I love John Lennox. He is a gem, a gift to the Christian world of teaching.

This video is Professor John Lennox on the subject of God, AI, and the end of history. Largely it is about understanding the book of Revelation in an age of intelligent machines. For those that do not have time to watch the video I have reproduced most of the content below.

“I’m your host, Dr. Peter Saunders. I’m the chief executive of ICMDA, which is the International Christian Medical and Dental Association. And this webinar is brought to you tonight in combination with the Forum of Christian Leaders as well. ICMDA brings together about 60,000 Christian doctors and dentists from over 100 affiliated movements.

So John, it’s a pleasure to have you here. John is professor of mathematics emeritus at Oxford University and fellow in mathematics and philosophy of science at Green Templeton College Oxford. As we know John has debated a number of prominent atheists including Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Peter Singer. But tonight we are exploring a question that sits at the intersection of theology, technology, and human identity. How should Christians think about artificial intelligence in the light of scripture? And particularly in the light of the book of Revelation, we live in a moment of extraordinary technological acceleration. AI is now diagnosing disease. Is it shaping economies, influencing behaviour, and increasingly mediating how power is exercised in all spheres? And for many Christians, this raises urgent questions. Are these developments morally neutral tools? Do they echo biblical warnings? Or are we in danger of reading tomorrow’s headlines too quickly into ancient prophecy? So, our guest, Professor John Lennox, has spent decades helping believers think clearly at the interface of science, philosophy, and faith. And in his recent book, God, AI, and the End of History, he brings that same clarity to one of the most understood, misunderstood, and often sensationalized areas of the Bible, the book of Revelation. So our goal tonight is is not speculation, fear, or date setting, but rather it’s discernment, understanding what scripture actually teaches, what AI truly is, and how Christian hope, ethics, and wisdom should shape our response in an age of intelligent machines.

Professor Lennox, thanks so much for for joining us tonight. It’s my pleasure to be with you. So you have debated leading atheists and you’ve written extensively on science and faith. Why did you feel compelled at this stage of your life, at this stage in history, to write about AI and revelation?

Well, some years ago, there was a great deal of discussion on the Genesis claim that human beings are created in the image of God versus the claims of technology to enhance humans by AI to such an extent that we might need to revisit what we meant by a human being. And a conference of Christian leaders was arranged in London to discuss this. And I was asked to give the opening talk on what Genesis taught about human beings. The invitation made me curious to delve into the technology and I saw very rapidly that AI was going to raise some very big questions not only for Christians but for everybody. And that’s how I got started on the book entitled 2084 which appeared in 2020. Now in that book since much of the talk about AI was concerned with the future I began to compare the promises of the transhumanists with biblical teaching about the future. And I pointed out that some of the futuristic AI scenarios envisaged by people like physicist Max Tegmark in his book Life 3.0, I pointed out that they were uncannily parallel to biblical teaching on the future, in particular in the book of Revelation. And this aspect of my book generated a lot of interest. And so I thought that I should try to write something to demystify the book of Revelation and make it accessible and to link it with a book that I had already written on the prophecy of Daniel, a book entitled Against the Flow.

The publishers of my book on Revelation were very enamoured with the bits on the technology and so they wanted it inserted in the title and hence we’ve got this title God AI and the end of history but that has confused many people to think that this is my latest book on artificial intelligence. So, let me clear that up. First of all, Peter, it isn’t. My latest book on AI was published last in 2024, and it’s the updated version of 2084. How AI shapes our future. It’s twice as large as the original book and shows just how much has been happening in those four years. That is my most recent book on AI. This book is an exposition of the book of Revelation, but with a careful eye on technology. And so it really is an exposition of the book of Revelation in an age of intelligent machines. So that’s where it comes from. We’re going to get into the book of Revelation uh fairly shortly, but but uh let’s just think about definitions first of all before we talk about revelation. What is artificial intelligence actually and and what is it not? Well, the first thing to realize that artificial intelligence is artificial. It’s not real. In other words, take the simplest kind of AI system. It is essentially computing and it’s a system designed to do one and only one thing that normally requires human intelligence. So the intelligence is simply the simulation. To use the words of Alan Turing who was the genius that really started computing off and raised these questions during the wartime when he built and solved the problem of the enigma machine. It plays a simulation game and one of the big problems with it is it uses words like intelligence, like machine learning and so on that anthropomorphize what is a mechanical and computing system and make people think that it is conscious. It is not conscious. The genius of God in creating human beings that he has linked intelligence to consciousness. These machines are only intelligent in the sense that they can mimic what normally takes human intelligence. Now there are two sorts. There’s narrow AI, which is the AI that we’re mostly familiar with. And then there’s a more speculative artificial general intelligence. And that is the attempt to create a system that can replicate everything that a human being can do, but do it much faster and do it much more expertly and so on. So that there’s a big push in that direction, but at the same time it’s the side of the whole topic that lends itself to science fiction and a great deal of hype. And one of my reasons for writing Peter was to try and demystify it and say what AI is and what it is not. Now let’s give concrete examples just briefly because medicine is one of the areas that has benefited hugely from narrow AI. Let’s take a system that works very well. We have a large database and in it are X-ray pictures of man lungs exhibiting different lung diseases and they’re labelled by the best experts in that field in the world. Those are put in a database. Let’s say there are a million X-ray pictures in the database. Then an X-ray is taken of your lungs because you’re worried about your breathing. And very quickly, the AI sifts through by using pattern recognition statistical techniques and compares your lung X-ray with the million in the database and very rapidly says you are most likely to be suffering from this particular disease. And as a diagnostic tool, very often this will be much better than you get at your local hospital. Now that is being rolled out over very wild fields of medicine with very great success. So that is one positive example. But just to go on the negative side immediately to show that there’s an ethical problem here. pattern recognition, facial recognition technology is very advanced at the moment. It can pick a terrorist out of a football crowd and is therefore very useful to a police force. But that kind of recognition can be used for intrusive surveillance of a population, perhaps a minority population such as is happening in Sing Jang in China with very horrifying results. So what enables criminals to be recognized which we would say this is positive can be used for controlling populations. So that even narrow AI which is so sophisticated snow that it can recognize a person not simply from the front by their face but from the rear by their gate scan be used to control populations. So immediately we’re straight into the ethical problem and the argument is you give up your privacy and we’ll give you security. So that’s a whole debate in its own right. So That’s an example of um narrow AI and there are many many examples but of course we’re pushing forward very rapidly in putting narrow AI systems together and there is advance on many many fronts and one of the big steps forward has been the introduction of so-called large language models like chat GPT And this year it has taken a quantum leap forward just within a month or so. So that it is quantitatively very different from what has happened before and we can discuss that as we can as we go on. So, artificial intelligence is capable of a huge range of different task and and that’s changing exponentially month by month as we go on. But what is what is AI not capable of doing? Well, of course, negatives are very difficult to quantify and there are several things that it was felt would never been so would never be solved. And one of them in science which is a fascinating question is how do protein structures fold? That was a 50-year-old problem. And the amazing thing is that an English mathematician, a genius, he won the Nobel Prize for it. Deus Hassabis solved the problem so effectively that she was able to work out the folding of over 200 million proteins which is staggering. So what people say one day is impossible turns out to be possible the next day and chat GPT has refined its capacities absolutely amazingly. For example, just recently I was asked to do a film illustrating what Jesus meant in John 11 when he said to the disciples who were scared of going back to Jerusalem because it was suicidal. And Jesus said to them, “Are there not 12 hours in the day? If a person walks in the day, they don’t stumble because they see the light of this world that is the sun. But if they walk at night, they stumble because the light is not in them. In other words, we are not bioluminescent. So I asked GPT, please construct a scenario that would get this across. And what it produced in about 30 seconds was absolutely brilliant and usable. So it then asked me, it said, “Since you want to film this, would you like directions for the cameras?” And it spouted a whole scenario, how many cameras, where they should be situated, and all the rest of it. And this is quite amazing. But what it can’t do, I think it’s important since this is not real intelligence. It’s not conscious. So it’s not aware. So the main thrust here is this. As human beings made in the image of God, we can experience what are called quailia. We can smell the wonderful scent of a rose. We can feel the sea breeze on our faces. We can perceive the beauty of the universe as we look through a telescope. Quailia are unknown to an artificial intelligence. It can have no idea of them. It has no ideas at all because it doesn’t think in the same way as human beings do. And so although AI has been used and is increasingly so to produce some level of robotic companionship, it can never replace, I believe, the fellowship that is possible between human beings. And of course, and we’ll probably talk about this later on, when it comes to relationship with God, of course, AI knows nothing of God. So, as you said, the book of Genesis tells us that human beings are made in the image of God. You’ve alluded to consciousness, sensation. What other uniquely human things will AI never be able to do? Well, the question of values, AI knows nothing about values or right or wrong. And human beings are moral beings made in the image of God. And if I may say so, this is one of the places where the transhumanist vision of using AI to perfect humans and to make them into God’s fails. No utopia can ever be built without facing the problem of human sin and rebellion against God. Those two concepts mean nothing for an artificial intelligence. And so one of the richest kinds of human experience from a Christian perspective is that relationship with God through Christ where we understand that Christ has died for our sins and has taken our guilt away and we can have a relationship with God. AI can never replace it or come near it or know anything about it. Which means, Peter, I think that we need to step up much more in emphasizing these absolutely uniquely positive things about the Christian faith that give human beings dignity because AI is very rapidly reducing human dignity. One of the main areas where this is happening is the area of work. Dario Amado Amade is the CEO of Anthropic, one of these multi-billion dollar companies. and he has written an essay just a week or two ago which is well worth reading warning that possibly within 2 years from now the advances in AI are such that 50% of all white collar jobs will be taken over by artificial intelligence in the medical world in the legal world for example there they set up a test and had a very complicated legal legal brief considered and examined by an AI system and by 16 lawyers, top lawyers. The lawyers got 60% of it right, whereas the AI got 96% of it right. And these things for which lawyers are paid a great deal, conveyancing, setting up contracts, all this kind of thing are now at the stage where they can be reproduced almost instantaneously. One of the most interesting things is an article that appeared in the Times last week by Matt Selman who was writing. He is a software developer and creates apps and he runs an AI company and he came to a realization as a result of the leap forward this year that is at the beginning of February, beginning of this month. He said, “I spoke in English and dictated what I wanted from this particular app.” He said, “I left it and came back a number of hours later and found the thing ready for use. The AI had written thousands of lines of code. It had then set up the app and tested it as a human would do, pressing all the buttons, refining the things that were inadequate and so on. And this is the key thing because up until now most of us have regarded AI as a tool rather than an agent. But AIS are now showing signs of agency in a very restricted but real sense. And he said this particular system was making decisions about how human beings might use this that I’d never thought about. And the thing was perfect. And he said, I suddenly realized I haven’t got a job anymore. And he says, it’s coming to all of you. And we need to really be very realistic about this, Peter. This is more scary than anything for people with all of these jobs. It used to be said a few years ago that if you wanted to keep up with the curve, you went into computer science. But now the coding can be done by the AI system. It can think of the codes and put them in. But this scary agency thing I’d like to say something about because it needs Christians to think very carefully about this that the AI that he was using. He said one of the problems and he gave an example is this. If you feed into the system a very big overarching goal, make money for example, and what the system is dealing with is feeding young people with material in their smartphone. It will investigate all sorts of ways of maximizing not only their attention to keep doom scrolling but also their attachment which is now a major feature. So that it will use all kinds of things that the designers of the AI system itself never thought of including going into the dark world to keep their attention and to make profit. It’s a version of the old story of the AI told to make paper clips and it turns the whole universe into a paperclip sourcing factory and regards humanity as irrelevant and destroys them all. But there’s a serious aspect to that and this is why you have even Nobel Prize winners in this field stepping up and saying that they are scared that they can’t control this stuff. They don’t really know what it’s doing or what’s happening. And that poses a huge problem because the control of it is being vastly outpaced by the developments. So those are some of the things that we need to factor into our thinking.