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- [00:02]
Maria Baer
You're listening to Breakpoint this week where we talk about the top stories of the week from a Christian perspective. Well, this week, while John and I are at the Colson Center National Conference, we have a special episode to share with you. It's an interview between John and another John, bioethicist and theologian John Lennox, about the implications of artificial intelligence. Please stick around.
- [00:28]
John Stonestreet
Well, welcome to a special edition of our Breakpoint podcast. I am very thrilled to have a conversation here. I would call him a national treasure because he is in the United States, but he's really a Brit, so he's an international treasure. I think, having helped so many people think so clearly about a number of topics especially related to science and faith. John Lennox is a mathematician, bioethicist, lay theologian. He's written many books on religion, ethics and the relationship between science and God. He's known for some very popular public debates with none other than Richard Dawkins and others. But his book, God, AI and the End of History. Talk about a loaded title. Right there is the is where we're going today is on the topic of AI. Dr. Lennox, it's an honor to have you on the podcast.
- [01:23]
John Lennox
It's a great pleasure for me to be back with you.
- [01:26]
John Stonestreet
It has been a while and we're grateful anytime we can, we can find some, some time. And I'm, I'm really grateful for this book. I, I want to begin just by asking an open ended question because at some level, AI is in all of our faces, whether we like it or not. And it feels like it came quickly. I know it, it didn't come as quickly maybe as, as we think it did, but, but it comes with promises and it comes with promises of peril. It comes with, you know, dire warnings of the end of the world. And it comes with promises of, you know, bringing about, you know, I think, as Elon Musk put it, no longer needing to work or make money. So give us the landscape of AI. Like what is actually the case when it comes to artificial intelligence.
- [02:16]
John Lennox
AI is moving immensely rapidly, more rapidly than anyone ever thought. But in order to think about it, we need to separate two kinds of AI. There's the kind that takes up most of that space these days. It's called narrow AI. And a narrow AI system is typically a system that does one and only one thing that normally requires human intelligence. So it's a computer based machine. Let's take a simple example, pattern recognition. So we have a database of maybe a million X rays of people's lungs that are labeled by the top doctors in the world. And then an X ray is taken of my lungs. And what happens in the system is that my X ray is compared with the million X rays, and it spits out a diagnosis very rapidly that's likely to be more accurate than you would get at your local hospital. And that has seen vast strides in medicine. There are many such AI systems. The important thing to realize, though, that these are machines. They're not thinking at all. They're simply simulating what a normally intelligent human being can do. And there's a lot of hype because the language we use is a bit tendentious. We talk about machine learning, we talk about artificial intelligence, but we need to take that seriously. It is artificial. It's only a simulation. And if you go back to the founder of this whole discipline, Alan Turing, the brilliant British mathematician, he called this the Imitation Game. It's playing the Imitation Game, but it's playing it with increasingly powerful reach. And I often say, and it's a comment on your own observation at the beginning, that AI is like a sharp knife. A sharp knife could be used for surgery or it could be used for murder. And that's exactly what we're seeing in the world today. Take facial recognition, which is more sophisticated than mere pattern recognition. It can pick a terrorist out from a football crowd, and that is very useful for police. But the very same system can be used to suppress a minority of people in a hostile country that has an authoritarian regime, and that's rolling out in various parts of the world. So you get the plus side and the minus side, and AI raises huge ethical problems. The next thing to say is AI is not one thing. There are many AI systems for different purposes. We can go into those if you wish. But I should come to the second kind of AI, which is the. The much more speculative kind, AGI, artificial General intelligence. And the idea there is the attempt to build a super intelligence, either based on existing human intelligences or radically new, based on some kind of silicon base so it doesn't suffer from the disadvantages of. Of biological organisms which decay and die. And of course, that is partly the realm of science fiction, but it needs to be taken seriously because some of the brightest brains on the planet are trying to actually make this kind of stuff. Now, there are deep fundamental problems even in conceiving it, which we can go into. You mentioned joblessness. And one of the increasingly obvious problems with narrow AI, the stuff that works, is that many job areas are very rapidly being replaced by machines and therefore saving a great deal of money. And the jobless effect is being experienced all around the world, particularly in the Western industrialized nations. But jobs like lawyers, for example, which were thought to be very safe, now a lot of legal documentation can be done at the touch of a button. And there are many questions that people have. I'm even discussing with my own son at the moment, who's a project manager in computing, and he suspects that his job will be done very soon entirely by computers. Website production, for example. A lot of that can be done by AI. So can coding. But those are all narrow AIs. Those are the things that are working. The speculative stuff, the sci fi stuff. Well, the big barrier there is that we are conscious. This is the very exciting thing, to my mind, an interesting thing, that God has created human beings and intelligence is linked to consciousness. None of these machines are conscious for a very simple reason that we haven't a clue on the scientific level what consciousness is. So it's idle saying that we've got machines that are conscious. We don't even know what it is, let alone how to build it. And it's important for those watching this podcast today to realize that the leaders in AI, the pioneers, are not trying to produce a conscious machine. They are quite happy to simulate. They wouldn't even know Peter Norvig, who's one of the lead people, he's written the AI Bible, one of the central pieces of literature on the topic, and he said we wouldn't even know what that meant. But we're not aiming to produce a conscious machine. So that's the start of it. And you get ramifications. As we watch war at the moment, a lot of it is driven by narrow AI. It's AI war with drones and guided missiles and all this kind of stuff. And people are very naturally pretty scared of what's going on. And there is reason for that. But the difficulty is, John, just finally on this, that the leaders are divided. Some of them take the view, look, you needn't be afraid of the world ending tomorrow because your AI is no more likely to eat you up than is your toaster. Whereas other people think that AI may be getting out of control, and if it gets out of control, it could be an existential risk to the whole of humanity. So you get a vast spectrum of what people think and fear, and it's difficult for the average person to have any way of deciding between them.
- [09:48]
John Stonestreet
I mean, that's a great introduction. And I've got 75 questions that rattled off of here. Let me just start with this one. So in distinguishing between narrow AI and what you call AGI, or general intelligence, are you suggesting then obviously that narrow AI is not only possible, it's actual and it's happening, but anything realistic in terms of that kind of AGI, that's where the promise is or the hype is overblown.
- [10:15]
John Lennox
I think it's overblown, but it's quite clear that one narrow AI will be added to another and we'll very soon be in a situation where There are many AIs connected together and giving human beings enhanced capacity. That's absolutely clear. And some people, of course, in this vein, they suggest that what we really need to do is to merge humans with machines in a kind of cyborg world. And I have met people who sincerely believe that this is the case, that eventually it is machines that will take over the planet. Even our former brilliant Astronomer Royal, Lord Rhys, believes something like that. So that we need to take it seriously. And in all of this, of course, for someone like me who is a Christian, it raises big question as to what we really understand human life to be and how far should we go in tinkering with it and altering it. Because to get AGI, that's one of the suggestions, that we should allow the scientists to make fundamental changes in the human genome and so on.
- [11:41]
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- [12:16]
John Stonestreet
For a lot of people, I mean, this feels completely out of control. I mean, the source of fear is how quickly the capacity is how quickly it started to infiltrate our lives. I mean, I remember a comedian ten years ago making a joke about how often we prove to computers that we're not computers or we prove to robots that we're not robots on those little captcha things. And now we're talking about a level of integration, the time in which we're interacting with this, that's happening so fast and that's coming along with such. Such incredible promise. And I think at some level, it's not only what might happen, it's the fact that most of us feel like we don't have any power over this. I mean, this is The Elon Musk's and the Sam Altman's of the world that are driving all this and we don't really even have a say in it. Do we actually have any kind of way to put the brakes on in any meaningful way?
- [13:12]
John Lennox
Well, there's no easy way. One of the reasons I entered the fray and decided to write a couple of books on AI before. The book that you mentioned. The book you mentioned is not really about AI. The subtitle is Understanding the Book of Revelation in an Age of Intelligent Machines. And I need to point that out because my main book on AI is 2084, artificial intelligence and the Way It Shapes Our Humanity. Just to get that absolutely straight, the connection with the Book of Revelation we can talk about in a bit, but the book you referenced arose out of my study of AI and the scenarios for the future that some serious scientists were proposing and comparing them with the fascinating details, limited as they are, which we find in the Bible. But as to what we can do, I think it's a good thing for scientifically gifted young people, particularly Christians, who have a strong ethical and moral stand to get into this field, because it's obvious to everybody that thinks about it that the technology advances much more rapidly than the ethical underpinning that it needs. And so we need to have people sitting at the table who have a worldview that is embedded in a transcendent morality. And of course, we live in an age where a lot of this field is dominated by naturalism and atheism, so there's no shared moral worldview. And that of course is part of the scary side of it, because you have a fairly large pressure group saying if it can be done, we should do it, no matter about the morality. So we need people to get discussions going at every level with their friends, with their governments, etc. About the need to police this carefully. But it's got scary enough for high level thinkers to be collaborating to work out some method of policing this. We've got a group in Oxford University and there's a group in most of the major universities in the world. Another scary aspect of it, of course, and I've suffered from this myself, is in the field of deception, which we need to talk about because, well, for several reasons. First of all, it has always interested me that when Jesus talked to his early disciples about the future and about his return, he constantly said, take heed that nobody deceives you. Now, the deception is at such a level that two or three weeks ago I was written to by a senior thinking Christian who said, I've just watched you give a very interesting lecture, and I'd like it transcribed for a little book that we're producing. And I thought, what is this lecture? So I looked up and discovered a fake website. I discovered a deep fake of myself and an AI generated talk saying things that I would never have said. Now, it was fairly crude. It was fairly crude because quite a few of the people who made comments on it on the screens below said, this isn't really John Lennox, but here's a person writing in who was theologically very astute and had deceived him completely. And I thought of Jesus words, they would deceive even the elect, that is the Christians. We got it taken down, but not before it had 7,000 followers. And that's what we're up against today, the deception so that truth becomes distorted and you don't know what to believe. That, I think, is one of the most serious things. The propagation of untruth, of lies is now possible on the grandest scale that's ever been conceived.
- [17:47]
John Stonestreet
Yeah, I mean, the world's never seen that kind of capacity. I appreciate how you went to the worldview behind it. I mean, obviously, since we're the Colson center for Christian Worldview, we think a lot about that stuff and starting kind of with that naturalistic worldview that's behind so many that are in these conversations and even in the technology. And it seems to me, too, that the worldview affects also the fear and the promises. Right. In terms of if you believe that the world is not being guided by a sovereign hand, a loving, benevolent creator, then you think the universe that we had basically shouldn't be here to begin with. There's no purpose for it. Had something gone wrong in the process, humans would have never existed or never survived. And that we're kind of one big mistake away from the whole thing going, you know, up in smoke. And I guess I'm asking this because the other thing that, you know, Paul repeatedly says when it comes to prophecy, don't be deceived, but also don't fear. You know, fear not. Jesus said that as well. How does that play into this on a worldview level?
- [19:02]
John Lennox
Well, the way I've found it, John, is this. Let's bring another feature into it, another word that's transhumanism. And part of the AGI hype is the desire on the part of people like Yuval Noah Harari to create transhumans. We're evolving up to a higher stage. We take our own genetics into our own hands, and we develop superhumans and so achieve a certain kind of immortality. And I found it very interesting that he suggested that his best seller, Homo deus, he suggested that the agenda for the 21st century really amounts to, firstly, to solve the problem of physical death. He said, in a short time, we won't have to die. We can die, but we won't have to because we solve this physical dying as a technical problem. Secondly, we will increase, massively increase human happiness by biogenetic engineering merging with machines and all the rest of it. And that's their plan, to achieve some kind of eternal life. Now, when I meet that, I have a habit of smiling at people and saying, you're too late. And they say, what do you mean we're too late? Well, I said, the problem of physical death was solved 20 centuries ago when God raised Jesus Christ from the dead. And as for uploading our brains into some kind of silicon state, I can tell you of a far better and much more credible uploading because, and this is the point where I think the Christian message makes a lot of sense to people. I say, look, because God has in that sense solved the problem of physical death, then the Christian message is centered on that and says because of it, he can offer anyone who trusts Jesus that he will one day upload them into another world and they will live permanently because they will have received a life, a new life in this age that will carry them on into eternity. And I find that really resonates with people. They look at this transhuman expectation for which there's practically zero evidence, and then they're prepared to consider what scripture has to say about it. So I found that the way in to writing my book about revelation, such
- [21:53]
John Stonestreet
a brilliant take on that. And it is interesting that we kind of now are at the end of this kind of new atheist era where we were told God is a delusion and spirituality was foolish. And there does seem to be in so many ways a kind of re enchantment happening in much of the Western world where people are at least open to the possibility of spirituality and these kind of alternative explanations. But that also kind of makes us pretty vulnerable, you know, to thinking even about something like artificial intelligence in a supernatural or a spiritual or a divine way. And I think, you know, maybe looking to it for answers, looking to it for salvation, looking to it for intimacy and companionship. We, we have AI boyfriends and AI counselors. I mean, you have, you know, churches proposing to have AI pastors. You know, it seems to me like that can open the door to some pretty dangerous things as well.
- [22:57]
John Lennox
It can, and it has. A religion is very much on the agenda of many people and some scientists are actually encouraging it. And it is simply to point out the obvious when we think that the AIs we've encountered now, particularly this most recent one, Claude Mythos, presents us with some of the things that are normally associated with deity. It seems to know everything, it's omniscient, it's omnipresent through the interconnected Internet, it can generate scriptures for you, it can answer every question, etc. Etc. And as you say, it can be used to generate companions of all kinds. And this is going to be exploited because, of course, God has set eternity in everybody's heart. If they don't get the right thing, they'll get the wrong thing. And it is frightening just how rapidly this is moving. And I'm afraid it's also infecting the Christian church because the temptation to get ChatGPT to write your sermon on a Saturday night is very high. And in the end, it's not going to have a dimension of God speaking through his spirit in it, although what it produces may be very accurate and sound and interesting. So we are in a realm where it's going to be very hard to detect the genuine from the false. In education, a massive problem, because a very high percentage of college students use GPT and now Claude Mythos to do their work for them. And it's becoming increasingly difficult to tell whether it's their work or ChatGPT or Claude Bithos's work. And some educators say, well, anyway, does it matter? Surely all we need to do is make sure these people are using these tools responsibly. And we have to change our entire view of what education is. And that is a serious problem for someone who's an educator like I am, think of foreign languages very simply. I used to have to translate my talks into German, and it took quite a lot of time. I enjoyed doing it. But now if I feed my English text into Google Translate, I get a German translation that's good enough to be improved into an excellent talk within an hour, and it saves me a mass of time. Or Wycliffe Bible translators are using some of these tools to explore how to get Scripture into remote and difficult foreign languages, which is very exciting. So the issue that comes here, John, is of course, an excellent tool can become a very bad master. And how to separate the two is the challenge that lies before us.
- [26:14]
John Stonestreet
You know, you talked about the temptation for pastors and the temptation for students as being almost irresistible. And I think that speaks to a couple things. One are the habits that we've already developed over the past many decades with our technology and with our computers. I think a lot, I've quoted a lot a line from an ethics book from Peter Kreft, the Catholic theologian, you know, who was talking about the challenges of the modern era. I mean, he wrote this 30, 40 years ago, but he said, you know, just at the time that our weapons went from being bows and arrows to thermonuclear bombs, we became moral infants. In other words, the problem's not just that, the problem is us. Right? And I think about the technologies that have already wreaked havoc on our understanding of who we are and how we understand things like work and virtue, you know, from social media to, you know, those devices that are ever present in our lives. How much are our bad habits kind of coming, I guess where the chickens are coming home to roost now with this super powerful technology. How much of this is just kind of an extension of some of the problems that we've, we've already had for a couple decades now?
- [27:29]
John Lennox
I think a great deal. I think Peter Kreeft was always very perceptive and that's exactly right. We're not making moral progress. And I find the analysis that Neil Postman made of the two famous dystopias, 1984, Brave New World and he pointed out the following. He said what George Orwell says is that the will be destroyed by the things we hate, Big Brother, totalitarian control and all of that. Aldous Huxley, on the other hand, said we'll fall in love with the things that destroy us. And there's a phrase in Neil Postman's analysis that I find quite chilling. He says both of these directions will undo our capacity to think. And that is happening. You get certainly among younger students. Why should I bother to do this homework when I can ask ChatGPT and it'll solve it for me instantly? And there's a laziness and an anti learning setting in. And on the other hand, as Jonathan Haidt has pointed out so well in his book the Anxious Generation, there are these companies that are destroying young people's minds by actually designing their websites to be addictive, as was proved in the landmark decision recently in your country in Los Angeles, where Mark Lanier argued the case and he's a Christian attorney and that was a very interesting landmark case. And I'm afraid that's happening. And Jonathan Haidt is dead right that we need to do something early enough. And I've been interested recently. I've been doing a lot of filming on this, and I did some for the Bible Study Fellowship, which is very well known in the usa. And they were saying they need more and more material for parents and grandparents in helping the young people navigate this. So I sat down for, I think, two hours with a former director of Google who worked at AI and is a believer. Now. That was a fascinating conversation, but it's quite clear that Jonathan Haidt, who's not a believer, actually is really onto something. And I think that all parents, all of us in fact, should read his book, the Anxious Generation to see what we're up against.
- [30:20]
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- [31:18]
John Stonestreet
If I'm hearing you correctly, and some of the others who have, I think, been so helpful in helping us all think clearly about artificial intelligence. I mean, a big thing. I mean, you talked yourself about how it's a helpful tool, how it is, you know, speeding up work for you. That is, I mean, that's a great thing if you can, you know, not have to spend four hours translating something to German, but get a perfect product and an hour. I mean, that's a wonderful thing. I have an attorney friend who says the same thing that, you know, that, you know, as long as they oversee it and supervise it, they can cut their workload and some of the legal work down by, you know, way more than half. But that is using AI as a tool and so much we use our technologies and I think the potential of using AI is even greater as a replacement for human.
- [32:13]
John Lennox
How do we.
- [32:14]
John Stonestreet
What are the habits for everyday people, everyday Christians, but really everyday people to maintain that framework of human exceptionalism, that these machines are not human, they cannot replace humans. We can't let them do it in the way that we live our lives and relate to one another and so on. I mean, help us walk through that.
- [32:35]
John Lennox
That raises the central question as to what makes human beings unique. And as human beings, we are conscious. AI systems are not conscious. As human beings, we are not only conscious of one another, but we're conscious of God. And we can communicate not only with one another, but with God. AIs do not, nor cannot. And there are areas of human experience that are not really touched by AI. And they have to do with meaning, which AIs don't understand. They have to do with the perception of beauty. Qualia. I can experience what redness is, AIs cannot. And emotional intelligence. Now, I know that AIs can be made to artificially replicate some aspects of care. So you have caring robots which some people find are really helping them in their loneliness and old age and all the rest of it. But I think it's worth thinking out just where it is that human distinctiveness is to be seen in its creativity, in its relationships with God and relationships full stop. And also for people to think hard. Young people who are now coming up for the job market to choose a job or a profession that is not susceptible to. To being rapidly taken over by AI. And people have pointed out that a lot of the practical skills are very unlikely to be taken over from AI, like plumbing. The lawyers are in trouble. The plumbers are not, as has been pointed out. And that is true, of course, at higher levels, the medical plumbers, the surgeons, we're going to need those, although there's robotic surgery. But you made a point just a few moments ago where your lawyer friend said, I could use this as a tool, provided I'm in control of it and checking it out. Now, up till relatively recently, we heard the term hallucinate a lot, which is just a polite way of saying that AIs get it wrong and, and get it wrong because in some sense they are programmed to reflect back to you what you want to hear. And we need to be astute about that and have our minds tuned to it so that as a tool, if we're checking out the output of an AI system, then we're much safer ground if we're not checking it out. Now, I use AI for fact finding, but once you've found it out, I want to check it some other way because you will be told stuff and it'll Even invent academic papers that don't exist, apparently, to please you. So great care. The thing is that I talk to a lot of people about this. Many people find it absolutely irresistible to play with it, keep playing with it, and so on, so that it becomes in itself an addiction, which I see as really dangerous. They're not getting on with their work, in a sense, they're entertaining themselves to see what this tool can now do. Okay, but we need to be very careful about that. And it's really a big challenge, and very much so to people like your Colson Institute, which does splendid work in this area of thinking through the implications of AI for the Christian worldview. That to my mind is hugely important and is partly why I wrote my books, to inform people so that they don't get scared of things that they don't need to be scared of, but that they need to be warned about. People that perhaps they do need to take into account. And I'm very encouraged by the traction that that has got, which has encouraged me to write this last book about Revelation.
- [37:12]
John Stonestreet
And I want to get into that because in just a second. But again, the worldview, you just kind of made another connection for me. I mean, if you think about worldview as a competing stories of reality,
- [37:28]
John Lennox
kind
- [37:28]
John Stonestreet
of the neo Darwinian story, transhumanism is your option. You're actually hoping to move humans to the next stage. Right. There's no reason to think that humanity has, you know, achieved some sort of pinnacle over living things forever. You know, we're a stage in this story and the evolution continues. The biblical story is, you know, puts humans as masters over the creation, not our creation. It's God's creation, but we're to steward it. And that, to me, just. You're talking about two completely different postures towards AI from these two worldviews. Right. The Darwinian posture is let's move beyond human. The Christian posture is humans take authority, take responsibility, steward the creation. Nothing else is, is to take a place above you other than God himself. That framework is very, very instructive, I think, in terms of how we should behave and also hopefully how Christians can maybe be in the room with some of these super powerful, super wealthy, super smart people that are driving this forward.
- [38:42]
John Lennox
Yes. And that gives us an opportunity. John. I believe that great differential between the biblical metanarrative and the AI metanarrative, to put it crudely, the transhuman AGI narrative is humans trying to become gods. That is explicit in Harari's book Homo Deus, the man who is God. Now, that was first suggested by a snake in Genesis 3, so we might be very careful of following it. But all through history, all through history, there has been this attempt to push humans to a godlike status. You meet it in virtually every ancient civilization. The Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Medo Persians, the Greeks and the Romans, who were turning their Caesars into gods. And now we have it today, unashamedly admitted by people like Harari, that we're turning humans into gods. Now, that encourages me to point out to people the vast difference between that narrative and the Christian narrative, because the Christian narrative is not of humans trying to turn themselves into gods. It is the exact reverse direction that God himself has become human. And people can see that you're claiming something. And I point out to them that the most amazing thing about human beings, model 101, so to speak, is that God could become one, which is awesome in its conceptuality. God became human. The word came to be flesh, came to be human, which is the exact opposite of the transhuman narrative. And of course, what adds to that, that God became human in order that he could elevate his created humans into his own sons and daughters sharing his life. That's the message I think we ought to put out into the transhuman space. And it's a much more credible one, because there's much more evidence for the power of Jesus Christ transforming lives than the power of AI transforming lives morally. Because what is happening now is, as in every dystopia, people are trying to create a paradise by avoiding the problem of human sin and rebellion against God. And you cannot do it, as the 20th century proved very clearly and tragically,
- [41:49]
John Stonestreet
and also avoid our mortality? I mean, that's the other part.
- [41:52]
John Lennox
Oh, well, of course, absolutely.
- [41:54]
John Stonestreet
How many bad things come out of trying to think we can dodge death and we can extend life indefinitely?
- [42:03]
John Lennox
I know, I know. But it is giving us an opportunity to leverage these ideas and explore other dimensions of Christianity that talk about them. And the motif man becoming God is something that we can talk about from various scriptures, from Genesis, from Daniel, from the New Testament, particularly Paul and Thessalonians, and from the Book of Revelation, and say to people, look, this thing that you're trying to construct, actually, you may well succeed because look at what this says. And I found a great deal of traction on that, even from secular people around the world who read my book and said, look, your book is very different. Can you talk to our people about it, even if they're totally secular AI companies? It is quite remarkable.
- [42:54]
John Stonestreet
Well, Talk about your book now, because I'm fascinated, too, and have been by this connection with prophecy. Partly because, you know, in the background where I grew up, prophecy was understood in a very specific way. There was a, you know, a very specific eschatological framework that was applied. You're making the connection to Revelation, you're talking eschatology, but you're not doing it exactly the same way as that. So walk us through it. What's the connection between AI and Revelation?
- [43:26]
John Lennox
Well, I probably am very familiar with the kind of background you're talking about, and people throughout the ages have sincerely tried to understand the book of Revelation, but there have been problems. And the kind of interpretation that didn't come to pass has had the tragic effect of putting people off, even looking at the book. So the churches don't so often open it. And what I want to say is there's so much really good stuff in here that we can understand, that we can safely leave a lot of it. And I have to leave a lot of it. I don't profess to understand it, but it can do something that it's meant to do. The book is called the Revelation of Jesus Christ. So by the time we finished it, we ought to know more about him than we did before. And that's a very simple observation. And the book itself, as a literary structure, its first chapter has three references to coming. Its last chapter has three references to coming. And in the first chapter, two of those references are very odd, grammatically odd, because they come as greetings from the God. Who is, who was, and who is to come. You'd expect that to read the God, who is, who was, and who shall be, the tenses of the verb to be. But it's who is to come, and that is repeated twice. The notion of the coming of God is a very old biblical one in the Old Testament, and it is connected with God coming to judge. There are a lot of poetic psalms that read something like this. Let the hills clap their hands and the forests sing, because God is coming to judge the world. Because people perceived injustice, they suffered and they believed in God. But when was he going to come and execute justice? So there was great hope that God would come. But when you ask the question, how will God come? The central reference in chapter one goes like this. Look, he is coming with clouds, and every eye shall see him. And they also who pierced him? In other words, the way God is going to come is in Jesus Christ. So we're up against what I believe to be the central hope of Christianity which Jesus told his disciples to expect and told his inquisitors about. And because he claimed to be the Son of Man, seated on the throne of heaven and coming to judge, they crucified him. So I'm not going to apologize for something that Jesus was crucified for. So it seems to me what the book of Revelation is doing is starting with this claim, God is coming. He's coming in Christ. And the end of the book three times over. Jesus speaks and says, I am coming soon. I am coming soon. And the whole church responds, even so, come, Lord Jesus. So the purpose of the book is very easy to see. It is to quicken in my expectation that coming of Jesus, and we need to talk about it a lot more, because the book of Revelation puts it in a context which Paul, quite a while before Revelation was written, contextualizes in the context of the development of evil. I'm referring to the famous passage in 2 Thessalonians 2 where the church was confused. They thought perhaps Christ had already come. There were some very confused Bible teachers around. And Paul says, roughly speaking, look, it will not come until the lawless one is revealed whose coming is with the power of Satan, and so on. So he talks about this individual with colossal power coming and setting himself up at the temple and claiming to be God. Now there's your homadeus writ large in a person who's malevolent and evil. That's not in the symbolic language of Revelation. It's plain, straightforward theological statement, which of course is unpacked in the symbolism of Revelation. And when we look at Revelation and Daniel and see these symbols of wild animals or wild things, I learned a lot from C.S. lewis about metaphor and symbolism, and he points out a very simple thing, but it's vitally important. Such symbolism always stands for something real. And that's important that these wild animals, they are standing as symbols for real powers, individuals, ruling states, and possibly the states as well, because it's a very complex metaphor. And what we're presented with very briefly is the fact that evil will reach a harvest in this world and there will be a world leader, a totalitarian leader, empowered by Satan. You won't have to guess who it is when it happens. It certainly hasn't happened yet, so far as we know. And Paul says that this individual will be destroyed by the brightness of Christ's coming. So that gives us a way in to focus on the things we can understand. And that has been my approach now to come to the AI side of it. One thing that struck me as Very interesting is this. There's a brilliant physicist, I think, at Princeton, his name is Max Tegmark. He wrote a book called Life 3.0. And in it he describes possible AI scenarios, one of which he calls Prometheus, which is an Amazon based company that takes over the world economy. And he spells it out in detail and eventually it gains control over all the Earth. And one of the special things that it does is to issue every Earth citizen with something like an Apple watch, with that kind of functionality that listens and watches and observes and tracks, but also can inject someone that the government disapproves of with the lethal toxin and kill them, you see. And I thought, how fascinating that this system will be built as an AI system of some kind. It eerily and slightly scarily reminds me of the fact that in the book of Revelation, chapters 13 and 14, there are two wild things, immensely powerful and wild creatures with the power of animals, the minds of humans, all this kind of mixture. The one, I take it to be the individual referred to in 2 Thessalonians 2. But there's another one, often called the false prophet. And what that individual does, according to Revelation, is cause the people of the world to create some kind of image to the first animal. I call it the monster, actually, because I find that conveys it better. An image that breathes, it speaks, and it causes all who do not worship the number one wild thing to be killed. Now, what is that? Is it a quasi AGI superintelligent? Because the net effect of it is to deceive the entire world. Now, my argument, John, is this. Not to identify it precisely, but to say, if some of our leading scientists are developing scenarios like that, why shouldn't we now revisit the biblical scenario to see if it can teach us anything? Because actually it is supported by much more credible evidence as to its veracity. And there's a coincidence there that I have explored in my book, the book that you have seen, and also in my book 2084, the second edition of that, which came out last year. And what I find is there's traction here instead of people saying, oh, don't be so fanciful, Revelation is not talking about that at all. The fact that you have the Pauline letter, which is plain, straightforward, no symbolism at all, talking about a human claiming to be God is oddly supported by one of the most famous numbers in the whole of literature, 666, in the book of Revelation. And people have been too successful in teasing that out. What individuals it represents, what most people have failed to notice is that the text is not concerned with who it is, but it is concerned with what it is. And the text tells you exactly what it is. It says it is the number of a man. And the hideous thing about revelation is you see all this symbolism of wild creatures and you don't know where to place them. Are they states, are they empires? What are they? That wild thing you are told is a human being in control of the world. That's the hideous thing about it. Who it is, I haven't a notion. But you'll not have to work out the significance of 666 as a gematria made up of giving numbers to letters in order to know who it is he's going to be revealed by the power of Satan. No one will be in any doubt. But the fact that that runs so close to the scenario that Tegmark sets up simply makes me appeal to people and say, look, have a look at this scenario and see what you make of it. So that's my approach there.
- [54:47]
John Stonestreet
I think that we have, in our modern age, gone too quickly away from seeing things biblically. I mean, we want to analyze it and we want to be skeptical and so on. And some of that's been healthy. There certainly has been many ways in which biblical prophecy has been used as a tool of fear and something to market. And I want to go back to here as we close out our time to something that you said. The things that God repeats over and over and over. Don't be deceived and don't fear. And when you put those two things together, that is a wonderful framework for our own thinking. I think in looking at this, what is a legitimate and real challenge. And I appreciate both the hope that you communicate and how you help us think through this, and also the seriousness, because scripture says, fear not, but be sober minded. You know, it holds all of that together for us and we need to emulate that. My guest today, the one and only John Lennox, Oxford mathematician, scientist, author of many, many books, most recently God, AI and the End of History. But he also, as he mentioned, has other books on AI, including 2084, which was also one of the early ones as well, kind of bringing some understanding to this issue. And you've done that so well for us today, and you've done that so well in your career. You're a real gift to Christians and a real gift to the church. Dr. Lennox, I'm very grateful for you and I'm very grateful for the work that you've done. Where can people stay up to date with what you're writing and what you're thinking and what you're doing. Do you have a singular place online or something that we could send people to?
- [56:31]
John Lennox
Of course. You mentioned my last book. It isn't my last book because two weeks ago in this country another big book has appeared and it's called it
- [56:41]
John Stonestreet
hasn't shown up here yet. So you have to forgive me. It hasn't made it across the Atlantic.
- [56:45]
John Lennox
It's coming across the Atlantic in less than a month. And it's called My Story. And I think perhaps many of your watchers and listeners may be interested because it's the story of my life and how I come to these convictions. So that will be out. Amazon is already advertising it in the usa, but it's out in this country. And I have a website, very simple, John Lennox.org where you can follow a lot of this stuff. So thank you very much, John. It's been lovely to see you again and to know that the Colson Institute is still doing a very valuable job on Worldviews Low. May you continue?
- [57:40]
John Stonestreet
Oh, God bless you. Thank you so much.
- [57:42]
John Lennox
Bye bye.
- [57:43]
Maria Baer
Well, thank you again for listening to this special edition of Break Breakpoint this week from the Colson center for Christian Worldview, I'm Maria Baer. John Stonestreet conducted this interview with John Lennox, which we hope you enjoyed and will share with others by pointing them to the Breakpoint podcast. Otherwise, we will see you all back here next week for our regular scheduled Breakpoint this Week programming. Have a wonderful week. God bless.