look, they were seeking to kill you. Why do you go there again?” It’s like committing suicide. And Thomas, one of them, the doubter, says, “Let’s go with him that we might die with him.” But when they go, what happens is that Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, and that’s the light that transforms everything. If they had stayed away and not gone with him into what was potential danger, they would have never learned that he could raise the dead, so they stayed in the darkness.

And Jesus explains the thing in a very interesting metaphor. He talks about himself as the Light of the world. And he says, “You know, God has made the solar system in a very interesting way, that He’s placed the light that we see by during the day outside our world. The sun’s outside our world. So if a person walks in the night, they will stumble because,” and here’s the observation, it’s a very interesting one, “because the light isn’t in them.” Now, the light is in some deep-sea creatures, as we know. They’ve got luminescence and all the rest, and I often wish I had a built-in light in my head, and sometimes I wear one, a little lamp.

But the point is, he’s saying, “Look, the light isn’t in you. I am the Light of the world. He that follows me will have the light of life.” And I just imagine that very simplistically. Ahat if here’s the light, and here’s me, and the light moves, I’ll end up in the dark. But if I move with the light, I will have the light all the time. And that’s exactly what happened to these people, consumed with fear. They went with him thinking they’d be killed, and then they discovered he could raise the dead, and that transformed everything. So that seems to me to be a very powerful exposition of what you’re saying.

JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, look, John, I think that’s a good place to end, actually. We’re at about the 90-minute mark.

DR. JOHN LENNOX: Are we really?

JORDAN B PETERSON: Yes, yes, we are, surprisingly enough. For everyone watching and listening, I’m going to talk to John a bit more about how his interests in mathematics and science and religion develop simultaneously on the autobiographical front. So you can join us on the Daily Wire Plus platform for that additional half an hour if you’re inclined to. Otherwise, thank you, John, very much for talking to me today. I will be in touch with you if you don’t mind about the next Exodus-like seminar that I’m going to host in Miami. Maybe you’d like to come and join us. You’d be a very interesting contributor, as far as I can tell.

And that was really a conception-transforming experience, not only for me, but for everyone else who participated. Man, it was quite the trip.

DR. JOHN LENNOX: Well, that’s for sure. Thank you so much. It’s been more than I can say a pleasure to meet you. And I would be delighted to join you on that if I could. Os Guinness is a very close friend of mine. And I was interested to see that at one stage you had two people from Cambridge, but nobody from Oxford.

JORDAN B PETERSON: So, yeah, well, it’s probably just sampling error, you know. For everybody watching and listening, thank you very much for your time and attention. And join us on the Daily Wire Plus platform if you’re inclined, to the film crew here for setting us up today through the thunderstorm. Much appreciated. And we’ll see everyone watching and listening on the next podcast. Thanks, John.

DR. JOHN LENNOX: Pleasure, a pleasure. Bye-bye.

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