Thank goodness God is keeping John Lennox alive so he can continue to provide us with gems like this presentation.

John Lennox warns of ‘idolatrous’ worship of AI, ‘reducing people to machines’

As artificial intelligence becomes more powerful, Lennox believes society risks elevating the technology to a position it was never meant to occupy. “The Christian faith has a great deal to say to this arms race,” Lennox said, warning against making technology “the ultimate source of truth.” He also expressed concern that AI is “reductionist,” adding, “We’re reducing people to machines.”

Lennox stressed that AI systems, regardless of their sophistication, lack consciousness, emotion and true understanding.

“This is a machine. Machines do not think,” he said. “They do not understand the redness of red. They do not experience emotion. They have no consciousness.” Instead, he said human beings possess a unique dignity because God created them with both intelligence and consciousness. “We need to step back and realize that we are conscious beings,” Lennox said. “And that gives us a supreme dignity and value.”

Lennox added that “the genius of God is that He’s made you and me and He’s connected in us consciousness and intelligence.” He also chastised efforts to “anthropomorphize everything” and treat AI “as if they’re conscious beings.”

“To reduce ourselves to merely machines or, on the other hand merely animals, is to demean our value,” he said. 

Bartlett then shared a quote from a former Google engineer, who predicted that “what is going to be created will effectively be a god.” “It’s not a god in the sense that it will make lightning or cause hurricanes,” he clarified while pondering, “if there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else can you call it?”

Lennox acknowledged that some people already attribute godlike qualities to AI.

“You have a system even now that has got some of the qualities we normally associate with God,” he said. “It appears to be omniscient. You can ask it any question. It is omnipresent through the internet.”

He noted that AI worship communities already exist and warned that such devotion amounts to idolatry. “It’s bowing down to something that in the end is idolatrous because it is less than God,” Lennox said. “And some people welcome this and say, ‘Well, this is the way we should go.’ And other people say, ‘Just wait a moment, there’s something very strange going on here.’”

Bartlett noted that “people are basically praying to it now [and] confiding in it in a way.” Dismisses ‘transhumanist agenda’ to ‘solve the problem of death’: ‘You’re too late’ 

Lennox also took aim at transhumanism, a movement that seeks to use technology to dramatically extend human life and eventually overcome death itself.

According to Lennox, Christianity already offers the answer many transhumanists are searching for. “The problem of physical death was solved when God raised Christ from the dead 20 centuries ago,” he said, adding that transhumanists are “too late” and cannot stop death. 

While some transhumanists hope technology will eventually allow humans to upload their consciousness into digital forms, Lennox pointed to the Christian hope of resurrection. “I’m waiting for the biggest uploading that’s ever going to happen in history when Christ returns and raises me from the dead because that is precisely what He promises,” he said.

Lennox added that transhumanism ultimately reflects humanity’s age-old desire to become divine. Lennox said how he often asks proponents of transhumanism, “Isn’t it fascinating that your transhumanism consists [of] humans reaching out to become little gods?”

Christianity, by contrast, tells the story of “a God who became human so that He could give us life and give us a new relationship with Him.” Lennox also asserted that both transhumanism and AI-driven visions of the future attempt to build a utopia without addressing humanity’s deeper moral problem.

“They will not face the sin problem,” he said.

“What really completes the circle for me is that my relationship with God is a relationship which is based on the solution to the really hard problem,” he added. “And that is the problem that I, by nature, have not always done good and by my own standards, I have failed.” 

Lennox summarized both transhumanism and AI as efforts to “build paradise, utopia without facing the problem of the damage that humans have caused to themselves and one another” that “will not face the sin problem.”

He dismissed these alternatives as inadequate: “Christianity to me doesn’t compete with … anything else because Christ offers me something nobody else offers me. Nobody else offers me peace, the peace of knowing that I have real forgiveness; the peace of knowing that I have a friend and a companion to whom I can talk all the time.”

‘You become a Christian by trusting Christ;’ not a ‘merit-based religion’

During the interview, Lennox reflected on his own path to faith and emphasized that Christianity is rooted in personal trust in Jesus Christ rather than religious tradition. “You see, my parents taught me quite clearly that I wasn’t born a Christian,” he recalled. “You become a Christian by trusting Christ.”

“To have somebody born or made a Christian by some ceremony is absurd to my mind,” Lennox asserted. He acknowledged that he “didn’t have any great feelings or anything else” as a child but came to “really believe this stuff is true” as he got older and attended college. 

As he began publicly sharing his faith, he said his confidence grew stronger over time.

“It was when I began to stand and share with others that a great deal of the underpinning came in and the certainty came cumulatively. I’ve never had these big flashes of anything, but I have had several experiences of what I can only put down to direct divine guidance.” Lennox added that he doesn’t “regard myself as religious, particularly.”

“Most religions prescribe a moral way that you try to follow and you’ve teachers, gurus, imams, all the rest, priests to keep you on the way, and then you come to a judgment at the end,” he added. “I usually draw a scale of justice. And if your good deeds tip over the bad deeds, then you get into whatever it is: Heaven, nirvana, all the rest of … That’s religion. It’s not Christianity, though many people think it is.” 

Lennox pointed to the refrain that “I do my best and I hope that God will be kind” as “the exact opposite of Christianity” and instead “a merit-based religion.” He noted that “in a human relationship, we don’t base our affection and relationship with someone on the basis of their merit.”

“God does everything, and if we trust Him, He is the one who gives us certainty. So, it’s not arrogance to accept it from Him. It’s arrogance actually to reject and say, ‘Oh no, no, I’ll go my own way, and I’ll try my best and hope that you will accept me,’” he concluded. 

 Agnostic Bartlett acknowledges ‘peace’ in Lennox and other Christians

Near the end of the conversation, Bartlett made a striking observation about Lennox and other Christian guests he has interviewed. “You have a certain peace and contentment that I rarely see in people that I interview,” Bartlett told Lennox. Bartlett’s interview with Lennox comes not long after he interviewed Canadian apologist Wesley Huff. As his conversation with Lennox wrapped up, Bartlett, an agnostic, said the theologian’s demeanor was “one of the most compelling arguments for God” that he had presented. Huff, he added, “gave me the same feeling as you. [He] feels like a really happy person, content.” 

Bartlett suggested a pattern was emerging among Christian thinkers featured on his show. “Christian apologists have that anchoring that so many of us are looking for,” he said. Lennox responded by noting that the peace found in Christianity is uniquely connected to forgiveness through Jesus Christ.

“I don’t find that sense of fulfillment and peace that comes through the forgiveness in Christ,” in other religions, he said. After Lennox insisted that religion gives “people something outside themselves,” he pushed back on Bartlett’s suggestion that “irrespective of which religion [it] fills that place in your life, you still get the same boost and meaning.” “I don’t find this need met in those practitioners of other religions,” Lennox insisted. “I don’t find that sense of fulfillment and peace — that comes through the forgiveness in Christ.”

Look beyond ‘reductionist view of the world;’ atheism ‘destroys rationality’ 

Lennox also addressed what he sees as a growing hunger for meaning in a culture dominated by materialistic explanations of life. Many people, he said, are dissatisfied with a worldview that reduces reality to nothing more than physics and chemistry.

He pointed to “the number of intellectuals who are step-by-step taking the Christian faith more seriously.” Bartlett agreed, adding that “it does feel like more and more people have these sort of existential questions about meaning.”

Lennox attributed this phenomenon to the “reductionist view of the world” pushed on the public. He contended that “people rightly feel it’s too small a world to live in” and are “looking to break out of this” in search of “a bigger picture that can make sense of my world and make sense of my life and give [it] some meaning.” 

Lennox went on to argue that atheism ultimately undermines the rational foundation it depends on. “If you reduce everything, it ends up in a black hole of meaninglessness,” he proclaimed. “That’s one of my top reasons for not being an atheist because it destroys rationality almost by definition.” While critics often portray faith and reason as opposites, Lennox maintained that Christianity is grounded in evidence and intellectual inquiry.

“I’m a Christian because I believe the evidence supports it,” he said. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t.”