One Of The Deepest Conversations You Will Listen To About God | Dr. John Lennox | EP 394

one of the most interesting things is we're told we're made in the image of God but it was God that told human beings to do biology name the animals that's taxonomy it's the fundamental intellectual discipline I'm not going to do it for you you do it for yourself and so the capacity of human beings to think in that sense whatever it really means seems to me to be a reflection of their creator and possibly an Ence if we extrapolate it of his [Music] [Music] existence hello everyone watching and listening today I'm speaking with Dr John

Lenox mathematician Professor author of many books and public intellectual we discuss the axioms and the dangerous aims of transhumanism the interplay between ethical Faith reason and the empirical world that makes up the scientific Endeavor and the line between luciferian intellectual presumption and wise courageous exploration so I I wanted to start by asking you your opinion on some questions that have gone through my mind uh recently and there's one that's very specific I think I'll start with which is that you know I I think for for a lot of my life and certainly when I was

younger I really bought the doctrine that there was an unbridgeable gap between the scientific way of looking at the world and the Christian way of looking at the world let's say and uh that this that that split the split the apparent split between science and religion was a consequence of an incommensurate d otomy of World Views you know and that the church had been opposed to Scientific progress at least in part because the scientific Viewpoint existed in contradiction to Christian doctrine but then especially in recent years in the last 10 years I've started to understand

that that was something like a French Enlightenment SL rationalist propaganda campaign and that there's a different that the the relationship between science and Christianity is much closer than I had imagined I caught on to this a little bit by reading Yung but that just as the universities developed out of the monastic tradition the notion that the natural world was intelligible to the inquiring logos that it had an intrinsic logic that studying it would be beneficial to man first of all that it would be comprehensible and beneficial and that that was actually a kind of moral

obligation that all struck me as like axiomatic statements of faith that were predicated on the Christian tradition that were the preconditions for the emergence of Science and you know I've tried to take that idea apart over the last three or four years to see if I can find any flaws in it but I think the evidence that the universities emerged out of the monastic tradition instead of emerging contrary to that that's absolutely incontrovertible on every grounds you could possibly imagine and the notion that you need to believe in the intelligibility of the world the capability

of the human logos and the and the beneficial consequence of acquiring knowledge you have to believe in all that to even get the scientific Enterprise going I also think that's incontrovertible and that those are axioms of faith and so I don't know how I don't know if those views are in accordance with your views or what you think about that so I'd like to hear what you think about that this is extremely interesting to me because I never saw the tension between Christianity and science because very early on as a teenager I was introduced to

the writings of a scientist who was a Christian who drew my attention to something Alfred North Whitehead wrote and it was really put in much simpler Language by CS Lewis when he wrote men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver and so very early on and I was fascinated by the idea that actually modern science is a legacy of the biblical worldview and therefore it's no accident that the Pioneers Galileo Kepler uh Newton Maxwell and so on were Believers in God and as

you pointed out it underpins the tradition that lies behind the great universities of the world that the doctrine of creation was actually the belief the underlying presupposition that allowed people to do science so I've come over my life to the conclusion that science and the biblical worldview sit very comfortably together but it's science and Atheism that do not sit comfortably together which I know is quite a controversial statement but at least it gets discussion going I just completed a couple of documentaries with the daily War plus crew and one of them was in Athens and

two were in Jerusalem and we were trying to puzzle out the um relationship between Greek thought and and judeo-christian thought most particularly the strange happen stance that the Greek idea of an intrinsic logos in the world seemed to dovetail with the judeo Christian idea of you might say the of the word incarnate in the human psyche and it seemed to me and obviously to other observers that there was an affinity between the Greek idea that the cosmos had an intrinsic comprehensibility and the idea that the proper orientation for human beings ethically would be one of

honest communication and investigation and those two things snapped on top of each other and it it it made me think of something that I actually learned from Richard Dawkins and I think this is a deep idea Dawkins wrote a very influential essay where he claimed that any organism that can function in an environment has to be a microcosm of that environment so for example if you were an alien biologist and you were presented with a terrestrial bird and you took the bird apart you could infer from the bird's structure the gravitational pole of the Earth

the density of the atmosphere the um the chemical composition of the atmosphere spere the electromagnetic frequency that the sun light was uh what would you say most at at what electromagnetic frequencies the Sun's light was most amenable to Vision Etc you could derive a model of the environment from the physiology of the organism now I know that there were Medieval ideas that were that were deep in Christianity that the human soul was a microcosm of the cosm most right that it reflected the structure of reality itself and I've been thinking about this in terms of

how the world might be best conceptualized so there's a mix of ideas here and if we're If an organism has to be a microcosm of the cosmos in order to function and we are a microcosm in that regard and we are a personality that runs on a narrative which we seem to be then in what way is it reasonable to claim that the the cosmos itself is best conceptualized as something that could be entered into relationship with personality to personality and that that's not the most fundamental reflection of reality I mean it seems to me

that that's where daw's thought eventually points if his Proclamation that an organism has to be a microcosm an accurate microcosm in order to survive is accurate so now that dovetails with the idea that the logos as a personality so that would be the judeo-christian concept can investigate the logos of the universe and that those things dovetail I'm so now I know that's a complicated mish mash of ideas but I'm interested in your thoughts on that well I I I think there's a lot in that actually and I recall listening to you give a very interesting

lecture on Genesis 1 and when you came to the statement that human beings are made in the image of God you paused and you pointed out that this was the Cornerstone of our civilization and I agree with that entirely I think that what Dawkins is saying actually points in the exact opposite direction to what his worldview is which is atheism of course in other words that we can read off from creation something about the idea of a Creator and as you say it dubb Tales perfectly let me put this another way I'm a mathematician by

background and a linguist I love language and Mathematics is a very sophisticated language but I love natural languages as well and it seems to me that where this fits together best is first in the fact that we can do science in the sense that there is a rational intelligibility to the universe which is the foundation of modern science and is a legacy of the biblical worldview so that the mathematical describ ability uh Einstein talked about he couldn't imagine any genuine scientist without faith in that it's the axom for doing science is to believe the universe

is intelligible but if you ask for the rationale behind that why do we believe the universe is intelligible it Bears the imprint of a Creator and I see that at the level of mathematics it its capacity to at least in part give us a handle on what's out there and also in biology where we we have at the heart of every living cell the longest word we've ever found the genetic code and all of that leads me to formulate it as follows that we live in a word based universe and that's the key of the

logos for me okay and so what do you mean in that case so what do you mean specifically that we live in a word-based universe what does that mean for you on the broader conceptual landscape well it means that this universe is not simply a product of natural unguided forces it is a product of a rational Creator an intelligent Creator and I believe even more than that a personal Creator now how I get there is only in part from a respon on the universe as I find it the point you made about each organism being

a microcosm of its environment it's also it seems to me that there are two sources two major sources of knowledge there is first of all observing the universe science Etc then there are the humanities but there's also the concept of Revelation in which I believe in other words it's not simply the human Quest for the Creator it's the Creator revealing himself so for me the Anchor Point in the end is that the logos became human and we beheld his glory in other words we can see exactly what this means in terms of what we can

understand that is the human uh being in which God encoded himself in in Christ now those are big ideas of course they're very deep ideas they need unpacking but that's it's essentially where I'm coming from okay so all right so let let me let me elaborate in two directions with regards to that so the first is that so one of the axioms of Faith that's necessary before you embark on the scientific Endeavor as an individual or as a culture which might explain why science emerged in the judeo-christian context and and no other place is that

the universe is intrinsically intelligible but there there's another Axiom two which is that the investig the honest investigation of that intelligibility will be good and so there is this insistence in Genesis when God casts order out of chaos and creates the world after each day of creation he says he States explicitly and it was good and when he creates man I believe he he says that it is very good and so and the reason for that is that not only is there an order but the order is in its deepest sense beneficial and positive and

the thing is is that it's easy and even rational it might be easy and even rational to take the Frankenstein monster view of the investigation of the world and to say well even if the cosmos is intelligible that doesn't mean that our investigation into it is intrinsically good or that it would bear good fruit now you have to believe that the truth will set you free in order to be a scientist because if you believed that the truth had no bearing on human flourishing let's say then the whole Enterprise would be pointless and if you

believe that the investigation of the complexities of material reality would lead us astray then you'd say that that should be taboo and forbidden but that isn't what we decided we decided that the or the revealed order would be good and then I'll add one other thing to that which I think is also axiomatic which is part of the logos idea in its deepest sense is that we are required to explore investigate and communicate about everything as deeply as possible so the idea you have this idea in job that is quite welldeveloped that no matter what

God and the devil throw at you you're called upon to maintain your equilibrium and your faith in the intrinsic goodness of being and then that's expanded in the gospels because the trials of Christ are the most extreme trials that can be imagined and and I mean that literally that's partly why the story has such potency right it's the worst possible sequence of events that could happen to the least possibly deserving person and that's a injunction to accept all of the terrible catastrophes of Life full on in this supposition that doing so is the manner in

which life most abundant could reveal itself and if you're a scientist and the real scientists are like this and I think Dawkins in this way is a real scientist is that you're actually committed to the truth right you put that above all else and you wouldn't do that if you didn't believe that the logos of commitment establishes the order that is good and I don't think you do that without intrinsic belief that it's something like human beings are made in the image of God I I can't see any escape from that rationale nor can I

and it's interesting that when I did my debate with Dawkins in the Oxford natural history museum at the press conference afterwards we were asked was there anything that we agreed on and there was one thing and that is that truth exists and and this is a crucial thing it depends that we are committed to The Pursuit Of Truth otherwise as you say science is absolutely no point I happen to believe that truth of course is not simply propositional truth but ultimately truth is a person and that is the very deep claim I am the way

the truth and the life and it's interesting there that that Jesus wasn't merely saying I say true things this goes much deeper I am the truth and if we set up a sequence of questions about anything what is the truth about the atom well you can split it into Elementary particles what is the truth about those I believe this claim is so big that it's actually saying that at the end of the backward sequence of questions Jesus Christ will say I am the truth and of course that resonates with what you were studying in Exodus

so interestingly I am is the fundamental proposition about the nature of God right right right so that's that's an existential proposition that has to do with action so Thomas well okay so when Thomas wrote the the um the what was it his theory of Scientific Revolution I can't remember the name of the book exactly at the moment the structure of scientific revolutions now yes did something that other philosophers of science did in the 20th century you know he laid out the case for science being a coherent set of explicit statable propositions and that's generally what

people think of as science but that's not accurate nor sufficient by any stretch of the imagination so so I'll give you an example of this and we can expand on that so my graduate supervisor Robert Peele was a real scientist and what that meant was that he conducted himself in a certain way it wasn't a matter of the things he believed explicitly it was the a matter of the way that he conducted himself let's say as a laboratory researcher okay so and that conduct was oriented around a variety of ethical propositions so um he was

very generous with his ideas and what that meant was he had a lot of ideas because he would share them with his graduate students for example and the undergraduates and they would respond positively and that would reinforce the mechanism within him that generated ideas and then ideas would flow forth more abundantly and so that was part of the scientific ethos to be generous with ideas and then a the next part of that was if he published his scientific research papers he was generous in the credit he gave to his graduate student collaborators generally listing them

as the first author and putting himself in the final place which is a convention among genuine scientists and so um he played Fair on the reputational front and then I had a supervisor like that I had a supervisor like that at Cambridge yeah well it's a great good for you can't become a successful scientist it's very difficult to become a successful scientist without someone like that to Apprentice with yep okay so then on the statistical analysis front so you know people who know know anything about statistics think that you take a spreadsheet of numbers and

dump it into a meat grinder and crank the handle and out comes truth and that is 100% false because when you're doing statistical analysis it's a form of critical thinking and exploration and you're making ethical decisions at every choice point so you have to figure out which data points constitute outliers because maybe there was a measurement error for example while you were sampling that particular behavior and um you you have to tilt the statistical investigation to some degree against the outcome that you're hoping for to make sure that you don't fool yourself and it's saturated

with ethical decisions and then that all has to be nested within a the presumption first of all the presumption that you should not ever publish false data just to move your career forward you know and you might say well why the hell not and also that you are required on ethical grounds to let go of your tyrannical presuppositions if the data reveals that what you're clinging to for your own psychological reasons is wrong and all of that's all of that's an attitude of ethical conduct and not a of explicit statable propositions and yeah that's that's

hugely important Richard feeman the physicist the Nobel Prize winner used to say You must Bend backwards to criticize yourself because you are the easiest person to fool and I'm very interested in this ethical Dimension because this is over and Beyond the propositions and the methodology of science I think it was Einstein who said you may talk about the ethical foundations of science but you cannot talk about the scientific foundations of Ethics so this is another layer in looking at the universe it's rationally intelligible but it's also a moral universe and ethical presuppositions and decisions infect

all of our lives and they do affect the scientific Endeavor it's not just dispassionate observation and making conclusions and theories there's a huge ethical de ition which raises deep questions as to what the reference point is who said so what are the Norms behind that ethical decision making process going online without expressvpn is like changing while leaving your window wide open you might not have anything to hide but why give someone random the chance to invade your privacy when you go online without a VPN internet service providers can see every single website you visit they

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Jordan that's expressvpn.com Jordan for three extra months free expressvpn.com [Music] Jordan well it it also implies that the scientific truth that's truest and and beneficial simultaneously is actually the conjunction in this Athens Jerusalem sense it's actually the conjunction of the intrinsic logic of the objective world making itself manifest to the truthful penetrating psyche of the human Observer it's the interaction between these two those two that constitute scientific truth and not one or the other and so and there's no getting see and what the atheist materialists would like to do is to say well the world

of facts speaks for itself but that's also technically untrue because there's an infinite number of facts they're certainly not all relevant we can drown the plethora of facts and we certainly will do will do that and to even communicate about them or study them or even draw our attention to them we have to prioritize and hierarchically arrange the facts and we do that according to an ethic and I think that's actually I think that is incontrovertible on scientific grounds because we have seen the emergent realization in a whole variety of domains AI not least that

there are facts but those facts have to be prioritized and you prior I facts within ethic that's absolutely right there's a deeper problem it seems to me with the atheist understanding of Science and that is this that we do the science with our minds some people think the mind the brain are the same I leave that aside since you're an expert on on the on the mind and the Brain but I I often say to people um you know what do you do science with I've asked many leading scientists this they say well I do

it with my mind and my brain give me a brief account of the brain and they say to me well the brain is the end product of a Mindless unguided process and I pause and I look up straight in the eye and I smile and I say and you trust it tell me honestly if you knew that the computer you use or the Machinery you use in the lab was the end product of a Mindless unguided process would you trust it and the interesting thing I've done a lot of experiments with this little story I

have always got the answer no I would not so I say you have a problem in other words your atheism is undermining the very rationality you use not only to do science but to construct any argument whatsoever it's not only shooting itself in the foot it's worse it's shooting itself in the brain let me let me ask you about something you said earlier about Revelation so I've also been i' I've been very interested in the what would you call it the the anthropological psychology of the development of thought that's a good way of thinking about

it is that how is it that human beings came to think now Carl Yung said something very interesting about thought about typical thought normative thought and he said the typical person doesn't think what happens to the typical person is that thoughts appear to them and they accept them as axiomatically true without further investigation and so and I and I believe that to be the case I think that in order to think critically you have to set up in the theater of your imagination um something that holds a proposition and defends it and then an adversary

or two adversaries that take it apart and so you're actually producing a collective within that will then hash out the thought but that's led me down the rabbit hole of trying to understand what we mean when we say something like I thought which would be the sort of thing that scientists would say when they're talking about how they do science well I thought up my hypothesis it's like you know that's not much of an explanation there buddy like what do you mean you thought it up because you didn't know the hypothesis let's say yesterday and

now you do know it and so how did you not know it then and how do you know it now and how is it that that new idea manifested itself and the answer is always going to be well it came to me and so that's the crucial thing I want to dive into so here's how I think the hypothesis generation process works and scientists very rarely talk about this he they talk about the observable data but they don't talk about the mechanism by which the investigative question was formulated and that's a huge Luni right that's

a huge domain of unconsciousness so this is how it seems to me is that first of all you have to have a problem and so that's something that calls to you generally because people are generally gripped by a problem right it isn't that they choose it voluntarily precisely it comes knocking they can open the door to it but it's something that grips them and compels them and it has a kind of autonomy in that sense um you know if something really besets you as a problem you can't shake it it dogs you and and that

that seems like a kind of autonomy on the part of the problem and also there's a million problems that could beset you but some stand out against the background right I think that's equivalent to the burning bush by the way anyway so you have a problem and you're you're searching humbly for a solution and humbly because you have to admit that you have a problem and you have to admit that you don't know to answer and then if you open yourself up whatever the hell that means you'll get a revelation and the revelation will be

an Insight where it'll be something that strikes you as probable or likely and so that's the first element that's the first two elements of thought the first element is a felt lack and that would be an admission of personal insufficiency on some vital front the next would be the knocking which is I would like to know the answer the next seat part of the sequence is a revelation as far as I can tell and it's be something appears to you and it Springs out of the Void for all intents and purposes and you can say

you thought it up but you're not saying any more than it appeared to me there's no more content in those two descriptive uh uh what would you call approaches and then once the Revelation makes itself manifest you can analyze it critically or you can subject it to further empirical analysis and to the criticism of others and it's that whole panoply of sequenced processes that make up thought but there's revelatory element to that that seems to me to be irreducible now the question is from from where is the Revelation spring I would sympathize with that analysis

very very much I I think thought is a little bit like time uh as Augustine said everybody knows what time is until they try to Define it and I certainly think that the idea that it came to me actually it cogs in with my own experience of my limited success in mathematical research it came to me I I think there are other dimensions of course as well you're absolutely right to try to take this question of analyzing hypothesis deeper because things often play a role that folk wouldn't think about like dreams like hunches like intuition

and all this kind of thing and whether it to us swelling up from the unconscious or all this kind of thing because I wonder let me step back from this one second I wonder if we have to think in terms of different levels of Revelation for example if I want to get to know you and you want to get to know me it's no use me putting you into a tomography machine and looking at your brain waves I will never get to know you unless you reveal yourself to me and usually that will be you

speak to me as you are now and I speak to you that is partly Revelation if you never say anything I'll never get to know you now those words that you use are coming from inside you and they have to do with your mind and your brain and all that very sophisticated stuff that we really know very little about because we don't even know what Consciousness is but I wonder if above and beyond that kind of human level of revelation or what wells up when we've looked at a problem or something else what wells up

in our minds we have to have a separate category which I would call Divine Revelation now whether the two whether the two Dove tail and flow into one another is is an interesting matter because if you go back to Genesis one of the most interesting things is we're told we're made in the image of God but it was God that told human beings to do biology name the animals that's taxonomy it's the fundamental intellectual discipline I'm not going to do it for you you do it for yourself and so the capacity of human beings to

think in that sense whatever it really means seems to me to be a reflection of their creator and possibly an Evidence if we extrapolate it of of his existence okay so now let's take this idea of of the source of thought and the different levels of depth let's explore that for a minute so I'm I'm going to describe a potential Pitfall down that route so let's say that I'm a scientist and a bright idea strikes me or I'm an artist and a bright intuition strikes me now I have two options when I'm considering that Source

I could consider that a manifestation of The Same Spirit of intuition and Revelation that has made itself manif EST as part and parcel of the creative Enterprise of all of mankind since the dawn of time right a continu of that same process which which insinuates something transpersonal about it right it's the operation of something Transcendent or I can take personal credit for it and say I thought it up now the problem with the latter approach as far as I can tell is first of all I think it's I think it's incautious and unwarranted because you

know the great scientists have always said that they stand on the shoulders of giants and can see farther for that reason is we are part of a great Collective creative Enterprise and God only knows how deep that goes but then there's also the terrible threat of self-deification that might otherwise make itself manifest you know and I see that emerging in our culture I see part of what's happening in our culture a kind of extension of demented protestantism where instead of the god that revealed itself to Moses saying I am what I am it's the individual

person who says I am what I am I get to Define myself I'm the source of all wisdom and Revelation my brain my psyche my subjectivity with with no humility in that regard and I actually think that that's a that's a devastating cultural impropriety because it elevates the subjective in to the status of God and that's a luciferian crime it is absolutely and specifically a luciferian crime because the Temptation you shall be as Gods is in the very first pages of Genesis and it fascinates me that the Temptation came in a very clever way giving

the impression that God wants to hold you humans down he doesn't want you to raise to his level don't you realize if you go against his word then you will rise in the hierarchy of being and you will be as Gods knowing good and evil and what fascinates me uh about that Dr Peterson is this in the first section of Genesis you have God's word creating the universe and God said and God said and God said in the second part you have God's word in a Prohibition defining morality and the first humans are encouraged to

go against it by being promised godhood and the knowledge of Good and Evil not knowledge of course God wanted them to have lots of knowledge it was the knowledge of Good and Evil that nobody wants and what I see in current society and I very much applaud your stance on this because it seems to me that the whole hodas phenomenon as for example Illustrated in the book by yal Noah Harari on artificial intelligence this idea of transhumanism that actually we should go for this and turn human beings into Gods seems to me to be incredibly

dangerous and it's the height of Pride arrogance and it is very destructive okay so so in the late 1800s when n you observed that God was dead it was a very complex observation because people like to think of that as a triumphal triumphalis Proclamation by this emancipatory philosopher and that wasn't the case at all because n basically said that God was dead and we' killed him and we'll never find enough water to wash away the blood right I mean he knew it was a catastrophe and he he prophecied that three things would happen one would

be that there would be a wicked turn towards a kind of hopeless nihilism because every structure of morality had fallen apart the second would be the rise of totalitarian substitute tions for God and N actually specified communism as a likely candidate and also prophecied that hundreds of millions of people would die as a consequence which was quite the damn prophecy for for the mid late 1800s and and then he also said But the alternative is that we could create our own values and that was the route that n saw as the way out now there's

a couple of problems with that and Technical problems you might say one is well we don't live very long and it isn't obvious that any of us singly is wise enough to create our own values the second problem is as the psychoanalysts point out pointed out very quickly it isn't obvious at all that we're Masters in our own houses because even if you only look at the spiritual realm as equivalent to something like the unconscious we're all haunted beings and we can't necessarily trust our judgment and this the third problem there's four the third problem

is that well who do you mean by the we that will create our own values like which aspect of the psyche is now going to create value n said himself that each Drive tends to philosophize in its own spirit and so in order for us to create our own values in some sort of transcendent sense you have to hypothesize the hierarchical integration of the psyche towards some superordinate end and that speaking in some voice and it isn't obvious to me at all that that would be a subjective voice I think it would be Ain so

so what happens with Moses is when he investigates the burning bush he goes deeper and deeper into the investigation and the first thing that happens is well his attention is attracted the second thing is that he starts to notice that he's treading on sacred ground right because he's getting deep into the phenomen and the third thing that happens is that and this is relevant to your notion of levels of Revelation is that the voice of being itself speaks to him right the Eternal Transcendent voice of being and Moses is smart enough he's wise enough to

know that that's not him right it's something above and beyond him and he doesn't take credit for it and that's partly why he never turns into a pharaoh in the desert right he separates himself from the source of sovereignty as such and I don't see how that can be done in the rationalist atheist materialist realm of conceptualization you fall in subjectivist trap okay okay no no nor do I and I I think nature in that sense was a kind of profit and we're seeing the Damage Done you know ever since I was very young I

was fascinated by the polar opposite of my Christian Heritage and that has led me to spend quite a lot of time in Russia and I've talked about these kind of things to Russian friends many of whom suffered in the gulag and I remember one conversation with a leading academician and he said to me he said you know John he said we thought we could get rid of God and retain a value for human beings and we woke up too late to realize that it cannot be done and it was nature that said if if you

destroy God you lose all right to the kind of values that we accept in a sense deep down in our uh judeo Christian culture and what is so interesting about Moses and I loved your discussion about that is that he came face to face not only with the concept of transcendence but Transcendence itself and he was brought into the presence of the very glory of God and you were discussing in your Round Table how in Hebrew cavod glory is associated with way wait and that leads me to think relevant to what you've just said about

CS Lewis I'm old enough to have listened to CS Lewis by the way when I was younger and CS Lewis in the 1940s saw exactly what was going to happen if a group of human beings took it into their heads to determine and redefine all future Generations through genetic experimentation and so on and in two books abolition of man and That Hideous Strength he spelled that out and he he made the point that if that happens it is not going to liberate human beings in fact it's going to abolish them because what will be created

by say playing around with the germline is not human beings but artifacts and so he writes the final Triumph of humanity scientists will be the abolition of man and it's that that I fear is really permeating our culture I mean the Caesars in Rome and the Babylonian Emperors who thought of themselves as Gods looks pretty trivial stuff compared with this Insidious teaching uh that's around in particularly the Western world today that we are actually all gods and we ought to rise to this and the only way to rise to it is to reject the Transcendent

completely there is nothing above us okay so so let's delve into that a little bit um because the devil's always in the details and so you know when I had when I had little kids I thought once about my son when he was about three and you know there's a terrible fragility to Children right and I mean adults are fragile obviously we all are because we're mortal and vulnerable and prone to suffering and uh I thought about my three-year-old son you know and I thought well he has this terrible vulnerability wouldn't it be good if

that could be ameliorated now you can do that two ways say you can you can Institute protective mechanisms that Shield them from the depredations of the world or you can strive to make them into this sort of competent people that can take the world on on their own right and it's akin to the gospel ideas I would say that you know you can you can learn to handle serpents and that's your best defense against serpents is that way you get to have the benefits of being and develop into someone simultaneously capable of bearing the weight

of being let's say and I don't know if you can have being without it having a wait you know I I don't even know it's like it's possible that mortal limitation is the price you pay for being I I don't know how things are constructed it it could well be uh what you're saying reminds me of dovi who said that he couldn't imagine uh a great person who had not known some kind of suffering and what we try to do with our children is somehow to limit that but we realize that part of their maturing

uh has to do with how they learn to handle life and we don't want to leave them defenseless do we so what you're raising is a very big set of questions now you mentioned that transhumanism attempts to solve some of this vulnerability and of course some things are very good I I we glasses and uh they enhance my vision and they're very important but this idea of hararis where he sets two agenda items for the 21st century firstly to abolish physical death to solve it as a technical medical problem and then to enhance human Happiness

by genetic engineering and Cyborg engineering and so so forth I take a very radical view of that when people hold out this promise to me I I simply say to them you're too late the problem of physical death was solved 20 centuries ago because I think there's strong evidence that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and the problem therefore of developing some kind of immortality was simultaneously sold with that because Christ promises to those that trust him and follow him that he will eventually raise them from the dead and that will be the best uploading

you can ever imagine of brains body and everything else so I take a very radical view that the transhumanist ideal is bound to fail there are deeper reasons behind that as well well so there's also a biological truism on the genetic front and so for example and it it's it's summed up in the phrase there is no breeding for for evolutionary Fitness like you cannot you cannot rationally breed uh a variant of cattle for example that are going to be um more successful at surviving in the Ecology of cattle it's not possible and part of

the reason for that as far as I can tell it's a deep problem part of the reason for that is that the Horizon of the future actually transforms unpredictably like actually unpredictably technically unpredictably it's not deterministic and what that means is that you cannot make a rational calculation that will determine a priori what direction Evolution should go in in order to be more successful and it's also for that reason that what the evolutionary process does is capitalize on actual random chance in order to produce variant that can meet the transforming Horizon of the future and

so now the theory has been forever that genetic mutation is random and and part of the reason for that is that it's it part of its mechanism there are a variety one of its mechanisms is the damage of DNA molecules by cosmic rays which is definitely random but you know there was a study published a year ago or two years ago in nature this is so interesting and and bears on our our our issues here that even though the mechanism of variability at the DNA molecule level is truly random there are repair mechanisms that fix

damage to DNA molecules and there's a hierarchy of genes such that some genes are so crucial to morphological development that if they mutate death is virtually certain or severe limitation right on the reproductive front virtually certain whereas there are other variable variations that are permissible with within the realm of likely survivability and the accuracy of the repair mechanisms is proportionate to the depth of profundity of the genetic code the genes that are most crucial to survival are repaired with 100% accuracy so there's room for variation at The Fringe now the reason I brought that up

is partly because there's an implication in the futurist posthumanist types that they could breed a better person by rational means but that means accepting the proposition a priority that you can compute what constitutes better rationally that you actually know enough about that and that's also a derivation of the notion that we can create our own values and I don't think any of that's actually tenable I think it's likely to produce all sorts of catastrophic um unpredicted outcomes that's much more likely like those would be mutations that are counterproductive in every way so to speak that's

much more likely than we're that than the notion that we're going to hit the target more squarely by mucking about with our luciferian rationality that's I I think I think that's absolutely right but it raises a number of other questions because the tcid Assumption I against a lot of this and it was formulated recently that Evolution has brought us to where we are in the present and intelligent design will bring us to our stated goal in the future and I uh like you I deny the second proposition but the first is beginning to look very

shaky indeed now I'm not a biologist but I do study a lot of the recent developments called the third wave in biology which are associated with systems biology Dennis Noble and jimes Shapiro and so on who now question seriously the whole darwinian um scheme the Neo darwinist explanation because although it's still accounts for variation they're now pretty clear it accounts for very little else and statements like ly marula saying that it's dead and my colleague here Dennis Noble who founded systems biology says that it's not fit for purpose it doesn't need to be modified and

therefore replaced and therefore I I suppose part of my skepticism comes from mathematics we've always been skeptical about the idea that random processes can increase information as distinct from variant so I have huge problems with this which is why I wrote a book about it recently so the two problems are for me one I I do not really believe that darwinian Evolution does all that people think it does it certainly does something but secondly that looking towards the future I I the idea that we will take it into our hands and intelligently move towards the

goal of a superum I think is immensely dangerous because it's the creation of God and there's a a lovely little quote from a conference recently that I picked up a biology conference and a student was there there and um she said oh it sounds as if you're creating God to the speaker and he says exactly that is exactly what we're trying to do and I do think that's doomed to failure for the reasons that you have been so expressit about yeah well you know you might aim at creating God but that doesn't mean that the

Transcendent entity that you produce will be godone absolutely not so right right I mean you you'd have to have a fair bit of huus to assume that you would hit the target that exactly so I've been thinking about you know you mentioned when we were talking about the dangers of transhumanism and the abolition of man you know you rightly pointed out very rapidly that well you know you have reading glasses and you're pretty damn happy with that you have these prosthesis that help you ameliorate your vulnerability and you wouldn't give them up and you do

recognize them as positive goods and you know and you could say with a fair bit of uh credibility that the fact that you have reading glasses is one way that you've transcended your mortal limitations now not entirely now so now we're faced with the problem of given our Advanced technological capability there are a variety of biological limitations that in principle we could transcend and then we might say well which of those should we transcend and so I have a complicated answer to that you tell me what you think about this you know I thought a

long while back about the problem of lying you know because it's reasonable for a young child or a young adult for that matter to ask the question well why shouldn't I just lie all the time if I can get what I want and I can avoid unpleasant responsibility by doing so like and every child knows this which is and every adult for that matter which is why we lie because we assume that we can Sherk off a certain unpleasant responsibility or can gain an opportunity and like what the hell why not do it and so

I thought about that for a long time it's like well what exactly is the problem here and then I realized you know when you're there'll be times in your life where very very complicated dilemmas will confront you like life and death situations and and you'll be suffering and so will the people around you and that will be no joke and then you bloody well better be have you better have a clear head at that moment because if you make the wrong decision you're going to take the catastrophe that surrounds you and you're really going to

turn it into something indistinguishable from hell and then you might say well how can you be sure that you have a clear head when the storms come and the answer is well how about if you don't allow the detrius in Your Vision to accumulate voluntarily right how about you don't blind yourself with lies how about you don't pollute the very mechanism that orients you in the world so that you have something to rely on when the difficulties come and I would say maybe it's the same thing on the moral front right because maybe the answer

to what should our limitations be on the scientific front isn't a list of prohibitions in the explicit knowledge uh realm but something like we should bloody well be sure that if we're going to be good scientists that we're truly ethically oriented so that when a technological possibility makes itself manifest to us we have enough wisdom to judge whether or not that's a direction that wise people would walk down so I read this book a while back a it was written by a KGB agent and he purported to have knowledge of a chemical weapons research program

in the former Soviet Union and the goal of the program was to generate a hybrid of Ebola and smallpox and then to aerosolize it for large scale distribution and he reported that the Soviets had killed a number of people 500 or so accidentally as a release of some of the chemical compounds or biological compounds this lab had been producing but you know it made me think because technically scientifically outside the realm of of ethics and and subjective value there's no reason why how might we breed a ebola smallpox um hybrid there's no reason that that's

not a valid scientific question right from the perspective of the of the pure facts if the facts have no value then any other any fact is worth pursuing any knowledge is worth pursuing but if you're sensible and you look at something like that you think well if you're an ethical scientist and you think something like should I hybridize smallpox and Ebola the answer should be no right that's just a road you're not going to walk down and if you have any wisdom it's going to be obvious that that's a bad Road and so it also

seems to me that in order to deal with the catastrophic possibilities of the post-human realm that we're going to have to become wise enough as scientists not to make that sort of egregious luciferian error and I don't think think we can do that by abandoning our traditional metaphysics I think that won't that won't work to say the least absolutely it won't work because what we're raising now is is a parallel question to the question of truth it's the question of the existence of the concepts of right and wrong and defining them and if you've got

no Transcendent uh reference point you end up with dovi rightly saying if God does not exist then everything is permissible he didn't mean that atheists couldn't behave of course they can but he meant there's no rational justification for distinguishing uh between right and wrong and we got to face that on the question of lying it's very interesting to me that the whole condition arose from the LIE originally you shall be as Gods knowing good and evil and you were talking about people thinking why shouldn't I lie on so on well of course one of the

arguments is that people who take that view if you lie to them and accuse them of something they don't believe to be true for instance accuse them of murder or theft or something like that you'll soon see that they believe in truth and they want the truth about themselves to be known so it's entirely inconsistent uh of course it's up to them to take that view if they want to but it's not one of those things that follows one of your rules of life that you want to be able to apply to others what you

apply to s so so that knowing good and evil so I think the luciferian Temptation is that is part of that offering of becoming as Gods is to offer to people the possibility of defining good and evil as subjective creatures right so so the prohibition that God places on Humanity in gen genis is to not eat of the fruit of the knowledge of Good and Evil and it's it's a very complicated narrative Trope um but one of the in in what would you say the the the the uh the the connotations right the implications is

that there is a there are moral guidelines that are absolute that aren't within the human realm of of it's of the knowledge it's partly the knowledge the ability to manipulate the ability to change or even to Define the Fundamental moral propositions are Transcendent and axiomatic and they're not in the proper domain of human maneuvering it's something like that and and the serpent says to man no you can take it all you can you can have full knowledge even of the moral axioms and that seems to be something that's what would you say that's off limits

if the game of being itself is to progress without catastrophe yeah it's something like that I think it's exactly like that because what is interesting about Genesis is that the first encounter we have with Morality In the pages of Genesis morality is defined not horizontally between humans but vertically between humans and God and that's crucial it's it's God that defines it ultimate ultimately so there is a Transcendence from the very beginning and it's the loss of that transcend that we're seeing damaging our culture today because we've lost that common sense of values that however distorted

it has been over the centuries that we did owe to the biblical tradition and now we wander in total confusion and it interests me greatly that the pressure particularly at young people today is to look inside for answers to these questions when what we need to be teaching them is no look outside and have your mind open to the fact that Transcendence is real and that there is a God and there is something bigger there's something more than materialism is giving you okay so so let's take that apart a bit you could imagine that there

could be three sources of moral knowledge that's the kind of knowledge that orients you in the world and one source could be the subjective now we've already talked about the limitations there is that well you don't live very long and what the hell do you know and what do you mean by the subjective like which part of you and and then there's the danger of elevating yourself to the status of final moral Arbiter which is a kind of luciferian presumption okay so those seem like bad pitfalls the next objection you might say is like okay

well you can't do it just subjectively I am who I am which is certainly the proclamation in our culture you could do it by consensus you know and that's more of a that's more The View that well the the group gets together and sort of decides by General agreement what right and wrong is and that can shift with time and place but as long as everybody is willing to abide by the same principles then we can Define them canonically as good or as good but there's but the problem with that is you run yeah go

on there's a huge problem with that you tell me what your problem with it is and then I'll tell you mine well my problem with that is the Nazi Germany problem exactly it's like well what what the hell happens when the whole herd stampedes towards hell if you're a consensus person and there's nothing else there it's like well there's no hell that's consensus and so the consensus by definition is right and so if everyone decides that no Jews would be better who the hell are you to stand in the way and you know if you're

willing to stand up and say well you should stand in the way well right so upon what grounds do you make that claim because it's not merely subjective so that brings us back to the problem of transcendent morality Okay so so you going to talk about problems of consensus yes it's exactly right that is the problem with utilitarianism um treating others as you want them to treat you and by consensus is fine if you've got equal centers of power if you've got a whole lot of equal centers of Power vying with one another then you

can say if you don't do this I won't do that but the very interesting thing about the case in point you mentioned Nazi Germany Hitler in his political youth made treaties but he tore them up once he had the power and if people say you shouldn't do that he said what do you mean you shouldn't I've got the power so it doesn't answer the question why ought you to go with a herd and and murder so many Jews and that's a huge weakness it's all right if you're dividing ice cream among children then utilitarianism is

fine give an equal amount to all of them or you'll be in trouble but at the higher level it's shot through with this problem of the total absence of any Transcendence the oughtness has to come from above okay so now you talked about power there you know and one of the radical claims of the postmodern types especially people like Fuko is that the fundamental motivating Drive of humanity and perhaps the cosmos itself is power now you know I I think everything Fuko thought about everything is to be taken with a gigantic grain of salt because

you know he was quite the awful creature and I think he had every reason for putting forward the proposition that there's nothing other than power because that justified everything he did that was done purely on the basis of power but but the but there's another there's another problem that emerges with that Proclamation which is a kind of self-evident problem and and I would think this is something the rationalists have a very difficult time with which is if I can compel you to do something why don't the next two propositions follow logically first of all if

I can compel you the mere fact that I can indicates precisely that I'm actually a better man than you because if you are better than me you could compel me and of course this is might makes right but M makes right is a very powerful Doctrine and almost all the pre-christian Pagan societies are operated on that basis in the most fundamental Manner and the aristocratic justification was something like well you're a peasant and the cosmos has established that you're a peasant and I'm an aristocrat and so screw you and and actually morally speaking because if

you weren't a useless slug you wouldn't be a peasant and that's a very very difficult argument to to generate a counter proposition to and the corollary argument is well if I can Force you clearly I'm more powerful than you are and that means that I have every moral right to do so and in fact you don't even get to object because you're too lowly to object but that that ref and that's the way of the world man yeah but it reflects a a series of values that needs to be questioned where do these values come

from to argue that the cosmos made me an aristocrat and you a surf is a very tenuous argument and in the end it's seems to me that we've got to ask ourselves the fundamental question what basis have we for valuing human beings as unique and again I refer to your comment on Genesis we're made in the image of God that gives us huge dignity and value it was something my parents got across to me when I was very young and as a Christian even at the bigger level the the idea that there's a higher value

even than the created value which is the whole topic of Exodus and I was utterly fascinated by your conversation on on Exodus because the valuation of people that is reflected in the Passover Lamb and the sacrifice in that God accepts them on the basis of a sacrifice and it seems to me that actually leads me now that I think of it and into into another Direction one of the problems of establishing rules of any kind seems to me that many of them bypass the heart of Exodus it's very noticeable that the law of The Commandments

comes after the Passover sacrifice after the Redemption and in the New Testament the parallel thing uh for Christians is the sacrifice is first the acceptance is settled it's not on the basis of your moral Behavior life but that empowers you to live so that the moral commandment in the letters of Paul for example come after the discussion of the sacrifice that gives you a true value now that is something that is lacking at the heart of our our culture we have no answer ultimately to the big questions of guilt and the whole problem nobody likes

the word sin but that's what it is the the moral damage we cause to ourselves and other people and setting up rules and regulations is hugely important we need them they're in the New Testament and in the Old Testament but I noticed that one of the major messages of Exodus is first Redemption and Redemption is by the blood of the Passover Lamb to put it in the biblical language and then the teaching and the same exactly in the test so let's let's let's delve into that well so what what appears to happen as far as

I can tell in the at in the post Paradise Lost transition in Genesis is that human beings are called upon to sacrifice right and you see that particularly in the story of Cain and Abel because two patterns of sacrifice are laid out in that story and one is genuine sacrifice and that's Abel and the other is halfhearted self-deceptive instrumental sacrifice and that's Cain and not only does that not go very well for Cain it engenders bitter murderous resentment and then eventually the horrors of War because tubul Kain who's Cain's descendant is the first artificer of

weapons of war and it's after that story that the flood comes and also the Tower of Babel and so there's two forms of sacrifice outlined and someone reading that who's a rationalist might object well why is sacrifice necessary and I think that's actually an utterly clueless rejoiner and and here's why so for example if you're going to be a scientist you know there was a woman I think her name was Barbara mcclint talk and she spent her whole life studying variations of color in so-called Indian corn and with a consequence of that was she discovered

a variety of facts about genetic structure that led to um technological improvements in cancer treatment but she labored in isolation for decades now you might say well what was her sacrifice and that's pretty obvious her sacrifice was that there was a trillion things in the world she could have been interested in and pursued and she sacrificed every single one of them to the Curiosity that made itself manifest in relationship to this strange genetic anomaly right and the thing is every time you focus your attention on one thing instead of the multitude of other things you're

making a sacrifice okay so you have to sacrifice in order to attend an act there's no way out of it and so then the the next question emerges here's another element of sacrifice if you're immature there's only the present as you become more mature there's only the present and there's only you as you become more mature there's the future at longer and longer durations and there's other people and so what you do as you mature is you sacrifice you and the present to the Future and everyone else and if you don't do that then you

stay dangerously immature and Psychopathic right because you're completely self-centered and narcissistic and so that's not good for you because narcissistic Psychopaths tend to fail and it's certainly not good for everyone else so you have to sacrifice to attend and act and you have to sacrifice to mature and then you might say well what's the sacrifice that's most pleasing to God and the answer to that has to be something like well yourself right you have to offer up everything to what's Transcendent and I think that is the that sacrifice that you described that's an a prior

act before the coming of the law right it's the willingness to lay it's the willingness to voluntarily lay everything on the line in the pursuit of truth and life more abundance something like that and I think that is the pattern that's laid out in the Christian story it looks to me like that's the pattern yeah well let let me comment on that I'm very interested that you mentioned Barbara mcclint talk because actually she discovered the jump so-called jumping Jean and she really was the Pioneer that's led to this third wave of biology I mentioned earlier

that's that's just a point aside but it's extremely interesting she was a Pioneer and she sacrificed a great deal but it seems to me that there we may need to think in terms of different kinds of sacrifice you see see at the heart of Christianity is not my sacrifice but God's sacrifice on my part a sacrifice that I could not have made but that sacrifice demands My Sacrifice uh offer up your body as a Living Sacrifice is what Paul says to be as a as a Christian but I'm prepared to do that the power to

do that comes from the fact that my acceptance with God depends on a sacrifice that's entirely out inside of me but can be appropriated by me and that is when Christ died and rose again now this this goes very deep but it goes to the heart of God doing something so that he can forgive me and deal with the guilt that I have incurred by my messed up behavior and all the rest of it that's one thing now in response to that yes of course we're called upon to sacrifice and there are all these different

levels a mother sacrifices for her child she doesn't sacrifice to some God she gives up her time and her energy and sometimes slaves very hard working to make ends mate for the children so she's given her all in that sense and at that level but there's a much more fundamental level that deals with a problem of human relationship with God that's gone wrong ever since Genesis 3 so you you mentioned that the mother's the maternal sacrifice and and so there were archaic societies where people sacrificed their children to the gods and that meant in some

sense that they were giving up something that was valuable and vital to please fate but what we have come to regard as the appropriate sacrifice on the part of the mother is as you pointed out it's herself to her child and and there's something deeper there in that which is that it's the voluntary sacrifice of the more powerful and that would be the mother in this case to the least powerful right and so that's the service of the higher to the lower as the Exemplar of the highest form of service that's the proper form of

sacrifice and you know I saw the pieta when I was at St peters's the couple of times I've been there that great Michelangelo statue and you know that really is emblematic to me of something approximating the female crucifixion right because you have Christ offering his own being in this cataclysmic way to the exigencies of being let's say but you have Mary making an offering that's of equivalent pain in some ways right because I think it's a toss up whether having yourself destroyed by the mob for example is a more painful experience than the experience of

a mother watching her child be torn apart by the ravenous mob right but we would also say I think to the degree that we have any sense that a mother who is performing her role properly Al she offers herself to the she offers herself to the Glorious adventure of her child right she puts herself secondary to her child's needs but she's also doing in a doing that in a way that offers the child to be what to ad to to enter upon the full adventure of the world and that would mean the voluntary acceptance of

something like suffering and death right because that's the destiny of everyone now a mother could try to protect her child against that and against the knowledge of that but that turns her into well a devouring mother right someone who destroys the burgeoning ability of the child to thrive and so there's a mute there's a dual acceptance of sacrifice on the part of the properly behaving mother she has to sacrifice herself to the child especially in infancy but then she has to be willing to let the child go to be broken by the world and that

that is the root to well as you pointed out that's part of the Divine pattern it seems to be part of the de Divine pattern of Eternal salvation it's something like that it's very paradoxical right because it means you have to take the full weight of mortality onto yourself voluntarily and maintain your moral orientation and that that's actually the key to well that's the key to that's the key to Paradise I suppose that's one way of thinking about it that's a key to reacquiring what you lost in childhood yeah taking the full weight of morality

mortality upon yourself is hugely important it's transformed of course if we believe that death is not the end and as I am convinced that Christ rose from the dead this introduces up for me a huge a huge new world of possibility that I am mortal but death is physical death that is is not going to be the end so as I get older my own personal orientation towards the future it gets brighter and brighter because I know that whatever happens if I am taken by cancer or coid or anything else that there has been a

new life that I already possess according to the New Testament a power within me that enables me to live but will also raise me from the dead in the last day and that that's a huge hope of course it's the Central Christian hope and it would be uh unfortunate not to hear that sight of Christianity and I feel many people today don't listen to the whole in a sense the whole meta narrative that Christianity offers because they would see in it that there's a real Prospect for the future that it does answer the problem of

physical death in a much better way than the possibly sudo Promises of transhumanist engineering well all right let me let me approach that psycholog olic Al um to to some degree um when when you're talking about anything that's theological the psychological can only make inroads to a certain depth but but look one of the things that psychologists have agreed upon on the clinical front for the last five or six decades I would say so quite a long time is that if you voluntary if you can voluntarily get your clients to expose themselves to the things

that they're afraid of and are avoiding as they're making their way to their destination that that makes them braver and more competent it's not exactly that it reduces Their Fear it produces within them a revelation of Their Own Strength so for example if you take a woman who's agrh obic and who is afraid of getting on an elevator because she thinks she'll have a heart attack on the elevator and be unable to get to a hospital and will die stupidly and loudly in front of the crowd in the elevator because that's the typical agrob uh

fantasy you can teach her to reacquaint herself with elevators through graduated exposure right and so you're basically taking the thing that she's most afraid of and then feeding it to her in graduated doses now what happens is she not only becomes able to take the elevator but a lot of fears that had beset her also vanished simultaneously and the reason for that is that she sees that when she encounters something she thought was beyond her capability there's something within her that reveals itself that's bigger than the fear oh but there's also a theological aspect to

that I mean I think that psychological insight is very important it's another example of it is of course if someone's afraid of flying you need to get them onto a plane you need to acquaint them with the actual reality of which they are afraid but but you also get that in situations theologically where people are afraid of the future H and why is that because they don't know enough about what God offers to people to conquer those fears it doesn't mean they'll Disappear Completely but it means that they can orientate themselves and come to terms

with those things so I would take that Insight absolutely because I use it all the time myself with other people well then people people shrink away if they don't have that faith and so on the mythological front you see this reflected in the dragon encounter stories that tolken made so famous for example and the idea is that if you can find the dragon that lurks in the deepest Cavern that's where the gold is hoarded and so the the Christian notion of Resurrection is a an extension of that Corpus of ideas because it's predicated on the

notion that if you forthrightly confronted the whole pan of the horrors of death in its multiple forms death and betrayal and and and what and the catastrophe of the mob if you faced all of that what you would see as a consequence is not so much Eternal Darkness as the Eternal resurrection of the light you know and it's a limit case right and and I I really it's hard for me to to know what to make of that again on the psychological front because it's a true definitely both in the narrative domain and in the

Practical clinical domain is that if you if people can find it within themselves to voluntarily shoulder the burden of confronting what they're afraid of they definitely get braver and more competent you know and some of that's because they get informed about themselves but there are also even biological Transformations that take place you know if you voluntarily face a stressor entirely different psychophysiological systems are manifest in you as a cont consequence of the voluntary confrontation that would be manifest if it was imposed on you involuntarily it's a whole different spirit that inhabits you that that's a

very good way of thinking about it it's genuinely a different spirit that inhabits you and it makes itself manifest all the way from the cellular level upward and the habitual practice of that attitude of voluntary confrontation can switch on new genes it doesn't just happen conceptually it actually transforms you physiologically and we have no idea what the limit of that is there's a very interesting in fact brilliant illustration of that principle in the New Testament in the famous story of the man Lazarus and His Two Sisters Jesus is with his disciples in Galilee a long

way from where they lived and they they send him a message and say that Lazarus the one you love is ill he was a friend of Jesus and Jesus doesn't do anything to come to them and allows the man to die and in that situation um he says to his disciples let's now go to them and explains that Lazarus is actually dead and they get really scared and they say are you going to go to Judea again look they were seeking to kill you why do you go there again it's like committing suicide and Thomas

one of them the doubter he says let's go with him that we might die with him but when they go what happens is that Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead and that's the light that transforms everything if they had stayed away and not gone with him into what was potential danger they would have never learned that he could raise the dead so that they stayed in the darkness and Jesus explains the thing in a very interesting metaphor he talks about himself as the light of the world and he says you know um God has made

the solar system in a very interesting way that he's placed the light that we see by during the day outside our world the Suns outside our world so if a person walks in the night they will stumble because and here's the observation it's a very interesting one Jesus says because the light isn't in them now the light is in some deep sea creatures as we know they've got luminescence and all the rest and I often wish I had a built in light in my head and sometimes I wear one a little lamp but the point

is he's saying look the light isn't in you I am the light of the world he that follows me will have the light of life and I just imagine it very simplistically that if here's the light and here's me and the light moves I land up in the dark but if I move with the light I will have the light all the time and that's exactly what happened to these people consumed with fear they went with him thinking they'd be killed and then he discovered he could raise the dead and that transformed everything so that

seems to me to be a very powerful um exposition of what you're saying well look John I think I think that's a good place to end actually we're at about the 90-minute mark really we delved into a yes yes we are surprisingly enough um we for everyone watching and listening I'm going to talk to John a bit more about how his interests in mathematics and science and religion develop simultaneously on the autobiographical front so you can join us on the dailywire plus platform for that additional half an hour if you're inclined to um otherwise thank

you John very much for talking to me today um I will be in touch with you if you don't mind about the next Exodus likee seminar that I'm going to host in Miami maybe you'd like to come and join us you be a very interesting contributor as far as I can tell and we had that was a that was really a conception transforming experience not only for me but for everyone else who participated man it was quite the trip well that's for sure thank you so much it's been more than I could say a pleasure

to meet you and I would be delighted to join you in that if I could o Guinness is a very close friend of mine and uh I I was interested to see that at one stage you had two people from Cambridge but nobody from Oxford so yeah well it's probably just sampling error you know um for everybody watching and listening thank you very much for your time and attention and join us on the dailywire plus platform if you're inclined to the film crew here for setting this up today through the thunderstorm much appreciated and uh

we'll see everyone watching and listening on the next podcast thanks John pleasure a pleasure bye-bye [Music]