EP. 28: john lennox, PhD - podcast transcript

Brad Cooper (00:05):

This is Brad Cooper with Purpose Nation…great to be with you. We’ve been on a bit of a break from the podcast due to COVID-19, but we’re back and really looking forward to today’s interview.

Up until now, this had been an audio only podcast, but as you can see, if you are watching this on YouTube anyway, we’re moving to video. Now, also due to COVID, the home office is in a little bit of a…transition…let’s say. I’m sure all you parents out there know the feeling…so please bear with me on the virtual space background I know it’s not perfect, but hoping to get a little better set-up coming soon, so stay tuned for that.

OK, to kick of our first video edition of the podcast, I’m so excited today to have as our guest, someone who really, really likes to keep folks like Richard Dawkins and others on their toes…Dr. John Lennox. Dr. Lennox, thank you so much and welcome to the Purpose Nation podcast.

Dr. Lennox (01:09):

Thank you very much.

Brad Cooper (01:11):

Great, great to have you. Thanks for being with me. Uh, hopefully you've been holding up okay. Uh, with all the things going on in COVID, and I know you've been doing a lot of calls and it's evening there in Oxford and getting late. So appreciate being with us, uh, late, late your time. For those of you who don't know Dr. Lennox, he's professor Emeritus of mathematics at Oxford University, University of Oxford, and he's an internationally renowned speaker and author. He has some amazing books spanning the field of science and philosophy and religion. He's traveled the world, defending the rationality of Christianity and belief in God and he is also famous, as I said, for some great debates with folks like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and Peter Singer. Hopefully, I got all of that right there, uh, Dr. Lennox, but, um, just an amazing, brilliant, brilliant guy. I'm so glad to have him on the podcast. I have the bio here in front of me, but what's one of the things that maybe we don't know about you, that's not in your bio, any, any like hobbies or special talents we don't know about?

Dr. Lennox (02:09):

Well, as a little hobby, I like watching the stars and I've got an observatory in my garden where there’s tenant's telescope, but unfortunately the skies over here tend to be very cloudy. So I haven't been out for a few nights, but I was lucky at that drama, the galaxy, the other night, also other hobbies are languages and a bit of birdwatching. So I keep myself interested in lots of things.

Brad Cooper (02:41):

That's great. Yeah. So you picked a great place, I guess, and I did too. I grew up in upstate New York and it was cloudy and rainy there kind of a little bit like England. Um, I've got the stars here in my background and we just had the space capsule to the dragons capsule. So you can maybe try to see ISS the International Space Station flight over this week as well. So that's great! And Irvine, believe it or not is one of the best places for birdwatching. We have like hundreds of species of birds here. So if you're ever in the neighborhood, my son who loves birdwatching, we'll take you out and show you our birds here. We have some great, some great birds to see. So, great also to hear about and see a new feature length film that Dr. Lennox stars in. If I can use that word along with Kevin Sorbo, also a movie star, and it's called Against the Tide. I really want to talk about that. It's just a great movie. I encourage everyone to go see it. It is going to be in limited release in theaters starting this week. It'll also be available for small groups, I guess in watching and streaming and things like that. So Kevin Sorbo, who's kind of the host of the movie. Everybody knows him from Hercules and movies like God's Not Dead and Let There Be Light. It was a great, great, great film, really well done. Excited about it. How did that come about? How did you get involved with that film and what was your reasons for doing it?

Dr. Lennox (04:07):

Well, it goes back quite a long way, and it's a Pensmore Films production. And the director of Pensmore Foundation is a physicist called Steve Huff who's very interested in the science and God debate. He was very concerned about naturalism and the way in which it's affecting, not only the Academy, but all around the world and skills and colleges. He came across one of my earlier books, I think it was God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? and he was visiting Oxford, and he looked me up and we became friends, and he invited me over to the U S to several conferences. Some of them in Westminster Theological Seminary, but in his home one evening, they showed God's Not Dead. I hadn't seen it before. I was intrigued and very surprised to discover that, right at the beginning of it, the Christian student challenged the atheist professor who was played by Kevin Sorbo was some of my arguments. That was the first I'd ever heard that my arguments were in the film. Thinking about that later, I'm sure it was Steve Huff came up with the idea of making a film and involving Kevin Sorbo, not now as the Hollywood actor, but more as a person who's intrigued to discover who this professor Oxford is, who leaves his comfort zone to challenge people like Richard Dawkins. And that's how it got started. And eventually we filmed in Oxford and in Israel and the Kara's productions team was mainly responsible for that in the United Kingdom. So that's the Genesis of it as far as I can recall it.

Brad Cooper (06:08):

That's great. And yeah, he does an excellent job in it. Kevin Sorbo in kind of exploring your life. I really enjoyed how it's sort of a parallel between your life and also at the same time simultaneously talking about some of the central themes that you put forward, you know, as a defense for the Christian faith. So interweaving those two, those two elements. One of things I enjoyed, too, about it and learning, kind of learning about your birdwatching and astronomy, uh, was also learning a couple of the things I didn't know about you, or didn't know as much. Two of them, I'll start with one, which was growing up in Northern Ireland. It seemed, very interesting in terms of the way you talked about that and, and how that experience maybe had an influence on you later. In the United States, you might hear, we have some interesting conflicts going on internally in our own country. So the timing seemed interesting as well for that. Tell me, tell me about that. What was it like growing up in Northern Island?

Dr. Lennox (07:08):

Well, when I was a teenager, they so-called troubles. The sectarian tension was mounting, and it was fairly clear that it would end up in violence, which it did for quite a number of years. And it was a divided country. There was a lot of hatred and bigotry, and my parents were very unusual because they were key Christians, but they weren't bigoted at all in the sense that my father ran a store and he employed equally across the communities as much as he could and got bombed for it. It was very dangerous to do that. I asked him once why he took the risk. He said, " Look, as far as I'm concerned, all men and women, irrespective of what they believe are made in the image of God and therefore are valuable, and I'm going to treat them like that." That was a very profound lesson for me. I've tried as best I can to put it into practice so that I want to enter into debates, say with perhaps very hostile opponents, but respect them as human beings. But the second thing was that my parents are very deeply convinced Christians. They lived it credibly, but they didn't force it on me. They gave me space to think, and even encouraged me to think about other world views. So I didn't grow up with a lot of baggage. That was a tremendous foundation for going to Cambridge and entering the debate right from the very word go.

Brad Cooper (08:44):

That's amazing. That's an amazing experience to grow up in. When did you start to have an interest in math or in science was at a young age? Later on?

Dr. Lennox (08:54):

Oh no, very, fairly young, well, I was interested in everything I wanted, first of all, to be a linguist. Then I moved on from that to be interested in electrical engineering, because I became a hand radio operator when I was very young and that I used to learn foreign languages to learn, to speak them. That was a key as the film shows to me later work in both Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. But in the end, I was persuaded to go from mathematics simply to give me a chance to get to Cambridge because the school I was at had fairly varied quality in its teaching staff and only in mathematics, could they offer me the kind of level of teaching that gives me a chance of getting into Cambridge, which I eventually did.

Brad Cooper (09:49):

That's great. Did you in your travels, uh, so obviously Kevin Sorbo plays an atheist professor in God's Not Dead. I don't know if he was modeled after, you know, one of your debate partners that you may have run into the debates, but what was your experience in college? Did you ever run into the professor like Kevin Sorbo played or was it mostly were they accepting of Christians or what was your experience?

Dr. Lennox (10:12):

There was everything. There was every worldview represented and, and they'd quite early on in my undergraduate career, I got into conversation with a Nobel prize winner who tried to tell me that, in fact, he did tell me that if I kept on with this naive Christian faith, I'd never make it. I would suffer by comparison with my colleagues. They said, if you want to make a career in science, you'd give up your naive faith in God. That was a very important incident happened to someone that the age of 19, because I asked him what he had to offer me that was better than anything I got and what he had to offer me was something I happen to know about because I'd read CS Lewis. I said, well, if that's the case, I'll take the risk and I'll stay with what I've got. I've actually put that story into a much more recent book which is called Can Science Explain Everything? That set a compass bearing for me in life and I resolved that ever if ever I got into an academic position, for people might be prepared to listen to me, I would never browbeat anybody, but present them with evidence and then encourage them to make up their own minds.

Brad Cooper (11:37):

It sounded like you were standing against the tide early on. It seems like we've had a high tide, if we want to talk about that recently, maybe in the last ten years with new atheism and Richard Dawkins and others. What is causing, do you think, or what sparked maybe this high tide that we might be, seemed to be in right now?

Dr. Lennox (11:57):

Well, I think it's a very complex mix of different things. In academia, you look back to the time of the Huxleys and the time of Darwin and the whole fight of the Huxley's against what they called amateur clergyman, who were naturalists and then natural world. Huxleys wanted to close all the churches and put up statues to the goddess, Sophia, all that kind of stuff. That partly flowed, I think, from the enlightenment and then France, you had a very corrupt church and you could see that people react to it against it. Then there were the complexity lent the whole thing by Newton's genius and the clockwork universe that came out of his thinking and God tended to recede into the background. So there's a whole complex of things. I find it very difficult when people say what exactly causes this. It's very hard to say. The high tide of Dawkins and Hitchens and Cole, the difference between that and what before was the element of mockery and arrogance and railing against Christians. Very irrationally, I'm trying to bribe bait them. That has not been successful. I think that is very much past its height. Now, the tide is more in terms of political correctness. All this kind of things that you mustn't say anything to offend anybody else. So you can't have proper dialogue and a public space. We still have elements of all the other stuff as well, because it's a very complex world and to which we have to say something that hopefully makes sense to someone.

Brad Cooper (13:49):

Right. Well, and unfortunately they got to be well-known during their times and time. I think the name recognition for Richard Dawkins, unfortunately, is much higher than most of our scientists we have in the U S uh, so I think, you know, I think there was a survey done where 30% of people in United States, it's still not high recognize his name, but I think Francis Collins, who's one of our top scientists here, who was about 4%. So it's, it's unfortunate that when, when people think, and as Christians, especially here in United States, think of scientists, people like Richard Dawkins come to mind, but we're going to change that. We're hoping to change that. And hopefully Dr. John Lennox will come to mind when people think about science to think about scientists and mathematicians, um, the two things. So the two things I mentioned Northern Ireland, and the second one was you mentioned as well as the cold war, not many young people today were, have any of the idea of the cold war. My kids, for example, sure they hear, they see things in the news maybe and hear me talk about it. I am old enough to remember those days. So talk to us about that. What was your experience there and what was important about that in terms of your journey that you've been on?

Dr. Lennox (14:57):

Well, the fact that I got involved in that part of the world comes from my interest in languages. I am fluent German speaker and was fairly early on. And one of the things I did after completing my PhD and getting a university post was to do research in West Germany. I really got the language fluently having a year there. That opened up the possibility of my going to Eastern Europe. Because in those days, starting in Hungary, very few people spoke English. Many people spoke German as an aftermath of the Second World War. I started to visit those countries and particularly the German democratic Republic, which was heavily communist and the atheist. I went there a lot in the '70s and '80s speaking, mainly teaching scripture, and teaching the Bible. In addition to that, I became a Russian translator of mathematics and to English. I went after '89, I started going to Russia and there, again, experience huge entrance from the part of people in universities and students to make this very strange professor who was an academic and believed in God, that was fairly unusual for them.

Brad Cooper (16:38):

Well, and yeah, so, and you had mentioned earlier kind of in the age that we're in, in political correctness and even in the science community, right? Things you can, and can't say, um, so that's why to me, when I saw that in the film and your background there, again, to brought parallels to our current world, that we are unfortunately seeming to live in where there is a lot of censorship and people are afraid to say things that might go against against the tide, against the grain. I was going to ask you, so you all, you have a new book coming out and I believe it's called 2084. Is that right? What does that a book about?

Brad Cooper (17:16):

Okay.

Brad Cooper (17:17):

It sounds fascinating. It's artificial intelligence. Tell us about that.

Dr. Lennox (17:18):

Well, the title is 2084:Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity. And the book has several purposes. The first is to instruct people whether they're Christian or not as to exactly what artificial intelligence is and what it isn't and to demystify it. Also to indicate that there are two kinds of artificial intelligence and stuff that actually works at the Beaumont. Then there is the kind of futuristic quest for a superintelligence by genetically enhancing human beings or constructing life from Silicon or something like that. What I wanted to do was to get across to people that there are some very positive things that are being done by AI systems at the moment, such as the search for vaccine for COVID 19. But like a sharp AI can be used for good can be used for evil and the surveillance techniques, the photographic techniques that can recognize diseases, can be used to sort out criminals from a crowd, which is great, but can also be used as surveillance technology to suppress the minority so that there are huge ethical problems. One of the things I actually want to do is encourage young people, particularly Christians who are aside typically literate to get into this field. So they make a positive contribution on the one hand and are able to contribute to the ethical thinking on the other, because what's very obvious to most people is that the technological advances outpacedthe ethical underpinning and thinking, and we run into trouble. So people like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, the led Stephen Hawking and so on were scared of the developments. So that's why I wrote this book. That at least those are two of the reasons they're not the only reasons

Brad Cooper (19:32):

And what, I guess what's what scares you most as you look at that landscape, what concerns you the most?

Dr. Lennox (19:39):

Well, what concerns me most is the central issue of what is a human being. As a Christian, I believe human beings are unique because they're made in the image of God. And that's what gives them their value. As Jordan Peterson pointed out in a very interesting lecture on the first chapter of Genesis, they referred to the statement that God made men and women in his own image. And he said, that is the cornerstone of civilization. And then he said, we neglect it at our peril and we are neglecting it because one of the drivers in artificial general intelligence is to say, right, we've moved from the animal stage to the human stage, Mark I, but we don't need to stop there. We can now take control of our destiny and buy into the transhumanist vision and turn human beings into God's to quote Yuval Noah Harari. So I interact quite a lot with the book Homo Deus, which is a best seller. It's title tells the whole story, a man who is God, God man, which is Harari's his agenda for the 21st century. And I want to point out that this is a very ancient idea, and we need to think about it very carefully because that kind of thinking in the past has led to hundreds of millions of people dying. The Russians attempted in earlier years to construct a new man and to do all kinds of eugenic experiments and it absolutely disastrous. So the thinking here, how low it hasn't been realized yet, nonetheless, it's raising sufficient concern for people trying desperately. They got some kind of international ethical agreement so that we won't create whatever we do a superintelligence that would wipe humanity out, for instance. So there are huge questions and I simply wanted to separate the hype and the science fiction from the reality, but nevertheless, to point out the issues that are at stake here, and they're very important issues, particularly for Christians to think about.

Brad Cooper (21:51):

That's great. The book is 2084, and we'll have a link on our podcast page for more information about that and all of a Dr. Lennox, his other books, as well as the film Against the Tide. So talking about against the tide real quick. One of the lines in the movie, and I'm paraphrasing it a little bit, that you said, which was also very impactful to me. You talked about not standing alone, not wanting to stand alone against the tide and raising up other Christians to become interested in science and math and other fields. So that you're not the guy with the finger in the hole in the dike, you know, with the thumb in the dike. You're standing against the tide with others. What did you mean by that? And how best do you think we can do that to raise up to raise other Christians?

Dr. Lennox (22:42):

What we mean by that is we need to educate another generation in these things. In our country, a survey was done asking why people were leaving the church and turning their back on it. Their main answer by far was, they're not answering our questions. Therefore it's very important for pastors and churches and leaders to not try and deal with all of this stuff themselves, because many of them are not scientifically trained, but to use the scientists in their congregations to really develop and get interest going so that young people will know what they think about these issues. Because they're so interesting in their own right, once young people get to a certain level of understanding, then they can go on their own and become very powerful witnesses and society. But if the church doesn't deal with these issues, then that's an utter tragedy. There still is in some parts of the world that kind of empty intellectual realism as if that's godliness, when the very first commandment is love the Lord, your God, with your mind, that's the exact opposite.

Brad Cooper (23:57):

That's right. And the second commandment is to love your neighbor and what better way to love your neighbor than coming up with cures for COVID or curing some other disease.

Dr. Lennox (24:05):

Correct. Yes, that's right.

Brad Cooper (24:06):

Yes. So that's great and yes, and that's what we're about a purpose nation. We also did a survey of about a thousand folks here in the United States and very similar. One of the questions we asked was who do you go to for more information about science and technology issues that, like you said, they have questions. Who do you, who do you think they go to? Church going Christians here in the United States?

Brad Cooper (24:33):

Well, they probably go to the internet, I would imagine.

Brad Cooper (24:35):

They don't go to the internet. They don't go to a professor. They don't go to the news. They go to their pastor or their priest.

Dr. Lennox (24:41):

Um, well, all right. But yes, that's hopeless.

Brad Cooper (24:49):

That's right into what you were saying. So we need to educate them. Um, and we need to educate others. What would you say to a young person? So not everyone is, are the professors that you ran into in college, not everyone is like Kevin Sorbo's character in God's Not Dead. There are a lot of brilliant scientists, professors who are also very strong Christians, uh, and you know, these fields. So we don't wanna scare people away. We want to encourage them. But what would you say?

Dr. Lennox (25:14):

There's no need to scare people away because the issue is not between science and God at all. That can be seen very easily and that amazes me why people don't see it. If you take the Nobel prize for physics and American Bill Phillips won at some years ago, who is a Christian. Higgs Boson on in Scotland, won not just a few years ago, he's an atheist. It's not physics that divides those men. They're both equally brilliant. That's their worldview. It's a worldview issue. There are brilliant atheists who do science and brilliant Christians who do science. What we need to teach young people is the issue is a worldview issue. There are scientists on both sides. So what you need to examine is this. Does science point to God or away from God? There's masses of stuff available on the internet. My web page, people use a lot, John lennox.org, and there's your web page. There's all kinds of information, but I fear that often young people are glued to tablets and smartphones all day long, and they don't do enough reading or thinking and possibly in the Christian world, they're not sufficiently concerned. Some of them with their fellow students to do the work, to try to answer the questions their fellow students have, because I guarantee once young Christians begin to witness in that way and find it difficult and have to answer questions that changes lives faster than anything I know.

Brad Cooper (27:00):

How has faith influenced your work as a scientist and mathematician and theologian and linguist and vice versa?

Brad Cooper (27:07):

Faith in what?

Brad Cooper (27:10):

Your Christian faith. How is your Christian faith, uh, influenced your walks and both in your professional life and then vice versa? How does, how does what you see in science and math influence your view?

Dr. Lennox (27:24):

The reason I asked that back to you is very important. The word faith is ambiguous in our contemporary world. You were using it as a shorthand for Christianity, but actually it's a normal word that that means trust and belief. I want to get across to folks how it's very difficult that faith is something we all use every day in every conceivable context. As a scientist, I have to trust that nature is basically intelligible before I'll do any science at all. Einstein once said, "I cannot imagine a scientist without that faith." So when people say to me, talk about science and faith, I say just a minute, do you think faith is not involved in science? If you mean talk about science and faith in God, I'll do that. But to make it equal on both sides, you'd have to get me to talk about faith and science and faith in God, and what justifies either of those two things. So the new atheists have done a brilliant job in redefining faith as a religious word means believing where there's no evidence. And I find many of my colleagues are bought right into that. So we need to tease that out a little bit. So from the very, very beginning, you see, I learned this as a teenager, that from C.S. Lewis and fact that faith in God was actually the presupposition behind the rise of modern science. So the connection to my mind was very clear. And so the very exercise of science, the fact that that can be done is evidence that points towards God and therefore it's central to life. It's not just central to Christian life and central to all of life. I have faith in my wife. It's evidence-based. I had faith in science, it's evidence-based I had faith in Christ it's evidence-based and to get that across to people, but they insist on putting faith in a separate box and faith, of course, they called me a faith head, which means I'm an idiot.

Brad Cooper (29:45):

That's a great, a great point. And that you've illustrated it very well. Yes, it is. It has become a loose word. I think hopefully most of our audience here would understand what I meant by it, but I completely understand what you're saying.

Dr. Lennox (29:58):

Of course, so did I. I was taking the opportunity,,,,

Brad Cooper (30:02):

I get the point. Yeah. So talking a little bit more about the movie. It opens this week in limited release. Is it outside of the United States or is only in the U.S. Right?

Dr. Lennox (30:15):

No no, only in the U.S. on the 19th, 20th and 23rd, I believe. It's one of these fathom events and then subsequently it will be on DVD and various other things. It's organized from within the U.S. So I have mercifully nothing to do with that. Except that I encourage people to go.

Brad Cooper (30:35):

That's right. So if you, COVID restrictions here in the United States, are safe to go out, there will be, I assume other opportunities, I believe there's a ways for churches to show it, and other groups here in the United States. And then I guess, streaming options as well here, coming up soon again, and it's Against the Tide and it's with Dr. John Lennox and also starring Kevin Sorbo. I'm hoping to have Kevin actually also, uh, later this week on the podcast as well and we'll talk to him about it. He seemed very inquisitive. I imagine he had a lot of questions for you.

Dr. Lennox (31:09):

He was great. Absolutely great! And there were genuine questions, which is why I enjoyed so much working with him. I'm glad you're going to have him on because I learned a lot from that. I'm encouraged to think that he really enjoyed it.

Brad Cooper (31:25):

Well, you told us something we may not know about you. What, what might people not know about Kevin Sorbo that you learned?

Dr. Lennox (31:32):

Oh, they probably know far more because I've never seen him, Hurcules or Andromeda or anything else. But he's a fine Christian believer and has taken the stand that is very important to him. I will be fascinated to see how the public respond to this film.

Brad Cooper (31:54):

Well, it's a great film. I enjoyed it, got to see it over the weekend. Like I said, I really loved how it combined and interwove your story, which is fascinating in itself, but then also, providing people with some really nice kind of simple arguments. It's, doesn't go into deep, uh, group theory of math, uh, or anything like that. It's all, you know, in layman's terms and things that anyone would be able to pick up and understand and use in Dr. Lennox's good work.

Dr. Lennox (32:23):

And I should, I should add that at this moment, I'm finishing a guidebook to the film because the film medium doesn't lend itself to detailed analysis of important questions. As I watched it again, I thought, Oh, I wish I'd said that. I wish I'd said the other thing. We need to go into this in more depth. So I've written a guidebook, and I think it's important for those watching your podcast to realize the film is essentially in two parts. The first part is dating with science and the God question essentially. The second part is dealing with the further step. And that is the rationality of Christianity. It's specific to the Christian faith, because I often get the questions that's all right, talking about God and evidence of design and nature, but you're a Christian. How, how do you go from one to the other? And we're attempting to combine these two things in a film, which does not often happen I understand. And that's why the second part of it was filmed for it all started in Israel.

Brad Cooper (33:33):

It's beautiful cinematography. It was really well done, so it's not your average documentary. It's not your average faith-based film that you might see Kevin Sorbo in. So it's a little bit of a departure for him and I guess a departure for you as well. Cause you're usually speaking about your books.

Brad Cooper (33:48):

I've never done anything like it before.

Brad Cooper (33:51):

Well, it's a, it's a really well done film, and I hope to see more of it and more of you and just thank you so much, Dr. Lennox for all you've been doing these many years going against the tide and this wonderful film. I encourage everybody to see it and as well check out some of Dr. Lennox's books and then we'll keep an eye out for the guidebook as well.

Brad Cooper (34:10):

Well, thank you very much for having me on. I trust your lone work does really well and helps many people.

Brad Cooper (34:17):

Likewise, God bless. And I hope you get to see some unique birds in the neighborhood or in your area. And again, if you're ever in Southern California, we'll come show you some of the rare birds we have here.

Brad Cooper (34:28):

Thank you very much. Goodbye. Bye-bye

Brad Cooper (34:30):

God bless, Dr. Lennox. Thank you.

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