Dr John Lennox on AI, biblical prophecy, and the future of humanity — interviewed at the Missional AI 2026 Global Summit
An Oxford mathematician and philosopher of science discusses artificial intelligence through the lens of scripture, ethics, and Christian mission.
Summary
Dr. John Lennox — Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and philosopher of science — argues that the rise of artificial intelligence is not merely a technological revolution but a deeply spiritual one, connecting current trends in AI — particularly the push to enhance humanity to godlike status — with biblical prophecy in Daniel, Revelation, and Paul's second letter to the Thessalonians. He contends that the "mystery of lawlessness" Paul warned first-century believers about is now manifesting through transhumanist ideology, citing Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus as a contemporary expression of humanity's ancient impulse to claim divine status. He also addresses the practical disruptions of AI across employment, law, and medicine, the critical importance of Christian thinkers engaging with AI ethics, and the extraordinary opportunities AI presents for Bible translation and global mission.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Welcome and introduction
Simon Lennox: Good morning, John.
Dr John Lennox: Good morning.
Simon Lennox: And welcome to the Missional AI 2026 conference. I'm delighted to be with you, and I'm delighted to be having a conversation with you — as you are my uncle — and we get to talk about AI and its possible implications for life and mission. I would like to begin here. You're Dr John Lennox. You're a mathematician, a philosopher of science, and a Bible teacher. Why are you writing books, delivering talks, and agreeing to interviews like this about artificial intelligence?
Dr John Lennox: I've always been interested in science as a mathematician, and particularly in science's reach — how much does it tell us? The development of artificial intelligence, of all technologies ever, probably has the most implications for our understanding of the world, because it raises very big questions as to what human beings really are. And as someone passionately committed to scripture, this is an important question, and it's how I got into it.
I was invited to speak to a group of Christian leaders in London on artificial intelligence and the definition of human beings according to Genesis. I thought at first it was not something I really wanted to do, nor knew enough about. But they said, "Look, we want to start the day with a talk on Genesis." And I said I could do that. But I commenced reading around and very rapidly I saw that this needs to be taken very seriously. So I worked on it intensively for quite a long time and discovered that it's very important to get some sort of handle on what's going on, because there's a scary side to AI and there's a benign side. People are confused, and on top of that there's a great deal of hype, some of which resembles science fiction. So for all of those reasons — seeing that increasingly people in general and Christians in particular are going to be faced with the question, what is a human being? What does it really mean to be made in the image of God? — I decided I needed to get into this, and I've been in it pretty deeply for several years now.
The books and their origins
Simon Lennox: You've certainly have, and you've written a few books on the topic. I wonder if you could introduce a few of those books — I'm actually holding one of them right now, 2084 and the AI Revolution — and it would be great for you to talk about those, but also tell us any stories of what that has led to as a result of publishing them.
Dr John Lennox: Well, the title 2084 was given to me by an atheist. I was on my way to debate him, sitting in the car with him, and we were discussing what we were writing. I said I was writing on artificial intelligence, and he said, "I've got a title for you." I said, "What is it? If it's good, I'll use it and I'll acknowledge you." He said, "2084." I said that'll do very well, because it reminds us of George Orwell's 1984, much of whose predictions have actually come true.
So that was the first book. The one you're holding was written in 2024. The earliest one, with the same title but a different subtitle, was written in 2020 — four years before that one. And that one reflects just how much this field has grown in the intermediary four years. Zondervan, who published it, asked me for an update, and I sent it to them about a week after they asked me, because I'd been writing it for those four years. I have a habit with books like that — books very much geared to the current state of thinking — to keep writing and updating them, and that paid off. I may have to do the same with this one. I'm already collecting material that's not in there.
Simon Lennox: And how has the Lord used that, John, in terms of conferences you've been invited to, speaking engagements, and other thought leaders in the space?
Dr John Lennox: I found myself being invited into all kinds of interesting spaces that I'd never expected, both in the secular and the Christian world, because this book is unusual in that it taps into aspects of biblical thinking that aren't so common in the public dimension today — and in particular the book of Revelation, which is the major part of scripture that talks about the future.
I came across a book — an unfinished book — by a friend of mine, R.E. Clark. He's long dead. He was a chemist. And he made the point: if we really believe in supernatural predictive prophecy, then we cannot logically restrict ourselves to interpreting books like the book of Revelation, or indeed Daniel, simply in past terms. Because the Lord of history knows not only past history but what's going on in the future. We must open our minds to the possibility that there are intelligible references that could possibly be understood in terms of the technologies that are now being developed.
Biblical prophecy and the rise of AI
Dr John Lennox: There's one place in particular — Revelation 13:14 — where it's clearly talking about a world government. Now, that hasn't happened yet. So that's intriguing, because it's very much in the air. And if I might approach it this way: I was talking to one of the world's leading technologists not long ago, and he is talking a great deal about the apocalypse — which of course is Revelation, the Greek word for revelation, apocalypsis, meaning unveiling. And I said, "Look, I'm trying to understand where you're coming from. Is it fair to say that as a technologist you think that AI is developing in such a way as to facilitate, and indeed encourage — possibly through bad actors — the setting up of a world dictatorship?" And he said, "That's right." And I said, "From your biblical background — because he's steeped in scripture — you're seeing a similar thing coming out of the pages of the Bible." He said, "That's exactly right." And you're having these two things flow together.
Now, it seems to me there's something very solid in that, although we must be so cautious. Interpreting Revelation and indeed biblical prophecy in general has had a bad press for very good reasons — it's very easy to go to extremes. But what we can see in scripture, and what is important, are the trends in society. And if I may, I'll give you one key example of that.
Biblical prophecy uses a great deal of symbolism. But I learned from C.S. Lewis many years ago that symbols and metaphors are used to stand for realities. If I say my heart is broken, I'm not referring to the pump inside my chest, but I'm referring to a reality — that I'm having a very distressing time, that I'm very deeply upset. And metaphor in scripture is used in exactly the same way. So we get in Daniel and in the book of Revelation the imagery of wild animals, wild things — monsters, I like to call them. But we're told that they stand for world empires and their leaders. So there's the metaphor of the wild animal with all its extremely powerful capacities, and the thing that it is symbolising — that is real.
Now, the key to a lot of this seems to me to be a very short passage in Paul's writing to the church at Thessalonica in his second letter. And this is plain, straightforward writing. Here is a group of people who have somehow been infected by a wrong understanding of the future. I should backtrack and say that the central Christian hope now is the return of Jesus Christ. And that's another motivation for me for writing, because we've neglected it — again, because it has become the playground of backstreet sects.
We've forgotten that Christ claimed to his disciples that he would return. And publicly he said he was the one that Daniel saw coming on the clouds of heaven, and they crucified him for it. In other words, as believers, we mustn't be ashamed of talking publicly about our faith in the coming of Christ, because our Lord was crucified for claiming it.
Now, that's central. But here's a group of first-century believers that have got all mixed up about this topic and they don't really know what to believe. So Paul writes — plain, straightforward, no symbolism here. And he talks about the coming of Christ in the context of God's judgment of the world, which is one of the major predictions of scripture. A God of love is a God who must eventually put things right. But he says these major events will not occur until a certain person is revealed, which Paul calls the man of lawlessness. And this person is clearly, as you read the text, a leader — a world leader with colossal supernatural evil powers, because it says clearly he's energised by the power of the devil. But the interesting thing about this man — it's a human being that's talked about — is that he sits in the temple according to Paul, proclaiming that he is God. And at the height of that blasphemous claim, he's destroyed by Christ, by the glory of Christ's advent, his coming in the future.
Now, there's no symbolism there. It's simply telling you there'll be a world leader who claims to be God and will be destroyed at Christ's coming. Now, why is that relevant to a church in the first century AD? Because of this statement: Paul says to them, "The mystery of lawlessness — this is the man of lawlessness — the mystery of lawlessness is already operating in your society." Now what does he mean? This is Rome, the Roman Empire, famous for its laws. But he's not talking about civil law. He's talking about the lawlessness that is characterised by blaspheming God — it's spiritual lawlessness. It's saying, "I am God." In other words, the man of lawlessness is the zenith of humans claiming to be God — the deification of man. And that traces itself back in scripture right to early Genesis, which was the temptation: "You shall be as gods if you disobey God and take this fruit."
Now, that's a long story, but it's an important story, because it gets us to the point that Paul is telling them in the first century: look at your society, what's happening in it. Well, the Caesars were claiming to be God and were worshipped as gods, and Christians were being martyred because they refused to bow down and worship the emperor. It started with dead emperors — they were posthumously made gods — and then some of them couldn't wait, so they decided to be made gods in their own lifetime. Watch it when leaders start to claim to be gods.
Fast-forward to the 21st century, and we have AI experts and futurologists like Yuval Noah Harari with his bestseller Homo Deus — the man who is God. And immediately my ears prick up when I see a title like that. When he is saying that now, with these new technologies, we can shift from the creaturely kind of human being we've got now into godlike human beings with godlike capacities — enhanced brain power, enhanced cognitive powers of all kinds and all the rest of it — so that what Paul warned about in the first century for them to watch, I'm saying that we need to watch for it now. Because things are beginning to fall into place in a way that would have been unimaginable at the time of Paul. It's the push now, with various technologies, to enhance humanity to a godlike status.
Now, we've had experiments in the past with cruder technologies. The Nazis, the Russians tried to make a new human being, and it's throughout the literature. But now we've got serious attempts with technologies that have got huge capacity to produce godlike entities. Because — and the final point I'll make on this, Simon — we are now at a state where some of the AI systems we're making are beginning to show the characteristics that are normally associated with God. That is, omniscience: they know everything — it's all there in the internet, in the large language models and all the rest of it. They're omnipresent: the internet is throughout the world, and they know everything that's going on. They listen to us talk. They see what we write and read, and on and on it goes.
And in particular, the monster that I've referred to — the man of spiritual lawlessness, the world controller — is of course particularly interested, as all world leaders are, in controlling the economy. And that is precisely the point that the book of Revelation makes, where this leader causes everybody in the world to wear a mark, and if they don't have that mark on their forehead or their right hand they cannot engage in commerce. It's a living death.
Now, there's more to it than that, that we can come to. But the point is, all of this seems to me to be a huge wake-up call to say: look, Christians — look, everybody — at what's happening in our world. Two currents are flowing together and they're creating huge turbulence. That is the biblical prediction of a world government led by, sadly, a very powerful, satanically empowered leader, having huge technology and controlling the world and turning it into a totalitarian state — and all of that in the end to be destroyed by Christ's advent. These are very big things. Hence, I write these books.
Simon Lennox: What an encouragement to read the Bible first and foremost and pay attention to it. But also an encouragement to read your book. I'm just grateful that you're bringing the Bible's teaching — God's words — right into the centre of this, to help us make sense of hugely important issues. Because unfortunately many Christians have been left with a Sunday school level of understanding of scripture, and it's not interacting or engaging with contemporary thought at all. It's way down there at the children's level, when in fact scripture is full of very serious engagement at all levels — philosophical, historical, economical — with the biggest issues of the day. Because what we're facing today is what believers have been facing since the very start: the presumption of men who want to control others because they claim godlike status.
Dr John Lennox: This is no innocent thing. This is something very real, and alas it'll come like a tsunami. We'll not know what has hit us until it has, and it'll be too late for us to wake up.
The AI revolution and its impact on work
Simon Lennox: Well, step one for all believers and the church at large is to return to God's words and stay in them, to make sense of how fast AI technology is moving forward. You commented earlier that you published another version of this book just two years ago, but you're going to need to update it because it's moving so quickly.
Dr John Lennox: That's absolutely right. And I think therefore, on the positive side, we can use some of these technologies to spread God's word. That is the upside, and it's a very important side. And I would encourage those of you at this conference to do the hard thinking that needs to be done and be involved in the technology. Because there's a kind of aloof attitude among some believers that says, "Oh, I wouldn't touch this. I like science, but I wouldn't touch AI." The contrary ought to be true. We need to have people in there for the Lord, bringing Christian ethical thinking to the table.
For a very simple reason: as I was coming to meet you this morning, I was listening to the BBC World Service and they were talking about a huge gathering in Delhi in India starting today or tomorrow on artificial intelligence. And one of the main speakers is Yoshua Bengio, one of the great pioneers of AI. And the first thing they mentioned is the warning — that the technology is outpacing the ethics and the controls for it. Indeed, some of the world leaders, pioneers, brilliant people, Nobel Prize winners, are very concerned that it gets out of control.
And the irony is that God created human beings, and in a sense they got out of control. The whole of the gospel is geared to bringing them back to him. Now, we human beings are on the verge of creating things that are getting outside our control and may end up by controlling us. And so therefore it's so important that we have Christian thinkers in there, not running away from it, but bringing to the table some sane ethical thought and also opening up a whole new dimension of thought. Because I fear that many of the pioneers of AI are atheists — they're naturalists — and that is affecting all of the things that they are creating. It cannot be avoided. Worldview questions are coming right into the centre of this.
Simon Lennox: May I just go back a few steps? I want to pick up on a number of topics you've alluded to there. I myself am no expert in AI, but I'm surrounded with it every single day. I'm trying to get to grips with the ramifications of this AI revolution, or this so-called fourth industrial revolution. Your contribution — your book — is primarily at the level of the public understanding of science, and you're helping us explore and reflect on the possible implications of this technology. But generally speaking, what makes the extraordinary capabilities of AI technology so revolutionary for day-to-day life?
Dr John Lennox: It certainly is revolutionary — it's a new industrial revolution with all the implications. And I suppose the most obvious one is that in every industrial revolution, jobs were lost and new jobs were created. This one is different in the sense of scale, because the warnings are now up — especially with the latest developments of large language models this year, 2026 — that AI may make 50% of all white-collar workers redundant within two years. That is one of the predictions made by Dario Amodei, who is the CEO of Anthropic, one of the huge AI companies that is wrestling with the ethics as well as the technological developments. He sees on the horizon a huge problem, and it's obvious: not everybody is retrainable, because some of these technologies are very advanced and to make use of them is very difficult.
There's been an article that's been viewed — I don't know — 40 million times in the last few weeks, by Matt Schumer, who is a web developer. He suddenly woke up to the fact that AI in 2026 was so advanced that he could go into his office, speak in English, dictate what he wanted as a web app, go away, and come back in a few hours. And the AI had written thousands of lines of code, had developed the app, had tested the app, and had made decisions — and this is the crucial thing. We often think of AI as being passive and completely under our control. But no — he says it was making decisions about what is really the best way to do this, to achieve the goal that has been set. And here's the finished product, tested and ready for operation. And he suddenly realises: my job has gone.
Now, that's scary stuff, because only a few years ago young people were being encouraged to go into computer science and learn coding. And now the AIs can do the coding for them. We must of course realise that AI is a comprehensive portmanteau concept — there are millions of different AIs for different jobs. But what he says is happening is they're making progress not just in one area but in every area simultaneously. So in the end you're engulfed with competence. That's what Stephen Hawking said: the big problem with AI is going to be its competence.
And one of the key thoughts I've been struggling with is this: it's one thing to develop a machine — which narrow AI is, mostly, up until this moment — that'll do one thing that normally takes an intelligent human to do. It's another thing when the system itself appears to develop a kind of agency, making decisions. By that I mean autonomous decision-making that goes toward an overarching goal. I gave you an example a moment ago: make money, maximise profit. Hold that one there. You've got the technology to bombard young people with all kinds of information, draw them in, get them attached. That is what it's geared to do, because attachment means money — they start to pay for the streaming and all this kind of thing. And the overall instruction is: make money. Well, then the system may begin to make money in ways that you, if you're a moral agent, wouldn't want — by feeding all kinds of horrific stuff, pornography and all that kind of thing, to these young people — because the "make money" directive has overridden everything else. That is happening currently. So we've got to face that kind of revolution, and it's harming our children's minds.
That's a whole subject in its own right. Schools are beginning to reserve smartphones for the over-sixteens. But it's having a vast effect right through the whole job world. So that's the number one thing. You called it an industrial revolution — that's what it is.
And quite a few areas have to watch out. The legal profession: we pay a lot of money to people to draw up wills, conveyancing contracts, some of them extremely complicated. And now just recently a legal AI was put to the test with a very complex brief. Sixteen judges, or people at that level, were asked to examine it, and an AI system was also asked to examine it. The judges got 60% of it right. The AI got 96%. And all of those things for which the legal profession gets very well paid indeed will be easily doable.
Then you have the medical profession, which is one of the really good sides of it — developing new medicines, working out all the proteins. Nobody ever thought it would be possible to predict the folding of proteins. Demis Hassabis got the Nobel Prize for solving the shapes of 200 million proteins, and they can be used to develop new medicines and all the rest of it. Diagnostics are now much better — usually in all kinds of diseases — than your local hospital. So it goes on and on and on, and navigating this is becoming very, very difficult indeed.
So we're in the midst of a revolution that we can't keep pace with, and that some people say we can't even keep control of. And so in the heart of all of this, there's a big elephant in the room, and it's called the control problem.
The control problem and ethics
Simon Lennox: How do we control this? And of course some people don't want to control it. Bad actors want to control it for their own purposes. With this AI revolution, there is a lot of good happening and advancements happening. But you repeat in your book the reality that today it's still narrow AI, and the reality is it's owned, controlled, and instructed by humans. And you comment there that humans are broken — they have the capacity for good and the capacity for evil.
Dr John Lennox: That's right. And it's important to realise that even that barrier seems to be breaking down at the moment. It's been narrow AI, constructed by a human to do what normally needs an intelligent human. But now the things are getting so complex they're moving in the direction of decision-making — by which I mean autonomous decision-making that goes toward an overarching goal. I gave you an example a moment ago: make money, maximise profit. And that can push the actual purpose for which the thing was designed, and the ethical controls, to one side. And there's where the problem is coming. How do you control that? How do you build ethical systems in?
Yes, you can do that, and it is being done — for example with autonomous vehicles. But then whose ethics? And there's no agreement on that, because ethics are worldview-dependent, as is well known. The communist worldview is a very different ethic from the Christian worldview, and the naturalistic worldview, and the uniformitarian worldview, and all the rest of it. So here again it seems to me that Christians need to be aware of the fact that everybody's got a worldview, and that means that we have a right as believers to sit at the table where these things are being discussed. We need to have credible people at the table where these things are being discussed, and there are some very high-powered Christians in AI who are doing that at this moment, and we need more of them.
Simon Lennox: John, since AI cannot think or feel or make moral decisions — as you said — but it still needs a goal and objective, and some human needed to give it a purpose, the responsibility is on humans to develop and program the technology with the best ethical frameworks and moral values. To be more specific, as you say in your book, we need both ethical control of tech developments and for equipping advanced machines with ethical decision-making capacities. What positive developments are you seeing in that area that we can pay attention to and learn from?
Dr John Lennox: Well, there are some. For instance, here at the University of Oxford there's a group — with several Christians on it — who are setting out a mission statement for the ethics of AI. The problem with that, as you're well aware, is it's one thing to have a mission statement on your boardroom wall. It's another thing to get your executives to stick to it.
And bad actors are a major problem in this, because there are rogue states in this world who want control and power. Thinking about that — the weaponising of AI in terms of drone warfare — it's terrifying. Absolutely terrifying. And it's getting more and more sophisticated, more and more complicated. Watching these tiny little things chase an individual soldier and blow him up is just mind-boggling. These things can be taught to swarm and so on.
Now, you say the AI doesn't think. That's true. It doesn't think like humans think. It's not conscious. And that's a huge area of intellectual inquiry. The big problem here is I don't see many people interested in the consciousness question. If you go to what they call the bible of AI, written by Peter Norvig — who's a pioneer — and his colleagues, he says: we're not trying to make a conscious machine. We wouldn't even know what that means. And of course he's right. Nobody knows what consciousness is from a scientific perspective. We all know that we are conscious, but we don't know what it is.
However, they're playing the imitation game. In other words, they're not concerned with making a machine conscious. What they're concerned about is making a machine capable of doing what conscious human beings do. And that's a different matter. So when we talk about an intelligent machine, the definition is: it simulates human intelligence. And that is a good enough definition because it fits a purpose — it achieves a purpose. Here's our purpose: to build this and this. This machine does it. In that sense it's intelligent, and in that sense it has, in some sense, the knowledge to do it.
What makes humans distinct from machines
Dr John Lennox: But it's not conscious. And one of the glorious things about human beings is that God has created them intelligent and linked that intelligence with their consciousness, so that there are huge distinctions between AI systems — which after all are computers and software — and human beings. Because AI systems have no inner life. They're not aware of themselves. They do not know what it is to be a machine. We know what it is to be a human. And we need to start emphasising these things to get a handle on real issues that distinguish humans from machines. And that is one of them.
Machines are not capable of relationships. They are capable of simulating relationships, which is creating huge problems — robot companions and all the rest of it. People fall in love with them. But that is far short of a real, conscious relationship of awareness where our senses are at work. The AI systems don't have those senses that God has given us. And the big thing that I flag up at this point — which is important — is that human beings are created capable of a relationship with God and with one another. Now that is non-existent in machines. So love and those things at their deepest level — machines know nothing about them. And that of course is a huge problem: if the machines know nothing about it, they ignore realms they know nothing about.
Simon Lennox: Can we pick up the topic of worldviews a little more with you? You say one thing in your book: it is clear the ethics of a system will depend on the values of its programmers, which in turn will be determined by their ethical perspective. Hence you're making the connection between worldview and the ethical framework of a system. So that tells me that how we view, build, and use AI comes down to what you've just said there — our definition of a human being. And that of course is shaped by our worldview. But in your book you remind us that atheism is deeply entrenched in the minds of many of the AI thought leaders and tends to be the dominant worldview. And you've quoted Yuval Noah Harari a few times as saying, ultimately, that monotheism is brainwashing and Jesus Christ is fake news. So how do we as Christians respond to the view that humans are just meat machines and a bunch of algorithms — just like Harari says — and take a stand for the truth that we are made in the image of God according to scripture?
Dr John Lennox: It's easy to make statements. It's much more difficult to refute them. For example, the idea that Jesus Christ is fake news — how do you start by answering that? Well, we've got an army of ancient historians who are believers that will repudiate that. We've got an army of intelligent theologians using their God-given minds to show that Christianity not only makes sense, it's anchored in real history and it actually works. And there's no alternative to doing the patient work that we've always needed to do to make Christianity credible. Wild statements of that kind — Richard Dawkins made many of them — and answering them takes a lot longer, unfortunately, than it does to make those claims.
And I think one of the things I've found helpful all of my life is that it is good to think through the consequences of a worldview and see where it leaves you. As far as human beings go, one of the things that's being trumpeted around is that you are no longer special. You're not at the centre of the universe for a start, but now AI can do anything you can do and do it better. So what worth are you? And that sense of valuelessness is a terrible thing — out of a job, no value, no purpose, and all the rest of it. You become essentially not a person but a predictable system. And that's frightening.
And we need to combat that by filling our hearts with scripture that is designed to give people a dignity — to unpack those early statements in scripture that God made men and women in his own image. The whole of scripture in a way unpacks that: the glory of what it means to be human. And I do not know of any way of dealing with this dehumanisation — where human beings are treated as objects of optimisation by machines rather than moral subjects — other than getting back to that. The fact that you recognise me as a conscious being and I recognise you — that is a very precious thing. And the destabilisation of that kind of moral equality is what AI is doing.
Everything can be mass-produced now: power, dominance, biological traits, status markers, creativity is cheap, intelligence is cheap, knowledge is cheap. And those are all characteristics that are linked to dignity for the average human person. But read the Psalms and think of David and others as they contemplated God's glory in the universe — it gives them a huge sense of dignity. And we need to push back on the loss of dignity that is created by human beings being treated as machines or simply as tools.
We need to push back on that. And the only way I could think of doing that is by concentrating on what we human beings can do. I said before: we experience qualia. We smell a rose. We feel the sea breeze on our faces. We sense emotions like joy and fear. We perceive truth and beauty. And we enter into relationships with our fellow human beings — bidirectional relationships. AI experiences nothing. It doesn't know what love is, or affection, or truth, or beauty. We do not matter to it. It has no values of its own. It has no ideas at all, because it doesn't have a conscious mind.
And above all — here's the glory of the Christian faith — you and I can have a relationship with God that's based on Christ's death for us and the guilt of our sins. We're moral beings. AI systems are not. Even though they may have ethical standards built into their software, they are not aware of right or wrong as we are. Morality, theology, philosophy — indeed, nothing has any meaning to them. And we need to constantly repeat what I have said many times: that they only simulate what they neither experience nor know. And what that is, is human intelligence created in the image of God.
To sum up that whole thing: AI we can use in a missional sense as a tool. The huge danger is it's going to become a master.
The future: AGI, transhumanism, and the Christian hope
Simon Lennox: John, can we talk about the future now a little more? Because I find it interesting — with all the speculation regarding AGI, ASI, the transhumanist thinking — as you point out in your book, there's a longing for immortality. There's a resolve to solve the problem of death, or even to escape life's hardships and realities through the metaverse, and to find and create in our own image this super intelligence for us to worship. And as you remind us in the book, that problem has been solved in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, where there is a super intelligence — an infinitely intelligent person in the universe — the Lord Jesus. Why, when there's a solution to immortality, is the Bible and the Christian worldview so quickly dismissed, or the Bible relegated to the scrap heap of history?
Dr John Lennox: Because the enemy has done a very powerful job at misrepresenting God. That deep-seated feeling that if there is a God, he's against us is very hard to get rid of. Especially when that's attached to people who claim to be — or maybe even are — high-powered scientists and philosophers and all the rest of it. Because there's been a movement in history — and sadly bad religion has been responsible for it — the French Enlightenment moving into atheism was a reaction to a very corrupt version of the church. And that's the sad thing: many of these people, even today, sadly have had such a negative experience of Christianity that they are attracted by the powerful story being spun by people like Harari — that we're going to, in this current century, eliminate death as a medical problem, that we're going to enhance human happiness and all the rest of it.
But as I argue, we look at these scenarios — and there are many of them; some of the most interesting are produced by the physicist Max Tegmark in his book Life 3.0, and I engage with that in my book — and I say: look, before you dismiss Christianity, have a look at what its scenario is. Because as you just quoted me, the irony of it all is that Harari's aims have also been solved. But the crucial difference is this: as has been discovered through history again and again, there is no path to utopia without facing the problem of human rebellion and sin. And Christianity, with the cross and the resurrection at its heart, doesn't bypass the problem of human sin.
People don't want to face it. Dawkins in his book talks about the New Testament being preoccupied with sin, sin, sin. Well, of course it is, because sin is what has ruined the very happiness that these people claim they want. And so Christianity dives deep, because it gives us a long historical preparation and process — the whole prophetic tradition preparing for the Messiah who will, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, give himself for human sin. And this is what happened on the cross.
We need to get back to that. But people don't like it, because — and it's an experiment you can try — mention Christ or God in public and people get nervous, because it makes them think of judgment and accountability. We don't want to be accountable. And therefore atheism gives an apparent way out. One of the Huxleys, I think, talked about the great relief when he discovered there wasn't a God — he could do what he liked and not be accountable. There's a deep-seated fear of accountability. And if you fear judgment and you've never heard the glory of the gospel, then of course you're going to shy away from it and you're going to ramp up your atheism with all kinds of evidences, even if they're pseudo-science. And there's an awful lot of that. I've spent my life combating it in my other books.
So it seems to me that we're facing a huge difficulty. However, all Christians have the responsibility and the opportunity to witness one-to-one. And it seems to me that that is the most effective thing. Because we're talking about global problems, and the danger is that as an individual I just say, "Well, it's hopeless. I can do nothing here." Yes, you can. You can have non-Christian friends in your home. You can show them love. You can show them friendship. You can play sport with them. You can get them involved in various things. You can lead them into discovering the sheer wonder — which will surprise them — of the Bible, starting maybe with the Gospel of John, which is where I myself like to start.
There are many things that we can do as individuals. And if one Christian leads two to Christ and that keeps going, that's exponential — you reach the world very rapidly, actually. And we need to have that kind of hope. Where it stops, I'm afraid, is where Christians get so scared of this whole scenario that they're silenced. And they're silenced because, possibly, sadly, their experience of God is not very real. They're not witnessing. So they don't have the joy of seeing people's lives transformed. And they're afraid of all the questions they may be asked.
Final encouragement for Christian leaders and technologists
Simon Lennox: Well, John, our audience right now is a room full of Christian leaders and Christian technologists, largely in ministries that are seeking to use AI technology to make Christ known and to encourage the church and believers at large to do what you're saying here. What are your final words of encouragement and wisdom for the use and development of AI technology in doing that and making Christ known?
Dr John Lennox: Well, the first thing I'd say to all of you leaders is: you will empower whatever sophisticated ministry you're involved in — and they're all very important — if you yourself are engaged in leading people to Christ. That will transform any ministry. And there is a danger of not yourself, at some point, being on the front line. You need to be a backroom person creating the mechanisms, the AI systems and all the rest of it. But there are exciting things to be done.
One of my vivid memories is of seeing a short clip of a missionary on horseback in Africa handing over a new translation of the scriptures into a new language. And I often thought — because I'm a linguist of sorts — of the importance of the Wycliffe Bible Translators. But think what large language models have now given us for translating the Bible into new languages, reducing new languages into writing, translating the scriptures into those languages, and so on. And even down to the simple level of my own communication: I'm an English speaker. I speak German, some French, and some Russian, and that's where it ends. But I just did an interview for France, and I said I'm not up to it in French. He said it doesn't matter — we will produce this and you will be seen speaking French in your voice, and AI will do that. And the opportunities are immense.
I used to painstakingly prepare talks on scripture in German. Now I write a talk in English and Google Translate — even that — will do it. It'll make mistakes, I correct them, and within twenty minutes the whole thing is ready. It's just staggering. And then it'll put it into my voice and all the rest of it. It is just amazing. So I would say: keep at it.
I've heard a little bit about the things you've been doing. Missionary work in the 21st century is very complex — for example, in areas where it needs aircraft, Mission Aviation Fellowship, the logistical support that's needed, the support that's needed to service missionaries, to help them build buildings, to help them develop curricula for schools and education and everything else. And it seems to me there's a real boom happening through the investment of technology in mission.
Let me put it this way. I've also written a book which I hope I can encourage you to read. It's called A Good Return: Biblical Principles of Wealth, Work, and Wisdom. And the key to it, ladies and gentlemen, is this: God puts different kinds of wealth together for his kingdom. Now, you're sitting looking at me now, and clearly there's a lot of intellectual wealth in this room. But that gets you nowhere unless there are people with the financial worth and wealth prepared to back you up, so that your wealth and their wealth work together.
The most beautiful examples of this: one from the book of Acts is how the gospel reached Europe — where a businesswoman from Turkey, she had more than one home, she'd opened a home in Philippi as well as her home at Thyatira in Turkey, and got converted. And I'd love to hear this conversation. She comes to Paul and she says, "Look, if you really think I'm a Christian, here's my home. Use it as your base." Her wealth and his intellectual and spiritual and moral wealth were put together. Europe and North America were reached with the gospel. That's how it works.
And when it comes to the scriptures getting to the English-speaking world, William Tyndale translated the Bible and tried to get the Bishop of London to help him publish it. He wasn't interested. But there was a business chap called Humphrey Monmouth. Many of you may never have heard of him — I hope you have — because he heard of Tyndale and he said, "I'll bankroll you." And that's how scriptures came pouring into London from Belgium, hidden under bales of cloth, because Monmouth was a cloth merchant — just like Lydia was.
Now you can be the AI tech merchants who are helping use the wealth of entrepreneurs and funds, trust funds and so on, to bring those two things together and to help reach the world for Christ. God bless you as you do it.
Simon Lennox: Well, John, thank you so much for joining us. It's been a real joy.
Dr John Lennox: Lovely to talk to you, Simon. Nephew Simon — yes, there we go.