John Lennox: Science DOESN'T Explain What You Think It Does (Brilliant Insights!)

Let's take the first point where you said science has explained how the universe came to be. It hasn't. That was the surprise I found reading Hawking's more recent book. I was quite amazed to read the following key sentence: "Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing." That was his reason for saying we don't need God. But just think of the statement: because there is a law like gravity, that is, because there is something, the universe will create itself from nothing. That's a flat contradiction.

Good evening, everybody. How are you doing? Good to see you. Welcome to Westminster Chapel and to what I'm sure will be a really interesting conference this evening, the Practical Wisdom Conference. We're talking, of course, this evening about faith in the age of science. Very often in our era, many people, especially atheists, have claimed that science effectively disproves God. Someone who has been answering those atheists directly for a number of years is John Lennox. John is a well-known Christian thinker; he's a Emeritus Professor of Mathematics and the Philosophy of Science at the University of Oxford. I've had the privilege of interviewing and bringing John into conversation with many skeptics over many years. My role here is that I've been hosting conversations between skeptics and Christians for over 15 years. Some people know me from the Unbelievable Show, which I hosted for 17 years or more, and I'm currently engaged in some new projects. I'll be excited to tell you about those later. But really, you're here to see and hear from John Lennox, so I'd like to invite Samuel and John to join me on stage. Do give them a round of applause.

Welcome everyone to Practical Wisdom, and thank you very much for joining us. My name is Samuel Marusa, and today we're going to be talking about faith in God and science. There's no one better suited to have this conversation with than Professor John Lennox. John, it's great to have you with us. Welcome to Practical Wisdom.

Well, thank you very much, Samuel, and ladies and gentlemen, thank you all for coming. I'd like to say how grateful I am to Samuel and the team that have organized this because, as Justin has just said, getting public discussion on the big ideas is increasingly important as our culture disintegrates. I want to encourage you to read Justin's book afterwards, and I want to tell you that Samuel is a formidable interviewer, and that we haven't colluded. I don't know what he's going to ask me, so I sit here in fear and trembling and look forward to the questions he's going to put to me.

John, you've engaged in many debates with intellectuals and heavyweight thinkers, people like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and many other influential atheists. Many people in this room will know you from these debates. Can you talk a little bit about these debates, which one was the most remarkable, and what insights have you gained from this experience?

I suppose one of the most remarkable ones, partly for a humorous reason, was the debate with Professor Peter Singer, one of the world's leading ethicists. I was invited to debate him on his home turf in Melbourne City Hall some years ago, although he teaches at Princeton. In the opening remarks, I'm always open with audiences and point out that my parents were Christian. When he started, he said, "Well, there goes my main objection against all religion—people stay in the religion in which they were brought up." When I heard that, I thought this is going to be very interesting. When I got a chance to speak, I said, "Peter, I told you about my parents; tell me about yours. Were they atheists?" "Yes," he said, "they were atheists." So I said, "You've stayed in the faith in which you grew up, then?" He said, "It isn't a faith." Oh, Peter, I said, I'm very sorry; I thought you believed it. Cyberspace went mad at that time that he was one of the world's leading thinkers who didn't realize that his atheism was a belief system. You notice how carefully Dr. Marusa Samuel introduced this; he talked about faith in God because all people are people of faith. Everybody's got a worldview that they believe, and this really exposed one of the biggest problems we have in our culture: that Christians are regarded as people of faith—that means they believe for no new evidence—but atheists, they're not people of faith; they're rational. Fighting against that is one of the things I've been doing for a long time. What have I learned from it? That's hard to assess. I've learned that it's pretty scary debating some of these people, and also it has confirmed my faith enormously because, spending a lot of time unpicking these arguments, as I grow older, I find them less and less intellectually impressive. But I think it's so important that we enter this debate, or we have shows like Justin has been doing for years, to allow people to see both sides of the debate. I think that's a very healthy thing and it enables people to see that Christianity has actually got very powerful evidence to support it, and we need to know that evidence.

You mentioned faith there, and you obviously have very interesting ideas on faith in God and science. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has this secularization theory, and he wrote extensively about this. He said in ancient times people needed God to explain supernatural things. So, for example, if you had a solar eclipse, people in ancient times would think that would be the wrath of God manifested. But nowadays, that science has explained that, we don't need God anymore; science has replaced God. We know there's no mystery there; we know how the planets move; we can explain what happens during a solar eclipse, and we can predict the next solar eclipse for the next thousand years. Science has replaced God. This is part of the secularization theory, and we live in a very secular society in the UK. Also, there's this "God of the gaps" view, which says—and many atheists and thinkers will say—look, Christians are a bit lazy because if they can't explain something, they just say, "Well, we can't explain it; therefore, God did it." This is the label that many atheists would put on Christian thought. What is your view on the "God of the gaps" theory?

Well, that may apply to some people, but I don't think it applies to me, as I try to explain. But there are really two questions hidden there. There's this notion that God and science are alternatives in terms of explanation, and for a long time I couldn't understand why people as bright as Stephen Hawking constantly said to the public, "You've got to choose between God and science." I realized that part of the reason for that was they didn't understand the nature of scientific explanation. That may sound like a very arrogant claim for me to make, but actually it's quite simple. We need to realize that the God explanation and the science explanation are different kinds of explanation. I often give a very simple example, even some professors can understand: Why is the water boiling? Well, because the heat energy is agitating the molecules of water, and it's boiling. Well, that's a scientific explanation. But I could equally well say, "It's boiling because I want a cup of tea." Now that is an agent, personal explanation. Think about those two explanations; they're different, but they don't compete; they don't conflict; they complement each other. I often say to people, the God explanation is the agent type explanation. God is the explanation of why there is a universe at all and why there are scientists there to study it. He's not competing in that sense at all, and we need both, as I find most schoolchildren can say. The second thing is that many contemporary thinkers have lost the idea of a God who's a transcendent Creator who upholds the universe, and they think of God in terms of the Greek God of Thunder. They couldn't explain thunder, as you said, so they postulated God. It's very important to realize that the God of the Bible is not in that category. There's a brilliant writer in Oxford, at one stage, Werner Jaeger, who was an expert on the Greek gods and the Babylonian gods, and he made this point, which I think is very important. He said all the gods of the ancient philosophies and religions are "descended from the heavens and the earth"—that is, they were actually part of the original material cosmos. The God of the Bible created the heavens and the earth, so they are completely different categories. Now, with that as background, let me come to the heart of your question, which is the "God of the gaps." Now, I'm allergic to this in the sense that I do not want people to think that I believe in a God of the gaps. So how do I deal with it? Well, in several different ways. I'm going to go for the easiest one, and it's this: think of Isaac Newton and his wonderful law of gravitation. I used to love explaining it to students—how you get an equation with eight symbols in it, and from it you could deduce the motion of the planets around the sun. It is just brilliant stuff. Now, when Newton discovered that, did he think, "Right, I have now got an equation that allows me to deduce the motion of the planets from it; I don't need God"? No, he didn't. He wrote what was perhaps the most brilliant book in the history of science, *Principia Mathematica*, and he dedicated it with the hope that thinking people would see in it evidence for the existence of a Divine intelligence behind the universe. Because his argument was this: I found this wonderful mathematical description of what goes on between heavy bodies and how they move. What a brilliant God who did it that way! And it's exactly that in the way we normally think. If you know a lot about painting, you will see much more in a Rembrandt picture than I would, who am pretty ignorant about art, although I like it. You can see the genius. If you're an engineer, you'll see much more in a Rolls-Royce engine than I possibly would because you see the evidence. And to my mind, God is not a God of the gaps; he is the most powerful explanatory power to make sense of the whole thing. I'm a mathematician; the very fact that we can do mathematics, to me, is an indicator that this is a word-based universe, to put it that way. The very fact that in biology we've discovered the longest word—the human genome, 3.4 billion letters in the chemical alphabet—is evidence of an intelligent mind. That's not a "God of the gaps"; it's the only thing that makes sense. Now I'm looking around the room, but the lights are blinding… oh yes, I see a word up there: PRAYER. How very suitable. There are two, four, six letters. The moment you see that, what do you deduce? Well, you can see letters; they have meaning to you. You cannot explain that meaning in terms of the physics and chemistry of the paper and paint. But the moment you see that, there are many mechanical processes that went into producing that sign, but you know, because that carries meaning—it's a word—that behind it there was a mind, not a "God of the gaps," but a mind that's the only sensible explanation of what you're reading up there. It's that kind of argument, to my mind, that I find extremely convincing.

So you talked about meaning there and semantics. And the word semantics… Ogden and Richards published a book in 1923, 100 years ago, called *The Meaning of Meaning*. Yes, and it's a very popular book, and they talked about how language influences thought and affects thought, and they devised the semantic triangle, which is a model of meaning. When you have the symbol or the sign—linguistic sign—on one side, you have the actual thing in reality on the other side, which is the reference, and then you have at the top, thought. It's the relation and the causal interaction of these three that give you meaning. This book was very influential in philosophy and also influenced C.S. Lewis in *The Abolition of Man*, published in 1943, in which he talked about objective moral standards and also natural law. So people and scientists sometimes say, "Look, there's this universe out there with millions of galaxies, with hundreds of thousands of stars, and they all dance together in a very interesting, beautiful rhythm because of the law of gravity, but there is no meaning to that. And also, as a human being—as humans—this is a microcosm; there's no meaning in our life either." Does meaning imply intelligent design?

It's interesting that people should even say a thing like that: "There is no meaning in it," and they expect me to understand the meaning of that statement. It's one of these incoherent things that people make statements, and they are unconsciously accepting themselves. It's like… may I tell a little story?

Please do.

Sitting in my Oxford college beside a man who had a book, and he was putting it on the table… and I could see its title was curious about semantics and so on. I said, "What's your book about?" But he said, "This is a book that shows that there's no such thing as authorial intention." I said, "Pardon?" I said, "You mean if I read your book, I will understand that an author has no intention?" He said, "Exactly so." I said, "I'm not going to read it." So he said, "Why not?" Well, I said, "It must apply to your book as well." Well, he never thought about it; he got very angry and he got up and walked out. We never saw him again. This is one of the weaknesses of this sort of loose postmodern style talk that says there's no such thing as truth, but they expect you to believe that statement as a truth. It goes too far; it goes right over the top. Now I'm very interested in the kind of way in which you posed that question because another person that influenced Lewis a lot, one of his Inklings, was Owen Barfield. He posed an interesting question: "Why is it we live in a world where we understand how almost everything works and we know the meaning of nothing?" Ian McGilchrist is very interesting; he's a polymath—he's a neuroscientist—but roughly speaking, he's been working on something we're all familiar with when we say, "Jane, you know, she's a real left-brained nerd, always into computers and all this kind of thing," whereas James, "well, he's so right-brained with his head in the arts and the clouds and so on." Left and right brain. Well, what Ian McGilchrist claims in his very interesting book, which is called—this is a very interesting title—*The Master and His Emissary*, is that there is substance to these differences between the two brain hemispheres. Roughly speaking, both brain hemispheres are involved in virtually every event in our brains and minds, but the differences are that indeed there is this concentration in the left brain on rational thought, on analysis, on breaking things down, whereas the right brain concerns itself much more with putting things into context and meaning. And he says this: for the last 400 or 500 years we have neglected the right brain, so that we're living in a world where we know how most things work but we understand the meaning of nothing. And when our late Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, read that, he had a lightbulb moment and he wrote a book because of it, a very interesting book called *The Great Partnership*. But he put it this way, and I like this formulation; it's very helpful. He said, "Science takes things apart to see how they work; religion puts them together to see what they mean." And it seems to me that that captures something extremely important that we need to focus on the meaning side because science is powerful precisely because it limits the questions it can answer. It cannot give us meaning, and it cannot give us value. Einstein saw that years ago. He said you could talk about the ethical foundations of science, but you cannot talk about the scientific foundations of ethics. You have to look outside. And I always cite one of Richard Dawkins' favorite scientists, Sir Peter Medawar, who said—and this is hugely important because science is so powerful—it's so easy to see… he wrote that science is limited because it cannot even answer the simple question of a child: "Where do I come from? Where am I going? And what is the meaning of life?" And to answer those questions, we need to go to literature, and I would add philosophy, and I would add theology, and a lot of other things as well. Because the fatal flaw in much so-called academic thinking is that people have come to believe that science is coextensive with rationality, which is nonsense. History is a rational discipline; so is theology; so is economics, but they're not the natural sciences. If science and rationality were coextensive, you'd have to close half the departments in every university in the United Kingdom. So that's how I'd begin to approach your question.

So science doesn't really explain the things that we think it explains?

No, that's important; it's very limited. Yes. But what you're hinting at there is even deeper because I used to think at school, because I was pretty naive then, I suppose, that Newton's law of gravity explained gravity. It doesn't. You know, nobody yet knows really what gravity is. Newton's law of gravitation gives you a mathematical capacity to calculate what happens when heavy bodies move in relation to one another, so accurately that they'll help you land a person on the moon. But Newton realized all those years ago that it doesn't tell you what gravity is. So even within science itself, a scientific explanation is rarely, if ever, a complete explanation. I have focused in the last several years on the nature of explanation because I feel there's huge confusion about it. But science did explain how the universe came to be, and also it conflicts… this conflicts with the Genesis account and creationism. I think this is a very important issue for Christians because science seems to have explained and seems to go against creationism. For example, some Christians say that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, so science seems to have explained that and contradicted that irrefutably. And then you also have statements in Genesis that man was created in the image of God *imago dei*. And I think this is hugely important because this is the cornerstone of our Western civilization. Now Harari took this a step further in his book *Homo Deus* and said two things: one, we can enhance human life by using data, information, and AI, very much based on Nietzsche from the 19th century; and also the second point he made in his book was that death is only a medical problem, and eventually science will help us overcome that as well. So the question is two-pronged, I guess, John: one, does evolution and the general theory of evolution go against creationism? And also, what is your take, what does the image of God mean to you?

It's actually a four-pronged question, I've worked out listening to you—or five even. Let's take the first point where you said science has explained how the universe came to be. It hasn't. And that was the surprise I found in reading Hawking's more recent book. I was quite amazed to read the following key sentence in the book: "Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing." And that was the reason he gave for saying we don't need God. But just think of the statement: because there is a law like gravity, that is, because there is something, the universe will create itself from nothing. That's a flat contradiction. But do scientists mean the same thing? For me, nothing means the absence of something. Do scientists mean the same thing? No, they have to redefine nothing as a quantum vacuum or something like this, and then they get into incredible complexities. I've written a book about this, by the way, called *Seven Days That Divide the World*. But let's just come back to the statement because it's worse than that. He says the universe will create itself. What on Earth could that mean? Sorry, I didn't mean to put the Earth in because that's the point. The universe… if I say X creates Y, roughly speaking you would understand me to mean if you've got X, you'll get Y. If I say X creates X, I think what that tells me is that nonsense remains nonsense even if scientists write it. And as C.S. Lewis himself pointed out… so number one point in response to you: I don't believe science has told us how the universe came to be. It is certain theories of the etiology of the history of spacetime, and as you say, a long time ago. So let's come up a little bit. The second point you mentioned was the age of the Earth and creationism. Now I must make a confession because a few weeks ago I was speaking at the speech day in my own school, founded in 1685 by Archbishop Usher, who famously calculated the creation of Adam at 9:00 in the morning on the 6th of October 4004 BC and wrote this in a letter to the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University and said, "Sir, I'm sorry, I cannot give it more precisely than that." As I spoke at the speech day, sitting beside me was the current Archbishop, so I turned to him and I said, "You know, you and Archbishop Usher are both historians, and Usher was actually a good historian, but I suspect, Archbishop, that you differ by about seven orders of magnitude in your calculation of the age of the Earth." And then I used that to speak to the kids in school and their parents, and I said one or two things, but not what I'm about to say to you now. The word "creationism"—creationist used to mean a person like me who believes in a Creator. Now it has been narrowed semantically to mean a person who believes in a young Earth theory. Now let me just hit this head-on and give you one or two arguments why I'm not convinced of that, and I'm not convinced of it mainly for biblical reasons. Let me explain. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth"—that's how Genesis starts. You then get a sequence of days—the six days of creation—and God rests on the Sabbath. The interesting thing about that text in Hebrew is that the opening statement is in one past tense in Hebrew, and it changes for the sequence of six days. Now, in order to be fair, I consulted the Professor of Hebrew at Oxford and the Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge, and to my amazement they gave me the same answer, and it's best expressed, I suppose, by Jack Collins, who was the lead Hebrew translator of the ESV, also a trained scientist, which is interesting, and I wrote to him about this, and I quote more or less… I don't have it exactly in my memory… he said this tells you that the first statement in the Bible occurs "at an indefinite period before the second group." So what does the Bible say about the age of the universe? Absolutely nothing, no matter what you believe about the days. That is the interesting thing. Now I could speak about the days, but it would take too long, but in order to satisfy people's curiosity, I have a book, revised edition, *Seven Days That Divide the World*. Let me come to your last point: the theory of evolution. Well, there are many theories of evolution, and biological evolution as usually understood by people like Richard Dawkins is—and I'm partly quoting here—"natural selection, the blind, automatic process that Darwin discovered, is the explanation for the existence and variation of all of life." That's a quotation from *The Blind Watchmaker*, one of his most famous books. Well, the first statement is false, and he took many years to admit it. Evolution—natural selection—cannot account for the existence of life, for the simplest of reasons: that natural selection, in order to do anything at all, depends on the existence of life to begin with. So it can explain *it*, full stop. The origin of life does not come into the mandate of biological evolution that's normally understood, unless you start to talk about chemical evolution, which is completely different; that has nothing to do with selective processes, and there's a lot that can be said about that. Secondly, Neo-Darwinism, as it now is, adds the mechanism they believe—selection—but these minor changes caused by mutation… now, number one, it's obvious that selection and mutation do something. Just have a look around this room; do we all look the same? No. Why? Because there was selection. I bet some of you did some selecting; I did when I saw the lady that became my wife, and I selected her, and marvelously she selected me, and that's why our children look like they do, but they're different from everybody else. Selection and mutation do something, and from a Christian perspective we must see that that is something God has built into the world, as Paul pointed out to the Athenian philosophers: God has made of one every race of human beings. So that's okay. And what Darwin observed—brilliantly observed, actually—were minor variations on the theme. But now comes the problem: does this selection and mutation mechanism explain all the variation? It has nothing to do with the origin of life, but does it really explain… does it do the work that's claimed of it? Now I'm very interested in this; I'm not a biologist, but I have lived and soaked my mind in biology for the last many years, and I've got a friend in Oxford who is an absolutely brilliant fellow of the Royal Society, Professor Denis Noble, and he is really the driving force behind what's called the third wave in biology. And what are they saying now? They're saying that Neo-Darwinism is not fit for purpose; it doesn't need to be modified; it needs to be replaced. The wheels are coming off this stuff, but people don't know it, which is why I've written just recently a major book on this to try to introduce, particularly to Christians, but not only, what is going on at the top level in science. The book is called *Cosmic Chemistry: Do God and Science Mix?* Now don't misunderstand these people; many of them feel still that there's going to be a naturalistic solution, in other words, a solution that doesn't involve a Divine input of any kind, but they're being much more honest now. And the reason is that the levels of information that we know to have been contained in the DNA—the human genome—are now discovered as only a small part of what's going on. And the huge problem is that DNA and all these proteins are dependent on the existence of the cell, but the cell is dependent on them, so you get a classic chicken and egg situation to which there's been no solution. And now scientists are thinking much more in terms of the cell, and the cell is an absolutely unbelievably bewildering complex of factories, microminiature… Now it's not the fact that they contain information that's the problem; it's the nature of the information. And really it goes back to this: the moment you see that—and it's only six letters—you know a mind behind it. So what I am suggesting is that within biology the evidence is mounting more and more that there are many physical mechanisms involved, of course there are—the Earth's a big planet, life is extremely sophisticated once you get it going, and clearly there are variations—but when it comes to the existence of life itself and all the major modifications, it seems to be that there is increasing evidence that you've got to factor in an intelligent mind in order to get a full explanation. Now I know that's an assertion, but I've tried to argue the case, and I put it out there in the public space.

So what you're saying, John, is that science is not the only way to truth, which is actually scientism. But on the flip side, we have fideism, and Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, was one of the proponents of this view. And the Bible has a very interesting definition for faith in Hebrews 11:1, which is "an assurance about what we do not see." Yes, and that's very interesting because many atheists would say all faith is blind faith, and also some Christians will say we do not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven by logic; we do that by faith. So the question is, what do you make of Dawkins' statement? You quote Dawkins in your book *God's Undertaker*, and Richard Dawkins says this: "It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, mad cow disease, and many others, but I think that a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate. Faith, being belief that isn't based on evidence, is the principal vice of any religion." Is all faith blind faith?

Well, no. And I haven't forgotten what you asked me about Harari, and I'll come back to that if I may. Dawkins and his co-belligerents have cleverly redefined faith and confused many people. What he is defining as faith is what most people call blind faith—that is, simply believing something where there's no evidence. Now other religions must speak for themselves and philosophies, but as far as Christianity is concerned, scripture makes it abundantly clear that the faith that Jesus and the apostles talk about is evidence-based faith. Now you all know what that means. If I asked you why you trusted certain people, you'd say, "Well, because of this and this"—that is, you give me evidence. Why do you believe those facts? Because of this and that evidence. That's the common way to react because believing without evidence is a very risky thing to do. But let's absolutely anchor this because it is central. John, in his Gospel, explains why he wrote it, and he says at the end, "Many other signs"—the Greek term is *semion*, from which we get semiotics; they're indicators of who Jesus was, what we call his miracles—"many other signs Jesus did in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book, but these are written in order that you might believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that believing you might have life in his name." Notice very carefully what that says: "These are written that you might believe." This is a basis, a set of evidences on which you can ground your trust, and your trust that Jesus is two things: one, *hamashiach*, the Messiah; two, the Son of God. And then, on the basis of that, you can have an experience of trusting him, which will bring you to eternal life as a gift from God on repentance and faith in him. Now that, to my mind, is crucially important. Now you mentioned C.S. Lewis, and this is a very interesting thing. We have a philosopher quite well known called A.C. Grayling in this country, and he was invited to do, I think it was a guest editorial in *New Scientist*, and he chose to point out in his article that Jesus requires blind faith. I got the *New Scientist* at that time, and I thought this is going to be very interesting. So here I read how does he prove that Jesus requires blind faith? Well, he goes to John 20 and relates the story of Thomas, and he quotes the description where Jesus says to Thomas, "Because you have seen you have believed, but blessed are those rather who have not seen and have believed." And there you are, he says, Jesus asks you to believe without evidence. My reaction to that was, "Can the man not read?" Jesus didn't say, "Blessed are those that have no evidence and believe." He said, "Blessed are those that haven't seen." I've never seen Jesus, and nor have you, I suspect. And why do we believe? Have we no evidence? We've got masses of evidence; it's just we don't have the physical evidence of seeing that Thomas had. But seeing is only one of our five senses, and there are all kinds of other evidences: physical evidences, historical, experimental, and all the rest of it. And this is incredible, and it was even more incredible because if he'd read the next few verses he would have come across what I quoted to you two minutes ago: "These signs are written that you might believe." It contradicts exactly how our brilliant philosopher seems to understand scripture, which shows to me something very serious: that some of our atheist friends and colleagues will not take evidence seriously because they've made up their minds that if it's Christian, it's faith, and faith is believing where you can't see. A.C. Grayling wrote a very good book about Wittgenstein, the philosopher, but Wittgenstein said that you cannot explain a system from within the system; you need someone from outside the system in order to be able to explain it.

Yes, Wittgenstein's statement is extremely important, and in fact, Jonathan Sacks takes that up in his book. But I must be fair to your question, Samuel, and come back to Harari and the future because it's actually important. You mention his two agenda items: that are one, to solve the problem of physical death; and two, to enhance human abilities and capacities and essentially produce a super intelligence. This is what's known as transhumanism, and in my own University of Oxford they are driving this forward. There are millions of dollars being put into this area of research, by the way. This is big stuff, and artificial intelligence is very much a part of it. Now we could go into details, but I'm not going to because I've actually written a book about it called *2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity*. But I will comment on these two things because they fascinate me because when people come to me and tell me about this wonderful agenda—we're going to solve the problem of physical death, and we're going to enhance human intelligence and give people some form of eternal life, possibly upload their brains onto silicon so that they won't be dependent on biology which perishes and dies, and all this kind of thing—I simply look at them and say, "You're too late." And I say, "What do you mean, you're too late?" Well, I said, "The problem of physical death was solved 20 centuries ago when God raised Jesus from the dead, and that proves that death isn't the end." But it's also solved your other desire because Jesus raised from the dead as the Son of God, and he was raised from the dead because he died. Why did he die? He died so that there would be a basis for God to forgive us for the mess we've made of our own lives and those of other people. And if we trust him as Savior and Lord, he promises that he's going to upload us—not simply our brains or our mental capacities—but he… there's going to be a physical resurrection in the last day. And I said, "I'll go for that rather than transhumanism because I think there's much more evidence to back it up." So they're too late, but they need to hear that message because they're not getting it, not at all, as far as I can see.

I think the resurrection, as you say, is hugely important for Christians, and that's a miracle. And again, David Hume said that in ancient times and in the past people would believe in miracles because they didn't have a good understanding; they didn't understand natural laws, which is… I'm not sure if you agree with that. But he also said that miracles are a violation of natural law. So what is your take on that? And also, why… what evidence is there for the miracles and the resurrection?

Well, my ancestry is Scottish, so far be it for me to criticize a Scotsman like David Hume, but he was wrong. And I say that not because I'm a Hume expert, but the most famous Hume expert that I ever met was Antony Flew, the philosopher, who all his life championed atheism like Richard Dawkins did, until he came to see that the cell and human DNA was a code, and it spoke of intelligence. And I had an interview with him not long before he died, and I asked him, I said, "What about David Hume and miracles?" He said, "I was wrong," and he made one of the most humble statements I've ever heard from an academic. He said, "My books were wrong; I'd have to rewrite them, and I'm never going to have the chance." But let's come to the substance of it. That's just a little story. Miracles—violations of the laws of nature—that's where the confusion lies. "Law" has two meanings for most of us. There are the laws of nature. What are they? They are our descriptions, often in mathematics, of what normally happens. An apple dropped falls towards the center of the earth, as Newton pointed out; the planets revolve around the sun in elliptical axes. But then there are those that say, "You must not drive in inner London without paying a congestion charge, and if you don't pay

Could they put their hand in? That has helped me enormously because it really knocks Hume right out of the ballpark. It shows that the confusion lies in the nature of our concept of law. The laws of nature are not like the laws of England.

Now here's the slightly ironic thing: to recognize a miracle—and the word "miracle" is slightly unfortunate because it's Latin, *miraculum*, a wonder—what we're talking about is supernatural events that give evidence that there is a supernatural nature. Not everything that claims to be a miracle is one. If I say it's a miracle that Jim passed his exam, that isn't necessarily supernatural; it's because he was a silly netw and didn't do any work. So we need to focus, and that's why I focus on the resurrection. This is a central claim: Jesus rose. It's supernatural. It's not simply that Jesus rose as if it came from inside the grave; it's God raised him from the dead. It's power coming in from outside.

Take a simple analogy: if I pick this up and drop it, the law of gravitation will tell me it falls towards the center of the earth. That will not stop Samuel catching it. He can intervene and stop it, and it doesn't break the law of gravity; it changes the configuration of the situation. So, at the larger level, God created a universe with regularities in it. If he hadn't done it that way, you wouldn't have been able to recognize a miracle if you saw one. If we didn't know dead bodies normally remain dead, we wouldn't be the least bit surprised by resurrection. The interesting thing is it answers another thing of Hume's. Hume said—and you put it in your introduction to the question—that in those days people didn't know the laws of nature. Didn't they? When Joseph was told by his fiancée that she was pregnant, he didn't know where babies came from, did he? So he believed her? No, he didn't, because he knew exactly where they came from. We read that because he was a righteous man, he wanted to divorce her quietly; he didn't want to expose her to public shame because he knew exactly what the law of nature was. It took a special intervention of God speaking to that man and saying, "Joseph, this is okay, this is holy, I'm behind this." The man born blind in John 9? It's a wonderful story, it's actually a humorous story. They said to him, "Well, you weren't the man that was blind, or you weren't born blind," all this, and he said, "Look, let's cut all this out. Since the beginning of the world, it's never been heard that someone born blind has received their sight. So what has happened to me is unique; it must be supernatural." Of course, they knew the laws of nature, and therefore Hume was wrong on both those counts.

So John, I want to come to the issue of the wording and the definition of apologetics, because that's exactly what apologetics does: explaining miracles and explaining the rationality of faith. But apologetics has nothing to do with being apologetic. It comes from the Greek word *apologia*, which means giving a defense of something. But at the same time, the second point I want to make, John, is this: apologetics seems to explain things, but does that limit Christianity to only the things that we can demonstrate and explain apologetically? So what is apologetics, and what are the limits of apologetics? Well, as you say, *apologia* is defense, but it's interesting if you do a word search to see where it's used in the New Testament, and it's mostly used by or about Paul. And his number one *apologia*, defense, is, "I was on the road to Damascus, and I met the risen Christ, and he completely changed my life." That was his main apologetic, and that's why I don't like the word, because it sounds like an apology. We should have translated it. All we did was take it straight out of Greek and transliterated it, but it's much better. I think Peter May's explanation of it is the best: it's persuasive evangelism. The most persuasive thing about your experience, if you're a Christian here tonight, is your experience of Christ. So it's not just a question of reasoning, although reason isn't involved at every level, of course it is. Reason and faith are not in opposition; you need reason even to read the Bible. People get very confused about it, and one of the reasons for that confusion is they think… they call me an apologist. I don't like that. I try to persuade people, and I use argument, but the key to the effectiveness of that is that when Paul stood up and reasoned in Athens and reasoned everywhere else—and the Lord did it all the time—Paul was using his abilities, but he wasn't trusting them. The danger for Christians, often with high education, is that they start to trust their reason and they use God when they get stuck. Real Christianity is to use our reason and all the abilities he's given us, but to trust him. That's the key, it seems to me, and that solves a lot of difficulties. And we must beware that the arguments are all important, but we trust God. And if we're trusting God, we'll know how to move and detect whether questions are genuine or not. Many are—many people simply need the stones out of the way so they can see clearly what the gospel is. But in the end, God is not a proposition; he's a person. Christ is not a set of propositions; he's a person. So what is being offered to us is a relationship of trust with a person. That's a huge thing, a relationship with the one who created the universe, and that, for me, is the biggest thing. And in this world where it's being attacked left, right, and center, we need to know not simply what we believe but why we believe it, because you cannot open your mouth in a multicultural, pluralistic society like what we've got here without people misunderstanding, misrepresenting, or simply just being curious. And we've got to answer. Peter always said, "Be ready to give an answer to people," an *apologia* to people who demand a reason for the hope that is within you, but do it with meekness. Justin Brierley wrote a brilliant book called *The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God*, and his main argument is that the new atheism wave is actually gone now and it's failed, and there's a lot of evidence to support that actually. And there's a new conversation coming on with new questions being asked that weren't asked 20 years ago: for example, "What is the meaning of life? What is my identity?" and so on. Now, at the same time, we all know that Christianity, according to the last censuses, is going down and is not what it used to be. So it's declining in the Western societies, at least in the West, in Western Europe. But how do you reconcile the two views, and do you think there's a new wave of intellectuals—perhaps as Justin mentioned, people like Jordan Peterson (it was great to see you on his podcast), people like Lewis Perry, Tom Holland, and others—who not only agree that Europe was founded, was based on Christianity, and the foundation of Europe is Christian, but they also acknowledge and appreciate the social value of Christianity? How do you reconcile these two views?

Well, first of all, I support your view of Justin's book, and spare his blood, is… but I would encourage you to read this man has probably one of the most comprehensive experiences of entering the arena and getting both sides together to debate these things, and it is very worthwhile reading. And if you get anything tonight, get that book. That's number one. Number two, I think is that I think he's right that the new atheism is waning. It's a belligerent kind of atheism that is dropped. There's another kind of vicious atheism that is keeping people imprisoned in Xinjiang in China, and all of that. We'll not go into that tonight, but it has changed, and questions of meaning and identity are coming up to the fore in the population and young people. People want some kind of identity. That's a pressure coming in one direction. Then there are transhumanists in the other direction saying, "We're going to give you an enhanced identity, but it's going to involve bioengineering; it's going to involve you giving up a lot of things." And we need to listen to C.S. Lewis in this. I would recommend to everybody to read a book that you mentioned earlier, *The Abolition of Man*. It's a short book, but it's pertinent. Lewis saw in that book and in his science fiction novel *That Hideous Strength* that if a group of scientists get the capacity to modify human identity, for example, by messing around with the human genome and creating a heritable sequence where the specification of human beings will change forever, what they will produce are not human beings in the image of God but artifacts. And he has got this chilling statement: he says, "The final triumph of man will be the abolition of man." They won't be humans; they'll be beings of some kind. And I fear we're moving rapidly towards that because in my research of artificial intelligence, there's a disproportionate number of people driving it who are very strongly convinced of the atheist worldview. It's not worldview-neutral. So we need to take that on board. And it's wonderful that we have, particularly young people around, who are communicating the gospel in a way that's got street credibility because it's bringing young people meaning, and we need to encourage people like that and develop their ability and give them a platform. But there are, as you say, some very interesting people around: Jordan Peterson, with whom I interacted recently—and it's on YouTube—is one of them, whose moving incrementally but moving clearly and, on his own confession, towards the Christian faith. Tom Holland, with whom I've interacted personally—fascinating, brought up as an ancient historian—and his book *Dominion* is brilliant. But what it's devoted to is his change. He thought originally that all the good things in our society came from the Greeks and the Romans. He then discovered they came actually from the biblical worldview, and he has got a wonderfully powerful statement about the effect of the cross; it is quite remarkable to read. And that's another book we're recommending—lots of books tonight—*Dominion*, worth reading. And there are a number of people, it seems to be around the world, who—intellectuals, public intellectuals—who seem to be moving step by step towards a full confession of the Christian faith. And there's then an outer group of people, and I keep meeting them, who, although they're not that far yet, are convinced that the materialism that dominates the academy and elsewhere is not enough, and they say to me, "John, there must be something more." Well, that's a great start to realize there must be something more. That's a very good point, because this new conversation opens the door to all things spiritual, and there's a new generation that's seeking meaning and looking beyond this world and seeking some spiritual meaning, even though that may not be Christianity.

Now, as we close, John, there are many, many young people in this audience who still have doubts and feel there might be a tension between science and faith in God. What advice would you give to young people in the audience who may feel this tension? Don't duck the questions that are up in your mind. That's the first thing, because one of the reasons I'm sitting here as a believer, 80 years old, and a scientist, is that I've discovered in life there are answers. Sometimes you have to wait a bit; you have to do some work, but that's important—that the questions that bother you… start to do a bit of reading, talk to other people openly about your questions and your doubts, because a large part of my Christian conviction has come from asking hard questions and waiting till I got answers. Now, I don't know whether I'm allowed to do a little bit of advertising, but I've been so concerned by this—young people feeling this tension—that this book, I was told this book, *God's Undertaker*, people found too difficult to read, so I've done a much shorter one called *Can Science Explain Everything?* And some people are kind enough to say it has helped them—not only young people but older people—to get some resolution to this tension. And I think the main resolution will come in the answer to the question that I did earlier: that the God explanation and the science explanation are different kinds of explanation. So read and discuss this kind of thing, because there are answers that can ease you through that tension, you see. Just think of a simple historical fact: virtually all the great pioneers of modern science, starting with Galileo, Kepler, Newton, coming up through Faraday, Clark, Maxwell, they were all believers in God. Historians have noticed this, and C.S. Lewis put it beautifully, as usual, and he summed it up this way: he said, "Men became scientific because they expected law in nature, and they expected law in nature because they believed in the legislator." I'm not ashamed of being a scientist and a Christian, because arguably it was Christianity that gave me my subject, you see. Science—biology—was started on page two of the Bible. Many people don't realize that. God named bits of the universe, but then he told the first humans, "You go and name the animals." Taxonomy—naming things—is the fundamental scientific discipline. God said, "You go and do it yourself," and we've been doing it ever since. So I think we've got a real mandate to do science and to do it with God, not against God. John, there's a lot of wisdom in your thoughts. Thank you very much for your insights on science and faith in God, on evolution and creation, on miracles. It's great to have you with us. Thank you very much for your thoughts, ladies and gentlemen, John Lennox. [Music]

Let's kick off with a few of these very popular questions. So you've spoken at length about science and faith this evening, but one of the most popular questions here is: do you think there could be other forms of life in the universe? And I suppose I would like to ask, and if there were, would it matter? I was asked… I was at a launch of a book by Professor Paul Davies, a physicist, and his book is called *Are We Alone?* And I was interviewed… I was being interviewed by a certain station called Premier Christian radio. I don't know whether you remember… I remember the interview well. It was one of the first times I'd had you on the show, and I brought you on with Paul Davies. That's right. And Paul Davies said, as a scientist, he thought that we weren't alone, but as a person, he hoped we weren't alone. And then I was asked, did I believe that there were other intelligences in the universe? And I said yes, and one very big one called God. And quite seriously, from a Christian perspective, there are other intelligences in the universe, of course there are, and God is the greatest one, but there are others because we are told that there are beings in some sense above us—what the Bible calls them, spirit beings. They're not made of matter as we understand it—angels and so on. So there are others. This whole universe is much more complex than we think, and our vision—we don't see everything. So I think there are, and it does matter infinitely, because if we were the only intelligences around, we'd be left with the question as to where we come from. But because we know about God, then we've got a huge answer to that question. Thank you.

So much from the sublime to the almost ridiculous. In this question, there are lots of theories in our internet age floating around, and interestingly, one of the ones that has sort of had a bizarre revival is the idea that we're living on a flat Earth. And someone… and this has been… this is the most popular question according to the likes… What do you think about the Flat Earth debate, John? Nothing at all, really. I mean… but in all seriousness, there's… for me, it's a sign of the fact we live in an age where almost anything can get airtime these days. And that's true. Wasn't it Chesterton who said that if people reject God, they don't believe in nothing; they end up believing in anything? And it just shows there's masses of ridiculous things that people believe, and that is the thing that staggers me. Taking the question seriously, they will believe that kind of thing, for which the evidence is all contrary. And yet, when it comes to seriously set forward arguments and reasons for believing in God, they won't even listen to them. There's a doublethink, and I would go as far as to say that there's a reason for it. There's a very interesting statement that Paul made that the god of this world has blinded the minds of those who don't believe. That there is an enemy who sets the thought forms of the world, and Paul analyzes the intellectual darkness that comes about in Romans when people reject God. They end up worshipping stones and inanimate things; they ascribe creative power to nature because they don't believe in God, and some of it is utterly absurd, and yet that is what happens. And I would describe it as intellectual darkness, but there's an enemy behind it. Thank you.

This is a very popular question: why do you think Christianity is on the decline in Europe, especially amongst young people? That's very complex. I think historically, you're probably better positioned to answer that than I am. There are roots in history going back to the Enlightenment. The evils perpetuated by some professing branches of the Christian church have died hard. The fact that in the whole EU Constitution the word "God" is not mentioned at all. The fact that our major institutions are all of them, virtually—as Tom Holland and Jordan Peterson and other people are pointing out—are all traceable back to scripture, yet that's airbrushed out of history. So that we are educating young people—we're, in that sense, brainwashing them—and not telling them the facts, so that they just don't know. And it's not surprising, you see. Let me put it very crudely: if you tell people constantly—young people—that there's no meaning in life, they are simply animals—moderately sophisticated animals—they'll end up believing you, and therefore their behavior will not be governed by any sense of morality. And it is frightening to read things like this: a class of students asked this—give an example of a moral dilemma. Answer: "What is a moral dilemma?" We are in serious trouble, folks. But I'm glad you said "in Europe," because there are other parts of the world where Christianity is growing and thriving, and they are often the parts where there's been much more persecution. And somebody pointed out to me the other day: if you take the whole of the Bible, how much of it was written at a time when there was no persecution and trouble? Very little. And we have had an experience in Europe, at least until relatively recently, without war for an unusual period of time. And unfortunately, into the vacuum there has poured all this kind of stuff—postmodernism, atheism, all the rest of it—and it has had an effect in our society. But please feel free to add to that, Justin, because from your perspective… I wouldn't disagree with anything that you've said there, John. I think that we are living in the wake, if you like, of many different forces that have led to the way in which religion is now seen as a private hobby almost. And to that extent, it's part of the fact that our cultures are increasingly mobile, fluid. Many community institutions have broken down because of the focus on individualism in our culture. And so there… I think there's a lot of things, and alongside that goes obviously this materialism, this story of materialism that obviously convinces people without good foundation that there is no God and so on. I think I'm encouraged. Part of the story I tell in my new book is that actually people can only live on those thin versions of reality for so long, though, until actually people do start to come back and ask, "Is this the way life is meant to be lived?" And I'm encouraged actually that I see a lot of young people… almost as we reach a point where there's almost no familiarity with the Christian story… one of the good things about that is that you don't have the… that you know what it is… and sometimes it's actually easier to start telling people what it is when they don't know anything about it rather than those who think they know what it is but actually have rather a false idea of it in their head. So I think we should be encouraged. I mean, let me skip to this question since we're talking about this, and this is obviously… you know, a lot of people here from the Romanian diaspora, and someone asked: what is your advice for the Romanian community, specifically the Christian Romanian community, for improving the belief climate in the UK? Any thoughts on that, John?

Well, I have had the privilege of being in Romania several times. The first time I went, I was poisoned deliberately by the secret police. Wow! It nearly killed me. Gosh! And I looked back to that, and the Lord preserved me because I went to visit some marvelous Christians there. But I've been back since, and they don't feed you poison anymore, and they don't have the poison, I think I could say. But you need to ask Samuel about that. They haven't been infected by all the poisons of atheism that we have in the West. So I think you've got… and what I saw at my brief visits, you got much more sense of togetherness as Christians. Well, let's ask a Romanian. Yes, I think Samuel needs to speak to this, probably be very well positioned to this question of how… how… how the Romanian Christian community can specifically encourage belief in the West. Well, I think the Romanian diaspora community is very strong here in London and in the UK. There are many Evangelical churches in London, and I think one of the reasons that Romanians believe in God and keep their faith, although they live in a very secularized society and culture, is because of Communism. And Communism promoted atheism as the national ideology, and Romanians have lived this for several decades and experienced what that means, and it simply doesn't work. So that's one of the reasons that Romanians and Eastern Europe in general remained a very religious society; it still is. And I think Romanians and other international diaspora communities, such as this—the Polish diaspora community, for example—can and may indeed revive Christianity and bring a new energy in terms of living faith in a secular culture as the UK. I think that's absolutely true. And I spent many years… I started going to Eastern Europe in 1976 and traveled many times, particularly to Hungary, Poland, and above all East Germany, and I came to the conclusion that many of our modern-day so-called new atheists have not got a clue about what atheism does to a culture. And as Romanians, you know… and because you know, you can be a force for enormous good in our society. When people start talking about these things, you could just say, "Just wait a minute, let me tell you what it was like to live under the Securitate and the secret police." And I saw this again and again in East Germany, which was almost Stalinist, and I went there many times. You've got a huge contribution to make, and I think Samuel's absolutely right, and I would encourage you to be a source of pushback against this kind of thing. I remember once talking in Russia, actually in Siberia, to an academician about the difference between the East and the West, and he said, "In both parts of the world you've got materialism, you've got the material, we haven't, but it's the same philosophy," and that's the tragedy. The stuff that you were taught under Marxism is very little distance below the surface of some of the leading intellectuals in the West today. It's the same materialism as a philosophy, but it's mixed with the consumerism that you didn't have in those days. And because you know what it's like to be deprived of many things because of an ideology, the Christian ideology or worldview is much more precious to you because of what it's done, and so you've a huge contribution to make.

Just before we go to a question from the floor, there's just one more that links really well in with what you've just been talking about, John, which is Andre, who asks: can you share with us a short story from your experience before 1990 behind the Iron Curtain that could help our faith? Because this is a fascinating aspect of your life that perhaps not that many people know—that you moved and worked among people, you know, in Soviet Russia and so on. Yes, well, before 1990 I wasn't in Russia. I went there first in 1989-90, but let me go years before that to East Germany, and I'll tell you one story of a girl called Esther. And she was a very bright girl; she'd been top of her class in school. And I happened to be there—I'm a German speaker, that's why I could move easily in East Germany—and she came home from school weeping her heart out while we were there. And we said, "Esther, what's wrong?" She said, "The teacher has just told me I've got to leave school and go and work in a slipper factory." Now this girl had been top of her class in every year, but at the age of 13 she was asked to take an oath of public allegiance to the atheistic state, and she said, "I'm a Christian; I can't do that." And she was crying, and we were weeping with her, but I said, "Esther, what did you say to the teacher?" I'll never forget her answer: she said, "Uncle John, I said to the teacher, 'Sir, one day you will stand before God, and you will answer for what you've done to me this day.'" I never forgot that. It steeled me to redouble my efforts to fight this ideology for the rest of my life, and that's what I've tried to do with God's help—to fight what is driving the most extreme things on the planet, and one of them is the persecution of the Uighurs. But all this kind of stuff comes from not a rejection of God but a hatred of God, and just that one thing encapsulates it. Wonderful. Let's have a question here.

Many wars are fought in the name of God. If God really cares, why is he allowing these things to happen? And the next is: even many lives are lost in natural disasters—innocent lives—where is God when all these things are happening? Well, thank you. That's the hardest question you can ask; it's the hardest question for anyone of any worldview—the problem of evil and suffering. And I would really want to be fair to your question to have an hour to talk about it at least, because there are no simplistic answers to this, but I'll try and say something briefly. You referred very briefly and concisely to two problems: there's a problem of moral evil—the bad things people do to one another, wars as we see it horribly these days—then there's a problem of what's called natural evil, which is a bit of a misnomer, and that is catastrophes, diseases, cancers, tsunamis, all earthquakes, all that kind of thing. Now, how do we face that? And I'm going to cut to the middle of that and tell you where I begin to see a possibility. I have no simplistic answer because there isn't one, but there are two ways of looking at it. The person who's suffering sees it in a very different way from, say, me who's watching—using… in other words, cancer looks very different in the eyes of a young mother who's just been told she's got six months to live and in the eyes of the oncologist who's treating her. So there are two different sides, and the person that's watching tends to have a more intellectual response; they're full of big questions. The other person is in utter pain and needs comfort and help and encouragement. Now, how do we face it? Well, I'll tell you how I begin to face it. The way you formulated the question is a very common one, and it's been there for centuries: if there's a good and all-powerful God, how is it that the world is like this? Now, let me look at it from the theoretical perspective first, because I'm afraid I'm a theorist above all, and if you want me to tell you about suffering, just see me in a dentist's… seriously, though, many people respond to this and say, "Therefore, there's no God," and many of my friends do, and I've been in Oetz many times, and I've wept every time. It breaks my heart to see what's going on in a country that I love—in Ukraine, been there many times, all those cities, I know them all. So what… how do we respond? Well, "there's no God." Now, people that take that view think they solved the problem; they've got rid of God. That's true, but they've also got rid, by definition, of all hope. The situation for them is totally hopeless, but actually they've got rid of the problem of evil. Now this is a more serious philosophical point, so if you don't like philosophy, go to sleep; I'll tell you when to wake up. The whole concept of evil, I believe, is directly related to the existence of God. Dostoevsky, the famous Russian novelist, said once, "If God does not exist, everything is permitted." In other words, he didn't mean atheists can't behave; he meant there's no reason for believing in good and evil. And Richard Dawkins says exactly that; he says this universe is just what you'd expect it to be if at bottom there's no good, no evil, no justice—DNA just is; we dance to its music. That's atheism—removing moral concepts—but that doesn't work, because Dawkins doesn't even work for him, because he knows he's a moral being, and therefore he talks about the problem of evil. So there are many reasons that atheism doesn't work intellectually, but that's not going to help a person who's suffering. Come now to the other side very briefly. When I was a student, we used to have long discussions with… well, if God is all-powerful and he's all good… and we never solve the problem—never. I've never heard a good answer to the solution. Now I'm a mathematician, and when mathematicians try for centuries to solve a problem, they usually ask themselves, "Are we asking the right question?" So let me reformulate the question. What are we faced with? A mixed picture. I call it beauty and barbed wire—beauty and bombs. We look out at a starry night; we see the Andromeda galaxy, and it's absolutely magnificent, and then we turn on the television and we watch what's happening in Ukraine. Beauty and bombs. We all have to face that. Now, how are we going to face that mixed picture? There's beauty; that's a mystery. If everything's evil, how is it that we get like that? And now I ask myself a question that's just as hard, and it's this: we've all got to grant that it's a mixed picture. Is there any evidence anywhere that there's a God that we could trust with it? That's an equally hard question, but I believe that question brings us further, and it takes us directly to the cross, because the claim is—and I often say to people, "Please listen to what Christianity claims before you reject it"—the claim is that the one on the cross is God himself—God incarnate. So what, if I put it bluntly, is God doing on a cross, suffering? Well, it certainly means that he hasn't remained distant from our human suffering but has become part of it. That's the first thing—the heart of God revealed. Now, of course, if that's where it had ended, we'd never have heard of Jesus. The next bit is where the resurrection comes into central role. I would have no hope; I wouldn't be sitting here trying to answer your question if I didn't believe that God had raised Jesus from the dead, and that's where the hope comes in, you see. Atheism is a hopeless faith—literally hopeless; there's no hope. Now, where can we get hope? What do the atheists got to say to the young mother with cancer? Nothing. Have I got anything to say as a Christian? I can't promise her that she'd be cured, although I know God has the power to do it, but what I can bring to her is a message of hope that she can have a personal relationship with Christ that will transcend death and have something there to leave her children with. Now I was in Christchurch, New Zealand, the same week as the earthquake, and I spoke about this, and when I'd finished—a huge audience, one of the biggest that they'd seen in the church for many years—there was a note left for me from a lady, and it just said, "I lost my husband last week," and she said, "What you said is the first glimmer of hope I've got." Glimmer of hope. And I believe scripture analyzes this very carefully; I haven't time to go into it in detail, sir, but in John 11 there is the story of what happens when people suffer. Lazarus died; the sisters expected Jesus to be there and cure him; he wasn't there. Jesus let the man die, and it nearly brought them to doubt the love of God. And when he eventually came and Lazarus was dead, the sister said, "If you had been here, he wouldn't have died." And then he suddenly told Martha, "I am the resurrection and the life." Now that whole story, I believe, shows us how this problem, on the one side, can lead people to doubt the love of God, but how Christ answers it by being the resurrection and the life. My final point is: I've tried to put this together briefly in a little book that circled the world; it's called *Where Is God in a Coronavirus World?* But that'll have to do for that.

Well, thank you so much. With apologies to many other people who have wanted to ask a question in person because time is drawing to a close, I'm just going to finish with a final question from Slido, John, and this is… well, I'm going to give you two actually because I think they're substantially the same question—both very popular. Someone asks: when Muslim people do what we do, which is believing what they're taught by their parents and carrying on their faith, what makes them wrong and us right? And to sum up that question, someone else asks: how do you prove that Christianity is the true religion and other religions are false? Thanks for that. I'm glad to hear that question because it's important. I never try to answer that question without saying this: when we start to talk about the differences between religions, there is huge danger of looking down at other people. Now it is very important to go back to something that Samuel said in our interview: every man, woman on the planet is a person of infinite worth, made in the image of God. And often you'll find that in essence the differences between religions are not moral differences; they are different differences in what people believe about how you relate to God. And you will find that many of our Muslim friends and Hindu friends and others have a strong moral code. Why is that? From where I said it's because they're made in the image of God; they're moral beings. And scripture tells us clearly that pagans can sometimes put professed believers in God to shame. Abraham, in particular, the father of faith, and a pagan Egyptian pharaoh had a higher moral standard than he did. Now it's so important to say that because the moment you start to critique people, think you are assuming you're better than they are morally. We're not. My atheist friends could put me to shame, and you know Christians have been caught out at all kinds of things. So we need to be very careful that we first recognize that the people we're talking about are made in the image of God and therefore, as creatures of God, have infinite value. Now, once we've said that, we can now come to the next question because there's respect there. The second point is… well, let me take the three great monotheistic religions—or we'll be here all night—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Now you could leave Christianity out; Judaism and

Up to that point, if you pass the grade, you get accepted. Nirvana, heaven, whatever. Most people will tell me that's what we believe. I say perhaps the best way to think about it is like a university course. You have an entrance exam, then you study. Every university in Britain and around the world works this way. The professors may be the best in the world, but they cannot guarantee you a degree. Why? Because the whole principle of universities is you get a degree based on your merit. If you don't earn it, you don't get it. Yes, and many people say, "Yes, that is religion." I've been told that by hundreds of people. Well, I said, "You see, that isn't Christianity," and they say, "Oh yes, it is." Now here's where the problem lies. Many people think that Christianity is like that: you pile up your good deeds, you try and please God, and you hope at the end that He won't take His law too seriously and will let you in. But you see, it's not like that, folks. Christianity's acceptance isn't at the end of the journey, at the Judgment; it's at the beginning of the journey, at the cross.

This is utterly revolutionary. Christianity isn't a religion. It certainly has a path and a way, but the path follows acceptance; it doesn't come before it. Because the unique thing about Christianity is that at the very beginning, what Jesus offers me is that if I repent—that is, turn away from the mess I've made of my life and maybe other people's lives, sadly—and trust Him as Savior and Lord, who died for me, then He will give me, then, right then, the acceptance. That's hugely important. Let me give you an illustration. This is so important because I've met dozens of people who don't understand this, even in this country. Fifty-six years ago now, nearly, I met a girl. She was lovely, so I decided I'd like to marry her. So I came along and I gave her a lovely present; it was wrapped up. I said, "Sally, I'd like you to be my wife. Now here's a present." So she opened it, and it was a cookbook. So I said, "Read page 153: 'Apple Cake.' Thou shalt take so much flour, thou shalt take so much sugar, thou shalt take… and thou shalt put in the oven… and bacon," so on. Now I said, "My dear, I would like you to take this book, and if you keep these rules—let's say, let's be reasonable—for the next 40 years, then I will accept you. Otherwise, you can go back to your mother." Why are you laughing, folks? That is how millions of people think about God. You would never insult a fellow human being—and I mean this very seriously—you would never insult a fellow human being by making acceptance dependent on their performance. Do you think God does that? That's turning God into a monster. And that's why you laughed; it's ridiculous. Of course, I didn't do that. Now, the amazing thing is she accepted me. It's not amazing that I accepted her, but it's amazing she accepted me. And what does that do? Does that mean she doesn't care about how she lives and how she cooks? Of course not! But she's not cooking to earn my affection; she's cooking because she's got it. And here am I tonight, talking to you, interviewing… Why do you think I do it? Do you think I'm doing it to earn brownie points so God will accept me? Not at all! I'm doing it because I know my acceptance doesn't depend on it. And that's the difference.

Now let me put it this way, so it's really sharp in your minds, and it could help you to explain this to people: Christianity does not compete with any other religion. Why not? Because Jesus offers me something none of them offer me. So it's a no-brainer to accept from Him something that nobody else offers me: forgiveness on such terms, acceptance, love at the very beginning, and a relationship. And that's the reason I'm a Christian. Thank you. Wow. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you again. Thank you again to John. Thank you to Samuel. And just as we close out, Virgil is going to come and give us a little bit of a welcome and some thank yous as well. Yes. Well, we've had a wonderful evening, do you agree? Yeah. Good. We want to thank Samuel and Practical Wisdom for this wonderful conference. Um, we started talking about this in May, and little did we know we'd end up in central London, in a famous place like this, with so many young people and Romanian people interested to hear from an English professor from Oxford, born in Ireland. Then again, we want to thank Professor Lennox for this extraordinary and very enlightening evening. We want to thank the organizer, Asra Christian Centre, and its wonderful contributors in terms of finance, energy, and time. Also, a warm thank you to our generous sponsors, without whom this evening would not have been possible. And I'm going to quickly read their names, and please do applaud. We want to thank Holy Trinity Romanian Church in Kingsbury, Holy River Church in Pinner, Connected Life Church in Birmingham, Life Spring Community in London, Zion Brethren Church in Stratford, Bethel Brethren Church in Kenton, Christ Church in Leighton, Harvest Church in London, Emanuel Romanian Church in Pinner, New Life Church in High Wickham, 7th Day Adventist Church in Hampstead, and Adventist Conference in the Romanian Pentecostal Church in Slough. We cannot conclude this list without expressing our heartfelt gratitude to Westminster Chapel for their very generous offer of these premises for the evening. They've been very, very kind to us, and they've been very helpful in every respect. And thank you to the AV team from this place as well. We often read in Romania books written by C.S. Lewis, books by John Lennox, and many books by Martin Lloyd-Jones. Here we are tonight in the very place where he preached. Um, I want to point out that we had people tonight coming as far as Scotland, the west of England, and some even from Romania. So well done, guys. Often forgotten and overlooked, I want to commend our wonderful volunteers who have worked for the whole afternoon here to arrange the chairs to make this meeting possible. And they will be working long into the night after all this is over. Please do applaud them. Thank you. Obviously, we cannot not mention God. Now, as you have been already invited, I reiterate the invitation: do go and buy books, lots of books. Make them travel light back home. Spend money; there's going to be money well spent. Buy Justin's books as well. Do give generously to Practical Wisdom and the future projects that this wonderful podcast is going to undertake in the future. Thank you. Thank you for being here. Thank you, Professor Lennox. Thank you, everyone. And thank you, Lord. Thank you. Thank you so much.