AI as God, Deepfakes, and Consciousness

John Lennox

The French have a word for it now: le grand renversement — the great reversal. Anyone who looks at the history of the relationship between science and religion will see that in the 16th and 17th centuries the pioneers of science — Galileo, Kepler, Newton — were all essentially Christians. The best summary is CS Lewis quoting Whitehead: "Men became scientific because they expected law in nature, and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver." There's a very close consilience between true science and true religion.

I'm delighted to see thinkers coming to that conclusion — Peterson on science and religion, Tom Holland on history and the Judeo-Christian roots of Western culture and ethics. Something is happening. And the people out there who were told by these bright atheists that Christianity is dead and superstitious — they're now hearing "we're revisiting our thinking." That creates both confusion and opportunity.

John Lennox

The real tension is not between science and Christianity. It's between science and atheism. That's the formulation I use because it gets people's attention. The argument goes back to Lewis and Alvin Plantinga, and it centres on a simple question: what do you do science with?

I ask scientist colleagues this question. They're about to say "mind" when they remember it's not politically correct to believe in a mind distinct from the brain, so they say "brain." And I ask them: tell me the brief history of the brain. The brain is the end product of a mindless, unguided process. And I just look at them and say — and you trust it? In your lab tomorrow, if your computer was the result of a mindless unguided process, would you trust it? The answer is always no. But that is precisely the problem your worldview creates. It's serious enough to shoot yourself in the foot; to shoot yourself in the brain is fatal. You cannot argue that arguments are invalid — you undermine the very rationality you're relying on.

John Lennox

One of the clearest examples of what's happening is Ayaan Hirsi Ali — started in Somalia, grew up Muslim, became an MP in Holland, joined the Dawkins new atheist movement, and then last November declared herself a Christian. Very interesting how she described her transition: "I choose to believe that Christianity is true." She was feeling her way forward to a position of certainty. When Dawkins interviewed her, he began by saying "you haven't really become a Christian" and ended by saying "you are a Christian, but it's still all baloney." That says a lot about where Dawkins is.

She said something I fasten on: "there must be something more." That is a very good start to any conversation. What is this something more? The fact that such a committed atheist has come to that realisation is a huge step out of the mess we've got ourselves into by submitting culturally and academically to a purely materialistic worldview.

John Lennox

We thought that when Christianity had been removed from the scene, atheism would take over. That's not what happened. Polytheism took over — every person has their own god or is their own god. And now we live in an age where there is a distinct danger of artificial intelligence being treated as God.

This connects to a deep problem in AI. God in his wisdom has coupled intelligence with consciousness. People talk about creating a conscious machine, but I ask: what is consciousness? Nobody has the least idea. We cannot create consciousness because we don't understand what it is. And when we encounter claims of machine consciousness, we face questions that materialism has no tools to answer.

The problem with being your own god — and I think this is producing a massive amount of misery — is that we're aware we're not actually godlike. We're flawed, we fail. But you can't pass judgment on yourself if you're your own god; you have to be perfect. So it must be somebody else's fault. Nietzsche understood this: "If there were a god, I couldn't bear not to be he." That's a profound statement about what drives the rejection of God.

John Lennox

Tom Holland started as an atheist — a brilliant historian of the ancient world who believed all our cultural values came from Greece or Rome. But he read more carefully and concluded they came from the Judeo-Christian tradition. He found, in a very moving passage, that at the heart of that tradition — the Cross — something so strange and so against any Greek or Roman concept of strength or virtue lies at the heart of the Gospel Paul preached. It dealt with the fundamental human problem of guilt and sin, which no utopia deals with, which is why they all fail.

He's another example of someone finding hard evidence that there is something more. And his discovery of the meaning of the Cross — of forgiveness, of identity in relation to a God who created us in his own image — strikes him as something worth pursuing. Here we sit in Oxford, whose motto is Dominus illuminatio mea — the Lord is my light. Our university was founded by people who thought about God.

John Lennox

I've been talking about Ian McGilchrist — the psychiatrist whose work on the left and right hemispheres of the brain is utterly fascinating. I've had a recent conversation with him. What he seems to have turned up is a left-brained solution to the demolition of materialism. He understandably doesn't like anything that involves doctrine, because doctrine smacks of the left brain, and he wants to move to the right brain. But I want to say you need both — and at one level he acknowledges that, because he says the high points in human history have been times when left and right have been in appropriate balance.

My impression was that he was saying: at the very least, the search for truth, the search for the sacred, the attempt to find something greater — these are critical to making your way in life. He said explicitly that we must make room for God. He gave a lecture recently in Oxford and mentioned the university's motto — Dominus illuminatio mea — in his final words as pointing towards what we need to get back to. It was a stunning ending. Here is another remarkable thinker finding hard evidence that there is something more.

John Lennox

The enlightenment's underlying assumption was that if we're sufficiently enlightened we won't have problems with guilt because we'll be good. But that's not the way it is. We've stopped trying to understand guilt; we've decried the need for forgiveness. Now many people are looking for forgiveness, conscious that there are problems in their lives, but we live in a culture that has forgotten the importance of forgiveness and how to do it.

We have this endless palette of gurus giving us five or six laws or ten rules. That's all well and good, but they don't give us the power. Someone who can't keep those rules comes away more miserable than before — because they can see what they should be but have no power to achieve it. For someone to come along and say there is a fundamental flaw in human nature, here is the diagnosis and here is the cure — that is too radical for many people. But they're beginning to wonder whether there might be something in it.

John Lennox

There's a false opposition people are forced into: revelation versus reason. I tackle it with an analogy. Imagine Aunt Matilda has made a cake and we submit it to every Nobel Prize winner for analysis. They give us physics, chemistry, biology — a hundred-page treatise. Before they go, I ask: tell us why she made it. None of them can. Unless she reveals it. Now, when she reveals it by telling us — "I made it for my cousin Jane" — that doesn't shut our reason off. We use our reason to see if what she's saying makes sense. Revelation and reason aren't opposed; you use reason on both.

God speaks through two modes: nature (the heavens declare the glory of God — you can read something off, but not a great deal), and through Scripture, which is not opposed to reason. We've got to use our reason even to read and understand it. The opposition that's been forced on people — that once you use the word "revelation" you have jumped over reason and negated it — is simply false.

John Lennox

Our young people go through universities where they are told there is no truth — it's all relative, situational. But instinctively we know the pursuit of truth is important. And it's silly to tell people there's no such thing as truth, for the very obvious logical reason that you're stating that as a truth. Ask a bunch of postmodernists who say there's no truth to come to a meeting at 7:00 and they'll all be there, because they believe the truth that the meeting's at 7:00.

From a Christian perspective, truth turns out ultimately to be a person. When Jesus said "I am the truth," he was not merely saying "I say true things" — though that is true. He was saying that if you keep questioning, it doesn't go back forever; it stops with him. That is a huge claim. But it's the only thing that makes sense, and because nothing is making sense anymore, we've ended up in material wellbeing but profound anxiety and unhappiness.