Has AI Become God? The Ultimate THREAT of Artificial Intelligence. John C. Lennox - #540

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/yt to win a meteorite 💥 In this episode, I sit down with renowned Oxford mathematician, philosopher of science, and public intellectual John C. Lennox to explore the urgent questions surrounding artificial intelligence and humanity’s future. We dive into the biggest questions about AI, consciousness, truth, faith, and what it means to be human in an age of accelerating technology. If you’re curious about whether AI is humanity’s greatest achievement, its greatest temptation, or something even more profound, watch the full conversation and join us as we explore the future of intelligence—and our place within it. Key Takeaways: 01:05 - Who Decides What’s True in the Age of AI? 03:14 - Can AI Ever Be Truly Creative? The ‘Einstein Test’ 04:10 - Consciousness: The Uncrossable Barrier 07:20 - The QWERTY Keyboard Problem: Are We Stuck with LLMs? 19:10 - The AI Hall of Mirrors: Training on Itself 27:02 - Information Isn’t Just Bits and Atoms 32:05 - Are We Trying to Build God? 36:48 - The Deepest Question—What Does It Mean to Be Human? 47:50 - The Temptation to Play God: From Babel to the Singularity 50:14 - AI’s Relationship to Power and Surveillance - Join this channel to get access to perks like monthly Office Hours: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 Get my books: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with productivity tips from 9 Nobel Prize winners: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life-changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Follow me to ask questions of my guests: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast #universe #podcast #briankeating #intotheimpossible #science #astronomy #cosmology #cosmicmicrowavebackground #intotheimpossible #artificialintelligence #aiandethics #2084 #religionandscience #surveillancesociety #superintelligence #philosophyofscience #humanconsciousness Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Visible puts the ultimate wireless hack in the palm of your hand. With unlimited 5G wireless data and hotspot designed to keep you connected. Powered by Verizon's 5G network. And no contract holding you back. Plans start at $25 a month or get the premium Visible Plus Pro plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code HACK. Make the switch at visible.com. Terms apply. See visible.com for details.

• 1:01Speaker 02

  Low energy, unfocused, foggy? You might be dehydrated. Whether it's hot yoga, over 100 degree weather, or too much sun. Gator Light, with a specialized blend of five electrolytes, was scientifically designed to help move fluids into the body faster for rapid rehydration. Shop now at retailers nationwide. Gator Light: Hydrates Faster Than Water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration. Consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist.

• 1:30Brian Keating?

  Imagine a world where your phone isn't just tracking you, it's training you not to buy things, to believe things. Now, take Orwell's 1984, fast forward a century, and swap boot-on-face tyranny for something cleaner. Algorithms, incentives, and safety, all wrapped in convenience courtesy of our government. My guest today is John C. Lennox, Oxford mathematician, philosopher of science, and one of the foremost public thinkers alive. He's debated the new atheists, lectured around the world, and spent decades asking a question that suddenly feels urgent. What happens when the tools that inform us start to reform us?

• 2:13Brian Keating?

  His newest book, 2084, is a warning shot about technology, surveillance, and the seduction of a future managed by AI technocrats like Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Marc Andreessen.

• 2:29Brian Keating?

  But we're not doing generic AI is scary today. We're going to get specific. Who decides what's true? What does misinformation mean when power defines the dictionary? And what's the line between protecting people and quietly replacing their agency? And how does Jesus Christ fit into all of this? Now, let's go deep into the impossible with today's guest, John C. Lennox. Let's go.

• 2:56Speaker 04

  I was just going to say that the older I get, the more important the.

• 3:01Brian Keating?

  Today, I'm joined by my friend, Oxford mathematician, legendary scientist, author, thinker, John Lennox, all the way from Oxford. And today, we're not talking about the usual topics that we talk about on this podcast, although we are in a different form, because we're going to be talking about the AI race that's enveloped the planet, even more so since John wrote this wonderful book called 2084 as a sort of riff off 1984. We'll talk about the parallels, too, but imagining a world 100 years hence. And John claims that the push towards superintelligent AI is nothing less than a modern attempt to make God and to be God.

• 3:42Brian Keating?

  Meanwhile, the ancient scriptures, like the Book of Revelations, may describe patterns that we're now recreating through surveillance technologies that have a commonality with George Orwell's great work. So our question today will be, is AI humanity's greatest invention, its last invention, or just its latest temptation? John, welcome to the Into the Impossible podcast. It's great to see you.

• 4:06Speaker 04

  Well, thank you very much, Brian. It's a real honor to be on this program with you.

• 4:12Brian Keating?

  Well, we've been friends. We've known each other for a little while now. We met in Europe, and now we're talking all the way across the country with the help of modern technology. And we're going to talk a lot about modern technology, especially the pursuit of superintelligence. And I've spoken to many researchers about it. Some claim it may be like God. Some say that they are the gods for creating it, but for the wisdom. But the first question I want to ask you is take you back to this other mathematician, physicist of some renown named Albert Einstein. Albert Einstein, you may know, and my listeners may have heard me say it in the past, that in 1970, he said, "I had the happiest thought of my life." And that was that an observer in free fall.

• 4:56Brian Keating?

  Like that, would feel no gravitational field. I want to ask you, John, what are the prospects that a silicon, or quantum computer, or any kind of artificial technological intelligence could ever have a happiest thought? And could visualize the sensation of free fall? And have this kind of magnificent breakthrough that Einstein did? Pose the Einstein test, instead of the Turing test. Can an AI ever achieve what Einstein did, sort of seemingly naturally for him?

• 5:27Speaker 04

  Well, I think it's highly unlikely for a very obvious reason. Because Einstein's experience is crucially dependent on the fact that he's a conscious thinker. And until someone gets a handle on consciousness as such. What fascinates me in the race for AGI, artificial general intelligence, or superintelligence, or whatever you want to call it, is that people tend to be pretty careful to screen off the really hard problem. And in what's often called the Bible of AI, written by Peter Norvig and his colleague,

• 6:12Speaker 04

  they honestly admit that they take the stance that Alan Turing took. In other words, what they're doing is playing the imitation game. They're imitating, or trying to replicate, using technology, what is normally done by a human conscious being. But they're not trying to make their machines conscious. In fact, many of them admit they wouldn't even know what that meant, because nobody knows what consciousness is. And I think that is a... An almost fundamental parier, a bit like an event horizon surrounding this this whole

• 6:54Speaker 04

  topic. So however much they will imitate what normal human beings and highly intelligent human beings and maybe superhuman beings will do, it nevertheless will remain imitation. And I I think that's a very important thing to bear in mind, particularly in light of the kind of vocabulary that increasingly is being used about these technologies. They're anthropomorphized until people almost think they have human minds, feelings, all the rest of it. But they don't experience quilia. They have no minds. They don't think.

• 7:31Brian Keating?

  That's right. And I think it's it's kind of interesting that we've kind of conflated, you know, that there's people use the word Band-Aid, at least here in America. I don't know what they call it there. But they they call it or Pampers. You call them nappies or in the UK, right?

• 7:48Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 7:49Brian Keating?

  But but Band-Aids are bandages, but they become synonymous or Kleenex for tissue. And that's an that's an example of of sort of these lock-in phenomena where something that became first kind of takes over. So for example, the Qwerty keyboard that you and I have in front of us, presumably, unless you have the Dvorak keyboard, and I'd be very impressed if you have a Dvorak.

• 8:11Speaker 04

  No, Qwerty, Qwerty's here.

• 8:12Brian Keating?

  So Qwerty was designed because in ancient typewriters, I remember, and you certainly remember, hunting and pecking, and there was a problem that the keys were mechanical and they'd strike the paper and the ink. And if you typed too often, letters that were very close together, very frequently associated with each other, they the the hammers would that held the letters would stick together. So they invented this way to slow down progress, which is to invent this Qwerty keyboard where the letters are not associated by frequency of use. So that would slow down and have now we're locked into that. Literally 100 plus years later, you and I have Qwerty keyboards for no good reason. I mean, they don't get stuck together now. Now, I'm wondering, John, if the same

• 8:53Brian Keating?

  thing might happen. Most people think of AL of of, you know, LLMs or AI as ChatGPT or Claude. And you you informed me before we began, you're party to a lawsuit which may get you a billion dollars. And I hope that you'll remember your friend Brian here in San Diego when you get that anthropic lawsuit cash, that sweet cash. But John, tell me. Do we make a mistake by assuming AGI, ASI, or even just a super useful AI will come from an LLM? I mean, don't forget, these things came from GPUs, graphic processing units, matrix multiplication, which is not very complicated, and a couple of algorithmic steps and huge training sets, but they're not very complicated. But are we getting locked in, just as the way we got locked into the QWERTY keyboard, we're getting locked in

• 9:38Brian Keating?

  because of the success of GPUs and large language models?

• 9:42Speaker 04

  I think you're probably right. And you know, I'm old enough to remember that even the QWERTY keyboard or an old typewriter, they stuck. I got stuck many times with my first typewriter, drove me crazy. But I think you might be on to something there. There's always the danger, if you've got a very successful product of a lot of thinking that goes on behind the scenes in machine learning and neural networks and all this kind of thing, the danger is that then the product is going to be the producer of higher and higher levels

• 10:24Speaker 04

  until we reach it, but it may not be. It may require, if ever, we get anywhere near anything like this. Certainly, AIs will be combined with one another so that they'll get more and more sophisticated. And I will readily admit, because I was testing it recently, that ChatGPT-5 is extremely impressive. I put to it a question, I wanted to illustrate an abstract idea, an abstract biblical idea. And I said, invent a scenario that would illustrate this. And the result was staggering. It was so good. I'm making a short film

• 11:08Speaker 04

  about this, you see. So it then prompted me and said, would you like to see how this would pan out in terms of cinematographic directions in order to make your film? And there they were. Where instantly and it was most impressive, although I'm well aware that these things hallucinate, which is a polite way of saying that they they make errors and that's all that's what they are. But I I think I don't know, you see, I don't know, but I'm puzzled, Brian, and you may be able to solve the puzzle for me. The fact that some of the leaders in this field appear to be nervous

• 11:53Speaker 04

  about the control problem. And they claim not really to understand how what they appear to have produced works and start calling for a moratorium, while at the same time, of course, piling on the research to outdo their competitors, which is a rather funny way to behave. But I wonder, and this is a question for you, actually. Is there something they're not telling us about what they have discovered in the in the inner workings of this kind of thing? Because it's a very unusual situation to be in, to have a technology where you're afraid of losing control of it.

• 12:37Brian Keating?

  Right, well, they call it, you know, humanities last exam, humanities last invention. I actually am an AI optimist for the following reason, I don't believe, I agree with you. I don't believe there'll be an AI AE, you know, Albert Einstein, I don't think that that will come about. Um, for the simple fact that if you look at the way the human creative mind works and you point out this distinction in the book, the difference between, you know, uh, the, you know, Pinocchio being, you know, created by um, Geppetto and Geppetto having a child begat, you know, as the Bible says, right? So there's a difference between creating something and and, you know, and actually instilling, breathing life into it

• 13:22Brian Keating?

  and and and sowing something. And I think if you look at the equations and and your colleague and friend, you know, Stephen Hawking used to talk about what breeds fire into the equations now. He was not a believer. He was a devout atheist, I would say. But even he recognized there was an intangible leap that humans needed to make. So I do worry about the murder bots that you talk about in this book. I worry about out of control, things like character AI, which has been alleged to be party to the the tragic death of a young person. You know, I'm not going to comment on the legality of it. But, but, and I agree to some extent with my friend Max Tegmark, who's very prominently featured in the book.

• 14:04Brian Keating?

  And, and also has been a guest many times on the podcast. But, but also with Jan LaKoon, they're kind of on opposite sides. And I had them, you know, fight with each other or just send each other messages. Yeah. They were not at the same time, but, but the bottom line is to create a truly useful artificial intelligence. I think it would have to do something that, that human beings can't do. And I see no evidence of that with LLMs as being the key driver. Now, that may change with other types of architecture for artificial intelligence. But I think what's going to happen is that the LLMs are so successful. They're the QWERTY keyboards, you know, times a trillion, and they're never going to be replaced.

• 14:46Brian Keating?

  I mean, imagine replacing every keyboard on every phone, on every desktop, eight billion computers with Dvorak keyboards, because it would make us much more efficient. I mean, it'd be 10 or 20. It will never happen, and I don't believe that it will happen with AGI coming about until it can create new laws of physics. That's the Keating test. The Keating test is, can it create some new law that we wouldn't have suggested? And my work with my students here at UCSD, we even put in, you know, speaking of Einstein, John, we put in the, all the data on Mercury's orbit for thousands of years from JPL. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory has actual historical measurements plus forecast retrodiction. We put that into ChatGPT, to a large language model, and we said, why, why does it behave this way?

• 15:30Brian Keating?

  But no other information. It could not figure out. Now, that's a huge leap. It could not figure out that there was a Riemannian metric and that there was, you know, Riemann curvature and all sorts. It couldn't, you know, I couldn't probably do that either, you know, starting from scratch. But it tried to discretize it. It made up different laws. It was very sycophantic, which is another problem these things have. So I don't think AGI is coming from LLMs, and I think LLMs are so successful. They're going to extinguish the oxygen of any nascent youthful AI technology. So.

• 16:00Brian Keating?

  I want to talk about what these things are doing, which are really sophisticated, you know, next word predictions. And word is a very important word to you and to me. As you mentioned, you know, in the beginning, there was the word. In Hebrew, the word word and the word thing are the same word, dvar. So what is, what are these things? Is the universe, I always thought the universe was mathematical, scientific, maybe linguistic. But you point out the essence of it being a personal universe. What does that mean to you?

• 16:33Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 17:03Speaker 04

  Well, let's, let's start with the, the word concept. It seems to me very clear that this is a word based universe. And the Hebrew text of Bereshit or Genesis is very clear. It's a wonderful document of about 100 words in Hebrew. And constantly repeated is the idea, and God said. And you have a sequence of steps leading up to the creation of human beings in his image.

• 17:46Speaker 04

  And so that would indicate to me that in a very deep and real sense, this is a word based universe. But the interesting thing is it's, and God said, this is a personal being speaking, which is very different from the abstract notion of word. And it summed up, as you quoted in the New Testament, in, in John's gospel, in the beginning was the word, which is essentially summarizing Genesis one. They accord precisely at that point.

• 18:26Speaker 04

  And this idea that the word is ultimately personal. What I mean is, you often see these posters. And God said, and then underneath you see Maxwell's equations written out. And it says, and there was light. But that is a total misunderstanding. Uh, that light doesn't appear from citing equations, even verbally. The equations describe what's going on, but they don't produce it. And that seemed to be almost, uh, the late Stephen Hawking was a genius.

• 19:07Speaker 04

  But I do not think he understood the philosophical implications of that. That the idea that equations were enough to create a universe. Equations create nothing. They describe, they don't create, they're hugely important. So I think the heating test is absolutely fascinating. And you run to a good thing there because it is very important, I feel, that with all the hype that's going on, that people keep clear heads and remind the general public that it's not a question of incremental improvement

• 19:49Speaker 04

  or even quantum improvement, that going along this track is never going to yield new laws of physics and this kind of thing. And we need to be, we need to be reminded of that because you will know in the academic world, I just had a conversation yesterday with people that work in the A I Institute in Oxford. And they're having large discussions about how do we assess students? Because every student is using A I to produce. I suspect you have that in San Diego.

• 20:25Brian Keating?

  Just happened finally yesterday, yeah, exactly.

• 20:27Speaker 04

  And in the end, uh, they are saying, we'll have to get back to the old unseen exam system where the students are put in a Faraday cage and have to.

• 20:40Speaker 04

  Do their examinations with no external communication because if we keep up simply allowing grading AI and we'll end up grading it by AI, we won't do it ourselves. So we're saying grading AI. The students will become intellectually mute and intellectually incapable of doing anything. That's what I'm afraid of. Do you fear that?

• 21:08Brian Keating?

  I do, I do. And I also fear the, you know, AIs being trained on AI-generated information. I make the analogy, you know, into the mad cow disease of your country. We have no problems here in America with our beef. But John, you guys had an issue with mad cow disease where cows were being fed cows, you know, to eat. And I feel like, I call it mad bot disease, you know, because they will just ingest the, you know, the scrivelings of previous AI outputs. And this will lead to just further entrenchment of these bad ideas of the sycophancy of the hallucination.

• 21:49Brian Keating?

  But, you know, speaking of Stephen Hawking, you know, he was certainly a materialist. And I think that he had, at least he was honest. He was very funny. I met him once. I asked him, why'd you write this book, A Brief History of Time? It was back in 1995 at a Royal Society meeting. He could still respond in more or less real time. I said, Stephen, no one's read this book. And he basically said, well, it's not important that they read it. It's just that they buy it. But the reason that he wrote it was that he needed to pay for his daughter's private education. So he was honest. But at the end of his book, he says, you know, if we, when we, not if we, but if, when we discover the laws of string theory, which are

• 22:26Speaker 04

  We will know the mind of God.

• 22:28Brian Keating?

  We will know the mind of God. Now, was that cynical? Did he insert that God because it would also lead to book sales? You know, every equation, he said, cut your book sales in half. But every mention of God, he said, doubles your books. What do you make of this relationship that he had, this kind of worship of science and the natural world? And this acuity that he had, but also this kind of blindness to maybe what is really going on behind the scenes? Was it utilitarian? How did you, how do you think he viewed or would view LLMs and AGI right now?

• 22:59Speaker 04

  I have no idea. I, I, I always think it's, it's difficult to second guess what, what people really think, but I noticed this because I did read that book from beginning to end. And I noticed this and I thought, well, is he leaving a door open there? But in later life, he shut the door. It seemed he very clearly shut the door. At least as far as his public utterances went. But there's, there's another side. I understand that he began to attend church. And he showed interest in that kind of, um, not only spiritual dimension, but Christian

• 23:43Speaker 04

  dimension. I've met one or two people who talked to him about these things. But how deep it went, I, I, it's, it's very hard to say. And of course, I think, I think that, um, Lord Reese made a point about Stephen. And Lord Reese admired him. Uh, you know him, I'm sure, very well.

• 24:08Brian Keating?

  Yeah, he's been on the podcast.

• 24:09Speaker 04

  He, he said about Stephen, he said they'd written papers for Stephen. I know Stephen very well. And, um, he knows, um, virtually nothing about religion and very little about philosophy. And I wouldn't trust him in either of those things. And what struck me about his books, very honestly, I was, I was hugely surprised. I, I saw an advanced copy of his, the last official book he wrote. And I wrote about it. I wrote a book called God and Stephen Hawking to try and put my thoughts together, which is still in print. And of course, I never got any reaction to

• 24:49Speaker 04

  it from, from the Hawking side. But I just felt that with all his genius and logic and mathematical ability, his understanding of philosophy was extremely weak. I mean, for a man to say, for a man to say that philosophy is dead and then write a book, the rest of his book on the philosophy of science, wasn't exactly clever. So I never met him, Brian. I remember seeing him because he was just beginning to show signs of his illness, walking around Cambridge. I went up in 1962, which is roughly the same time as he turned up a bit older than me to be a PhD student. So I remember

• 25:33Speaker 04

  him and he clearly was an absolute genius.

• 25:36Brian Keating?

  Oh, yeah.

• 25:37Speaker 04

  And I've talked to people who worked with him. But Einstein, you mentioned, is useful, of course, for many reasons. And one of the things is his famous, rather dry observation, that the scientist is a poor philosopher.

• 25:57Brian Keating?

  That's right. Well, it goes back even to Galileo, you know, in his, in his first encounters with the telescope, that he would say things like, well, the telescope obliterates the need for philosophers, because you can prove with your eyes that the Milky Way is made up of stars, for example, which is wrong. And it's just amazing to look at how many of these great men and presumably, you know, their, their, their colleagues, you know, that they had great flaws. And I think when we lionize and we venerate them, we kind of worship them as gods, especially, you know, I've written about this in my book about the Nobel Prize, that we kind of, it's sort of a kosher idol, you know, for a vota zora, for idol worship, because it's not bad, right? I mean, you're doing science and, but

• 26:40Brian Keating?

  you literally, John, you go to Stockholm, you bend, you bow down, you receive a gilded, graven image of Alfred Nobel, who's the patron saint, or, you know, whatever.

• 26:50Speaker 04

  Dynamite.

• 26:51Brian Keating?

  Of dynamite, you know, the, the merchant of death he was called. But, but getting back to Hawking. So, one of the final things that, that I remember Roger Penrose has told me many times is that Stephen was the best person to make a bet with, because no matter what side of the bet he chose, he would always flip flop. And so you'd be right and you'd win the bet. And he did this with my friend Kip Thorne as well, obviously, too.

• 27:15Brian Keating?

  Yeah, and the black hole information paradox. He speaks a lot about the notion of information. And I wonder, in the context of the mathematics, at least, of black holes and their ability to seemingly rearrange information, at least so decisively that it's impenetrable and scrutable, does that mean that there will be some, perhaps only, human capabilities which can never be computable? In other words, is there some way to demonstrate, maybe through the black hole information paradox, that there is something unique about humanity as opposed to any other type of intelligence?

• 27:56Speaker 04

  Well, you've mentioned Roger Penrose, and I've been very interested. I try to follow it as best I can in his discussion, particularly of Gödel's results in mathematics. And as I understand his argument, and I'm quite impressed with it, that this seems to indicate that the human mind can deal with things that are non-computable. And if you are a materialist and a mechanist, so to speak, you will never reduce human thought ability to computing.

• 28:41Speaker 04

  And it seems to me, therefore, that the very, just adding to that and taking a sideways step from it, information, as you know better than I do, is not easy to define. And we've got various types, semantics and tactic and all this kind of thing. And we can calculate how many bits per second can be transmitted across a channel by Shannon's brilliant theory and all the rest of it. But I have always taken the view, in spite of a lot of pressure coming from the other direction, that information in itself is immaterial. Now...

• 29:24Speaker 04

  There was an argument, was it Landau or somebody like that who wrote a book or a paper called Information is Material. And it seems to me that it confused the fact that information is usually embedded in material things.

• 29:43Brian Keating?

  Yes.

• 29:43Speaker 04

  For example, the information I'm receiving right now through sound and hearing is, depends on physical substrates to communicate it. But the information itself is not material.

• 29:56Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 29:57Speaker 04

  And if that is the case, which I believe it to be, you have two things. First of all, you have the non-computability of certain things. And perhaps Gregory Chaitin would be the man to ask about that, as well as Roger Penrose. And information is immaterial. That, to my mind, spells an end to materialism as a philosophy. There must be something more. And that intrigues me as well. I've observed more and more as I've got older, the number of leading intellectuals who are beginning to pause and say, there must be something more. And I suspect you've come across that phenomenon in this connection.

• 30:40Speaker 04

  But I'd love to hear your take on Roger's notion that he can actually show, at least he argues, that the capacity to do something like Gödel did shows that which computers cannot do, he says, it has led to a huge storm of discussion. I don't know whether it's ever been resolved.

• 31:04Brian Keating?

  No, I don't think it has been resolved. It's reminiscent to me of Descartes, you know, I think therefore I am. It's I compute, therefore I am.

• 31:11Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 31:11Brian Keating?

  It's a wonderful, it's a wonderful kind of exposition in his book. And I've, I've had the, the, the honor of being with him and, and Stuart Hameroff to talk about consciousness. But, um, but, but the thing that, you know, so I, I, I wouldn't say that, that Sir Roger is particularly, you know, religious, although he's incredibly philosophical.

• 31:32Speaker 04

  No, he's not. He, he says he's a humanist.

• 31:35Brian Keating?

  And he talks about scient- scientism in sort of the, one of his books is called Faith, you know, in fantasy and where he's talking about some of the things that Hawking put so much of his, of his, you know, great hopes for salvation in. And it makes me think, in reading your book, 2084, really makes me think about the parallels between AGI, the search for AGI, and, and religion. And I just have a list of the ones that spoke the most to me in your book.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 32:33Brian Keating?

  And it's funny, John, because many of them have a parallel structure, and maybe you'll write about this someday, between the search for extraterrestrial intelligence as well. And let me say what they are, and then, and then I want to ask you, is, is the AI race the, the race to make God? But let me, let me get the, the parallels first. So there's the notion of eschatology, that there's some future event that's going to transform everything. And ASI, it's the singularity. There's soteriology, the salvation that comes from a higher intelligence, that having this superintelligence, as I said, you know, Elon Musk calls it the last invention, these things that are supernatural, as we call

• 33:13Brian Keating?

  it, superintelligence. There's notions of, of imminence and transcendence, where the higher mind lives. Obviously, the higher intelligence is imminent. It's built from

• 33:25Brian Keating?

  Objects, as you said, material objects and material processes and mathematics. But then it transforms via this strange mathematics that, as you said before, its creators don't understand. And then, lastly, but not least, you know, there's, there are, you know, rituals, there's purification, there's sort of this prophet archetype where the first country, for example, we're often told that we can't pause, John, we cannot stop the race at Claude or ChatGPT to, or OpenAI, to make AGI, because if China does it, then, then America's, you know, days are over, right? This is what we hear.

• 34:07Brian Keating?

  Even though we invented all these pernicious things like social media and pornography, as you point out, that all came from America, right? So it wasn't like they're, they were held back and we succeeded economically beyond our wildest dreams because we invented Snapchat and AI girlfriends. But John, let me ask you, are we trying to essentially create God with AI?

• 34:30Speaker 04

  I think that people are, and they say they are. It was, I'm trying to recall her name, a famous pioneer of AI who said that the whole thing began with, quote, "an attempt to forge the gods." And if you listen to someone like Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Homo Deus, the very title of the book, "The Man God," or "The Man Who Is God," and he says quite explicitly that we've managed, or at least evolution, as he puts it, has managed to get us from creatures

• 35:14Speaker 04

  to thinkers. We can now take evolution into our hands and by what he calls a rather riley, I think, intelligent design, we can turn ourselves into gods. And he says, well, gods with a small g, but you get the idea. And then coming from the other end, you have the inevitability of people starting to worship something that they don't understand but is bigger than themselves. After all, as has been pointed out very often, if you take some of the theologians.

• 35:53Speaker 04

  Ideas of of God being a being who is omniscient. Well, after all, we've got advanced AI surveillance technology that's going very rapidly towards omniscience. Omni presence, it's everywhere in the world. The internet is is worldwide, et cetera, et cetera. And it'll soon know more about us than we know about ourselves if it doesn't know already. And I believe that in the US at least, there are groups of people who are given to worshipping AI officially. And it is inevitable.

• 36:33Speaker 04

  This whole idea, though, Brian, is so interesting because if you go back to the Hebrew scriptures, starting in Genesis, and it's brief but very succinct report of how damage came in to the world. You have the famous account of the Garden of Eden and the temptation by the snake, as you will very well recall, and it's so clear, is that God is trying to keep you humans

• 37:11Speaker 04

  down, and he knows if you go against what he says and eat the forbidden fruit, you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. And it has been well pointed out that they were banished from the garden, but they've been looking for that climb up to be gods ever since. And so right through history, and I've traced it in considerable detail in some of my books, you have these outbursts things through history of powerful leaders claiming deity in order to establish. Their powerful rule.

• 37:54Speaker 04

  You got it in the ancient Babylonian world, under which the Jewish nation suffered terribly. And I've written about that in my book on Daniel, and it's fascinating. Then the Caesars started to call themselves gods, usually post-mortem, until some of them got impatient and decided they were gods before they died and caused a lot of trouble with the Senate. And all through, and if you think in my lifetime, Chiesasco in Romania was treated as a god. Hocha in Albania had hymns sung to him. And this idea of reaching out to be a god

• 38:36Speaker 04

  is absolutely ingrained. And it seems to me that AI may well be facilitating that. I would like to add one staggering point to my mind, that the biblical revelation shows us something the exact opposite. All of this stuff is humans wanting to become gods. And the central message, as I understand it, biblical message is that the god has become human in order to do what you were saying, the soteriology, in order to save us, where the Jewish and the Christian tradition flow together. So I feel that the biblical material

• 39:20Speaker 04

  has got a huge amount to say about one of the biggest problems this raises. And that is what exactly is a human being? Now that we're replicating so many properties of humans. So it seems to me that the Keating type of test is actually very important, that you push, push from the side of cosmology and science, and physics particularly, to really spell out the, the way you see, the limits. You know, I've written a lot about the limits of science, and most scientists.

• 40:01Speaker 04

  Agree with it. They're not scientistic. They don't take the view that science explains everything. But we need to bear down on that and point out that not only does the do the natural sciences not explain everything, they don't answer the big questions that now people are attempting to answer through a pseudo religion of artificial intelligence. In other words, who are we? Why are we here? And what is the meaning of life?

• 40:29Brian Keating?

  That's right. And these are the things that matter the most. And I learned from a

• 40:32Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly.

• 40:33Brian Keating?

  From a Christian pastor, even though, you know, I'm practicing Jew, that in the opening lines of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible, it said, God says, let us make man in our image, which is a very, you know, all little kids in Hebrew school learn this, but I didn't learn it until I was in my 50s. But, but the point is, who is God talking, like, who's he talking to? You know?

• 40:57Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 40:57Brian Keating?

  And if you look at it, who, the only entities that are around when he says that, and, and by the way, nobody has to take this literally. Nobody should take away that, that I'm a least biblical literalist whatsoever. I, I have my right to talk to people like John and like Sam Harris, who I've had on, or Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, I've, I've hosted in person in, in, in America. So, or in Canada, actually, it turned out. But, uh, but the point is, who's he talking to? The only entities around are, are him, the angels, you know, godlike entities, like angels and him, and the animals. And I, I think that's beautiful. We, we have this kind of angelic, you know, godlike ability

• 41:38Brian Keating?

  to create and to partner, you know, with a higher being. But we also have animalistic urges for power, for money, for sex, for greed, for all these different things. And I think that's the wisdom, which artificial intelligence, for all its flaws, at least doesn't purport to be wise. You know, it's not called artificial general wisdom. And in Hebrew, you know, like the, it's repeated that the native, you know, Eskimos of, of Canada and Alaska have 30 words for snow or something because it's so important to their culture. Uh, you know, in Judaism, we have at least eight different words for intelligence, wisdom, insight, foresight, uh, you know, all these different types of things because it's so

• 42:20Brian Keating?

  unique to what humans can do. And I think that's where, again, I'm an optimist. I love AI. And I'm so, I'm just so like, um, proud to know you and so happy that you are who you are, because I don't know anybody, uh, even my contemporaries, John, that use AI, that understand AI as well as you do. And you started this book before the year 2020. I know that for a fact because it came out for the first time in 2020. It was released again last year. But let's do what you're not supposed to do. Let's, let's judge a book by its cover. I have an AI-generated jingle, which my producers are going to insert right now, about judging books by their covers, so.

• 43:12Brian Keating?

  There it is. So, John, take us through, what was the reason that you chose the title 2084?

• 43:18Speaker 04

  Oh, right. I, I, I have one or two comments to make, if I may, on what you, what you just said, because I, I resonate, I resonate and I deal with it. And I've got something which I'd like to show you.

• 43:35Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 43:44Speaker 04

  This was given to me by the president of the University of Bar Ilan in Israel. And it's very special. You see, I didn't have to reach far to get it. And it, it spells beta and aleph, beta and aleph. But you'll notice, if you look carefully, that the, it's a stereoscopic microscope.

• 44:12Brian Keating?

  Yes.

• 44:12Speaker 04

  And the two lenses are the Torah.

• 44:15Brian Keating?

  Torah scroll, yeah.

• 44:17Speaker 04

  And it's one of the most wonderful symbols.

• 44:20Brian Keating?

  Beautiful. Now I'm jealous. Now, now you've given me the sin of jealousy, John. How could you do that?

• 44:25Speaker 04

  It's, it, it's wonderful in the way it harmonizes the natural sciences and.

• 44:33Speaker 04

  The Hebrew scriptures, the biblical scriptures. And I'm extremely proud of it. I love it. It sits very close to me and it reminds me that the beginning of wisdom is to be found in the Torah. So there's something rather special for you. Um, and your question, where did I get the title? I got it from an atheist, an out atheist. This will amuse me, amuse you because you, you probably know, um, Peter Atkins, the professor of physical chemistry at Oxford. Well, he and I were traveling together in the back of a car

• 45:17Speaker 04

  uh, in twenty nineteen or twenty eighteen or something. And we were going to a debate on the God question where we were taking opposite sides. And it's a fascinating discussion, which is on the internet under the wonderful title, Dueling Professors. So in the car, I said, Peter, we're not going to discuss tonight's um, debate. And he said, no, we're not. So what are you writing, John? And I said, well, I've got very interested in artificial intelligence. And immediately he said, I've got a title for you. I said, what is it, Peter? And if it's good, I might use it and I'll acknowledge you.

• 45:59Speaker 04

  I said, well, it's twen- he said, it's twenty eighty-four. So I used it and you will see that I acknowledged him in the book. So that's where it came from. And I thought it was a very good idea. Peter hasn't changed his mind. I don't know that he's had a look at that book at all.

• 46:21Brian Keating?

  Wow. Well, another great topic again, uh, from the Bible. And I promise we'll, we'll get into a couple of non, uh, you know, transcendent topics.

• 46:31Speaker 04

  I'm, I'm really enjoying this.

• 46:34Brian Keating?

  It's not for you. It's not for you. It's for my, my audience, the members of my audience that, that have a visceral anti-religious reaction. And I should say. You know, uh, you know, I, as, as you know, I was born Jewish and then I became, converted to Catholicism and then came back to the religion of my faith and, and so forth, and tried to learn all these things that I would have learned if I had a bar mitzvah at age 13, but instead I was an altar boy in the Catholic Church in Dab, in Chappaqua, New York. But one of the stories that has always resonated with me, whenever I read the Torah, you know, Jews read the Torah once, one chapter, one weekly parsha, a portion each week, is, is of course the Tower of Babel, which, which everybody's sort of heard about, there's

• 47:16Brian Keating?

  language, you know, kind of learning tools called Babel and all sorts of things. But what's never mentioned is that when the, when the Bible mentions it, it's always alongside with the tower and the city of Babel. In other words, it's never in isolation, the migdal is always with the ear, the city and the tower. Why do you think that is? I mean, is there something about like the human agglomeration in cities that leads to this desire to, as you say, transcend and reach to heaven?

• 47:45Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 48:13Speaker 04

  Oh, I think that is. And I think one of the people who sees it very clearly is Leon Cass, a very eminent Jewish thinker and writer from the University of Chicago. His book on Genesis is magisterial. I've learned a vast amount from it. But I decided to do a lot of work in trying to understand this when I was writing about Abraham and his story that is very important for the whole Bible. And it seems to me that the city and the tower are hugely important because of what

• 48:56Speaker 04

  cities represent and what towers represent. And to come directly to the point.

• 49:06Speaker 04

  Skyscrapers are very interesting and there are some cities in the world, as someone has said, like Kuala Lumpur, that you'd never have heard of if you didn't know about the towers that were there. And a lovely quote, I started to read accounts of the motivation for building a skyscraper. And one journalist said, behind every skyscraper, there's a massive ego that's bigger than the skyscraper itself. And here you have people reaching for the sky. And one of the bits of dry humor in Genesis is, and God came down to see the tower, so they didn't reach heaven after all.

• 49:48Speaker 04

  He had to come down to see it, which is absolutely marvelous. But it seems to be a wonderful symbol, that city and tower, of human hubris. And they were trying to make a unity that would never be scattered by their own power and by their ability and their brains. And it had to do with the fact that they all had one language, a common language. Now, this interests me greatly because, you see, the result of AI is that we are getting more and more efficient translators

• 50:32Speaker 04

  that are making it almost, at the moment where I could speak to you if you were Chinese in English and you would hear Chinese come out immediately out of the other end of the system. So that what we're experiencing technologically could be seen as a kind of reversal of Babel, which is a very interesting way of looking at it, because this idea of forging a unity through sheer power and coupled with the rejection of the true God and making yourself or AI into a God. Because the interesting thing about images in the ancient world,

• 51:16Speaker 04

  and we're now building technological images, as you point out, in the modern world, is they simply embody the ideals of the people that create them. And they're pushing towards the sky. And They won't reach God unless they're, if they're restricted, as many of them are, that's quite obvious they are, because of the amount of atheism that's tied to AI. Now, like you, I'm not, I'm not a pessimist about all of this, and I hope you didn't get that impression from my book. I'm trying to be a realist, and the reason for writing it, which you asked, is, was

• 51:58Speaker 04

  to inform first of all, and to get people thinking about its implications. Because you know better, again, than I do, that technology always suffers from the fact that the powers, the ethical principles needed to control it, always develop much slower than the technology itself. And so we find ourselves in a situation where companies are scrambling to have some kind of ethical statement, but they know, for one of the big reasons you gave, that if it can be done, it's going to be done by somebody. And it is putting a lot of power into the hands of fewer and fewer people.

• 52:43Speaker 04

  Now, those trends, that unity in Babbel, or Babylon as it was, that idea starts to barrel up through history, and we see it in the great empires of the world, in the Roman Empire. And of course, when I was young, not too many people talked about the idea of a world state, but they're talking about it now. And the agglomeration of power, and that's, of course, where I brought the Book of Revelation, the last book in the Bible, into this, which uses the imagery from the Jewish prophecies,

• 53:25Speaker 04

  very powerful imagery, particularly from the Book of Daniel, where Daniel, a fascinating character, if ever there was one, he saw down through history the rise and fall of a sequence of empires, and he identified three of them, they're explicitly identified.

• 53:44Speaker 04

  As Babylon, Medo, Persia and Greece. And then there was a fourth one, which we can identify as Rome. And the amazing thing about Daniel was, as I believe, he wrote in the sixth century B.C. And he got the stuff right, which is amazing. But he talked through this imagery of great animals and beasts and so on, about these empires. Now, symbolism, which is used in Daniel, see, as Lewis taught me, I used to listen to him at Cambridge. The fact that symbols always stand for something real. And if you approach the Book of Daniel and Revelation that way, yes, there's symbolism.

• 54:28Speaker 04

  But what does it stand for? And the idea of coupling animals in these visions with certain human properties, like human intelligence and insight, leads you to an idea of a hideous strength in the future that governs the whole world. And what I say is, have a look at Max Tegmark's fascinating book, Life 3.0. I, I found it so interesting. I've never met him, but if you're talking to him, tell him I found it extremely interesting. Because as I remark in my book, one of his scenarios, the one he highlights now,

• 55:11Speaker 04

  he's very open, he said, I'm not saying which one I believe will happen, and I take that. But his Prometheus idea, which has come back with some of the leaders of AI, I just recently, in a company of that name, is so close to the descriptions in Daniel and the Book of Revelation, that I have a little argument with people. I say to them, look, if you take these scenarios seriously, that are written by eminent intellectuals and physicists like Max Tegmark, perhaps it's worth revisiting what Daniel the Prophet said 26 centuries ago, and what you read at the end of the New Testament.

• 55:55Speaker 04

  And actually, you probably don't know this, but. Just before, just, just recently, I brought out a very big book, my biggest yet. And the publishers have called it God, AI and the End of History. Understanding the Book of Revelation in an Age of Intelligent Machines. That might just interest you.

• 56:20Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 56:21Speaker 04

  Your watchers.

• 56:23Brian Keating?

  And you, you bring up our mutual contact, at least, I can't, I can't call him a friend, but, but Peter Thiel, you know, said, kind of echoing Mark Twain's famous statement about history not repeating but rhyming, that he claims that AI basically rhymes with the Book of Revelation. I'm not.

• 56:41Speaker 04

  Well, that's, that's right. And I was fascinated when I read that. And I've talked to him about that. And it seems to me a very interesting coalescence of ideas that as a technologist, he sees AI at least facilitating that kind of surveillance technology that would enable a world dictatorship. And he sees similar things from the Bible, which he studied in his background. And I see exactly the same. And I feel therefore that it's worth talking to people about it.

• 57:19Speaker 04

  Because of course, in days gone past, people used to just laugh at any sort of identification of the things that happened in Daniel and Revelation. And we've got to be extremely careful. But what we can see is what we've been talking about. You can see the trends towards the deification of man is the way I would put it. You can see that all through history, that, that, that isn't a symbol, it's reality. And we can see the move towards unity and power and control and all this kind of thing. And looking from the perspective of trends, we can build up.

• 58:01Speaker 04

  A very good idea without necessarily identifying every last thing, which some of our forefathers tried to do without success. You know, Hitler was the beast and all this kind of stuff. Well, he was a representation of that kind of thing, but maybe not the final one sadly. So there's a lot of work to be done, I think, in communicating to the public that it's not so crazy taking a biblical view of things. And the sad thing to my mind is that, as you say, many people have been put off by encounters with religion that have left them bruised and beaten, and that's a tragedy.

• 58:46Speaker 04

  So go back to the original documents, I would say. Read Genesis, read Revelation, read this stuff, and see if it makes sense. And it makes a lot more sense, I think.

• 58:59Brian Keating?

  Yeah, from a purely science, when I talk to my atheist or even my radically agnostic friends, like my friend, the late, great Freeman Dyson, he was the first guest on the podcast and he would spend his

• 59:10Speaker 04

  Was he really, right?

• 59:11Brian Keating?

  Yeah, he would spend his, he was a smart man, you know, he wouldn't, he wouldn't spend winters at the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey. He would come here to La Jolla, San Diego, UCSD, and we'd always do a podcast and talk together. And I said, you know, you're kind of inscrutable, you know, Freeman, because you, you claim to be agnostic. But if I were to ask you, you know, um, you know, what do you do on a, on a normal Sunday? It would be identical to the same things that, you know, Richard Dawkins also doesn't do, namely go to church, you know? So in what ways does an agnostic differentiate by his behavior from being an atheist? I, I think most, many agnostics are just unwilling to admit that they're really atheist or, or, or, you know,

• 59:55Brian Keating?

  or God forbid, admit that they may be tempted by religious understandings, but

• 1:00:00Speaker 04

  I think that's right. Uh, there are two kinds of agnostics, of course. Greek agnosco means I don't know.

• 1:00:08Brian Keating?

  I don't know, right.

• 1:00:08Speaker 04

  But it, it, it mutates that. To a much more, a much less humble position, which is, I don't know, and you can't know.

• 1:00:18Brian Keating?

  Exactly.

• 1:00:18Speaker 04

  Well, if I don't know, how can I know that you can't know?

• 1:00:23Speaker 04

  Third, it's a contradiction. And I think that's absolutely right. It's more of a popular descriptor to avoid having to face certain deep issues. But there again, I am fascinated in these last few years of reading people like Tom Holland, for example, who coming from an atheist position, fascinatingly, because he is a classical historian, understanding Greece and Rome. And he used to think that all the best values came from Greece and Rome, until he discovered they didn't. They came from the biblical worldview, and he has moved steadily

• 1:01:06Speaker 04

  towards reclaiming that ground. And Jordan Peterson, no, perhaps a bit further back, is doing the same kind of thing. And there are a number of people like this.

• 1:01:16Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:17Speaker 04

  And I find that immensely encouraging at the high old age of eighty-two.

• 1:01:23Brian Keating?

  That's right. Well, you're two-thirds the way to the biblical age of one hundred and twenty, John, so I hope you will make it. But in the remaining minutes that we have, I know it's late there, but if you'll indulge me with your legendary forbearance to ask two more questions.

• 1:01:41Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:01:42Brian Keating?

  And the first one is about, really, you know, topics that we've brushed upon. But one of the wonderful things, I think, of a scientist is to balance humility with, you know, as we say in Yiddish chutzpah, you know, to have a little bit of arrogance and ego. Because if you're, if you just try to, you know, defeat Mother Nature, if you won't call it God, or whatever, you say, Mother Nature is undefeated and always will be. We'll never know all, you can never win science, John. You can never get to the, just like, imagine getting to the end of the internet, right? I mean, every hour, there's like a million hours of video posted to YouTube.

• 1:02:21Brian Keating?

  It's hopeless, but if you if you purely led with that feeling of hopelessness, you'd be brought to despair and you'd never do anything. And yet, John, it's very hard. There's a Yiddish proverb which says, "The man who stands in the middle of the road gets hit by both sides of the traffic." You know, if you have too much humility, you'll never do anything. And if you have too much arrogance, well, we know where that leads to. But do you think that this is just another incarnation? You know, maybe before it was technology, the internet, all the different types of technology, that we are trying to do something, we're trying to transcend our limits of perhaps our mental abilities, our physical abilities, and maybe, just maybe, our lifespan.

• 1:03:05Brian Keating?

  Do you feel that this is dangerous in some sense?

• 1:03:09Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 1:03:38Speaker 04

  In other words, I think it could well be. From where I sit, you see, there is in the human spirit a longing for transcendence. And you said something a while back that is absolutely fundamental for me. And that is the statement, "Let us make man, human beings, in our own image." You know, I have a telescope sitting behind me, which you probably can't see. But I love looking up at the Andromeda and so on, on the odd nights that it's clear here. I sometimes wished I lived in Southern Carrefour.

• 1:04:21Brian Keating?

  Maybe you'll visit us for your sabbatical.

• 1:04:24Speaker 04

  But anyway.

• 1:04:26Speaker 04

  The heavens declared the glory of God, said the Hebrew psalmist, but they were not made in God's image. You were, and I was. And this gives human beings a tremendous dignity by virtue of being created beings. And that is my answer to this feeling of all the knowledge in the world is overwhelming, all the feeling, as Newton did, you know, I'm just at the edge of a vast sea of the unknown. And that is absolutely true. But if we are genuinely, and I believe it to be the case, made in God's image,

• 1:05:10Speaker 04

  that is an immensely freeing idea. And I'm just glad that I learned it very young from my parents. And we have a value therefore that is transcendent. And here it is. People are seeking for transcendence, but they're seeking it through their own ability to produce technology that maybe will let them last a few more years, or in cryogenics, or uploading their brains into the cloud, or something like this. When all the time, there's a transcendent message coming down through Abraham and the

• 1:05:53Speaker 04

  Hebrew prophets, and I believe into the New Testament, of a savior that comes to save us from that, and to give us a new life and a new power to live, that's as a gift. And one of the most important statements, and I've written a book about it basically, is when Abraham was commanded in Hebrew, lech leha. It's two of the most important words in Hebrew, says the late Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, that I love to listen to in the UK. And lech leha means a number of things.

• 1:06:34Speaker 04

  It means go yourself, go on a journey, or it means go into yourself, and learn about yourself, and so on. And if you ask, what was the major lesson that Abram learned on his journey? It was this. It was the lesson of what it means to trust God. The just, the righteous shall live by faith. Abraham believed God, says Genesis, and it was accounted to him for righteousness. And that, to my mind, is the heart of everything. So that you can have transcendence in yourself as a free gift by learning to trust God. But

• 1:07:15Speaker 04

  that means that you've got to start by believing that there is something transcendent way beyond AI.

• 1:07:23Brian Keating?

  Well, yeah, I like to say that, you know, if, if, if belief were enough, right? I mean, you never say, I believe in gravity, right? You dropped this thing. Einstein didn't believe in gravity. We have evidence for gravity. And I think the problem is that scientists demand evidence of everything. And I don't think, I mean, this, this is my, my guess, but you can correct me if I'm wrong. But there are certain things that you accept as axiomatic, you know, for, for, you know, for Christians, it's that, you know, Jesus was the son of God, the, the son of man, the, the, who died for our, our sins, as you believe. Jews believe it's in the future, but, but also that he, you know, he was, he was, he died, but that

• 1:08:06Brian Keating?

  he was resurrected, and then that he ascended. And one thing I've always, you know, kind of been curious to ask someone like you is, is what is the nature? I mean, can you, can you explain the sort of, in other words, the, the evidence that, that Jesus was lived is, is stupendous? I mean, there's tremendous amount of-

• 1:08:27Speaker 04

  Untestable.

• 1:08:28Brian Keating?

  We know his, we know not only where he lived, but we know his rabbi's name. And we know that he was a great rabbi, and he was great. And the Talmud speaks about the mistakes that the, that the Pharisee Jews, which is basically all Jews nowadays descend from Pharisee Jews, but it took on sort of a negative term, obviously. But that, but that they treated him poorly. I mean, that, that is recognized as, as a mistake and, and if nothing else, in the way that, that he was interpersonally reacted. Not that we killed him or, or whatnot, as often alleged. But, but the ascension, John, has always been puzzling to me because- This does tie into what you just mentioned about cryogenics and living forever.

• 1:09:08Brian Keating?

  The fact that Jesus was resurrected is different than he ascended, right? So there's a difference between those two. And I think that a lot of scientists can can accept the notion that he was born, that he lived, even that he did the works and deeds that he did. And then that he was killed, obviously, we know that. And that he was, you know, was at least not present and was presumably, according to the Christian tradition, that he was resurrected. But that he then ascended. I've always been curious about that as a non-Christian, you know.

• 1:09:45Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:09:46Brian Keating?

  How does that work? What is there any like kind of influence of physics, of physical laws? Is there some way to understand that? Or must it be accepted purely based on amuna, on faith, on notions that are transcendent that cannot be proven? And you should not look for evidence for it. So can you explain what the ascension really means? And maybe to a simple physicist like me?

• 1:10:10Speaker 04

  Well, this is a fascinating question. And I happen to believe that amuna, the pistis faith, is only valid if there's evidence for it. And let's start here. This could be the beginning of a very big discussion, which I'd be happy to have, but I'm going to compress it. There's only one, as far as I know, scientifically trained person who writes in the New Testament, in some sense, a scientist, and that was the medic, Luke. And it's Luke who gives us the fullest description of the ascension. And one needs to read it very carefully.

• 1:10:55Speaker 04

  Because people have the idea that Jesus went up and up and up and up and up. And that shows that Luke believed in the three-decker universe, hell beneath, and all this kind of thing. That is not what he says. Jesus went up physically, is the claim. And then a cloud took him from their sight. That is, the disciples' sight. And two angels spoke to them and said, "You men of Galilee, why do you stand gazing up to heaven?"

• 1:11:33Speaker 04

  Because this Jesus, this same Jesus, shall so come as you saw him go into heaven. Now, in those phrases which I'm quoting, five times over is mentioned a visual dimension. They saw it. And what they are told is that it is a thought model to help us to understand the way in which Christ as Messiah will return. They saw him go physically and literally, and I'll come to that in a moment. And he had promised them that he would return.

• 1:12:18Speaker 04

  He promised the disciples that privately. And when he was put on trial in Jerusalem and asked, was he the Messiah? He said, yes, and you will see, and he quotes Daniel now, and says, you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of God and coming on the clouds of heaven. And it was that that triggered the crucifixion because he was, in their eyes, not all of them, but some of them, in their eyes blaspheming, claiming to be the divine figure that Daniel had seen operating the judgment of God. Now, what is so interesting about it? I believe Luke is not basing his writing on a three-dimensional view of the universe at all.

• 1:13:03Speaker 04

  He's simply reporting as a fairly hard-nosed person, probably trained in Alexandria, where they knew quite a lot about the planets and the earth and all this kind of thing. And let me put it this way.

• 1:13:19Speaker 04

  In 19, I think it was 53, Queen Elizabeth ascended the throne of Great Britain. Now, what does that mean? Well, of course, you don't take it literally. She didn't get up, but she did. You see, she literally got up and sat on a throne above her people. But that actual physical movement was, at the same time, what we call a concretized metaphor. It was a symbol that she was taking over power.

• 1:13:55Speaker 04

  In other words, what we've got in the ascension and what you need to read is the Apostle Peter's explanation of it as a fulfillment of Hebrew scripture. This is very important. But that Jesus went up and demonstrated that he was above and then went into the other world in ways that we wouldn't begin to understand, so demonstrating that he was above, as I think C.S. Lewis once put it rather gleefully, he said, "If Jesus had gone down into the ground, it would have started a very different kind of religion."

• 1:14:33Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 1:14:34Speaker 04

  To sum that up, it seems to me the ascension is part of the whole picture. Because Jesus didn't come back immediately, and that has led to all sorts of questions. And as you know, one of the big problems, and I understand it well from a Jewish perspective, is if he was the Messiah, why didn't he really rescue the nation from the Romans and all the rest of it? And the solution to that, according to the New Testament, is the coming was in two parts. First of all, he came and fulfilled Yisiah, who, Isaiah's prophecy, that he would

• 1:15:16Speaker 04

  be wounded for our transgressions and bruised and would die, and then would be raised, and then for a time. Now, here's the interesting thing. I was just reading it in Hebrew this morning. I tried to wrestle with the words. Psalm 110 is the most cited Old Testament scripture in the New Testament. And it says, "The Lord said unto my Lord, 'Sit on my right hand until I make your enemies the footstool off your feet.'" The Lord said to my Lord, and who's speaking to who? And what exactly does it mean? Because, as Jesus pointed out

• 1:16:00Speaker 04

  in his day, this is David speaking.

• 1:16:04Speaker 04

  David is speaking to his Lord. Now, who could that possibly be that's been invited to sit at the right hand of God? And Peter, the day of Pentecost, said, "This is a prediction of the ascension." That the movement is part of the whole timeline of the history. Messiah comes, he's rejected, but the earth has not heard the end of him. He will return to fulfill all those things that are at the heart of Jewish hopes, for those who do hope for Messiah, and many do, as you know. So there, it seems to me, is the beginning of a way of understanding it. Now, of course, it's supernatural. I'm not questioning that.

• 1:16:48Speaker 04

  But we can make sense of it by seeing it as part of the whole story of, well, it's soteriology, of redemption, of the way God is dealing with the problems on this planet. And I find it really fascinating that there is enough detail here to get us thinking about possibilities that aren't crazy, but do make a lot of sense in light of the big picture.

• 1:17:19Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I mean, I was hoping on two fronts, maybe, that you'd bring up, you know, quantum entanglement as the mechanism, or maybe a wormhole, you know, for Stephen Hawking.

• 1:17:29Speaker 04

  It may be. I just don't know. The point is, let's, that's a good question, Brian. But I go back to this. It seems to me that the central biblical claim is there's more than one world. And you were making the point earlier, angels, animals, in at the beginning. And what amuses me often is the fact that if the Bible says that there's more than human beings in the universe, everybody laughs at it. But if a scientist says we're not alone in the universe, everybody takes him seriously. Which is a lovely contradiction. This is not the only world that is. That is the crucial thing. There is another realm,

• 1:18:14Speaker 04

  and that's at the heart of Jewish and Christian thought. And if that is true, then interactions between those worlds are likely to be very complex. They're likely to involve a multiplicity of dimensions, and quantum mechanics, and wormholes, and all of that. I just don't know what they are. That is why I very carefully said, Christ didn't just go up and up and up till he reached Andromeda. He demonstrated that he was above, and then he went into that other world from which he had originally come. So this is big stuff. And it's lovely to think about it from the point of physics, but I think you would have more illumination than I would.

• 1:18:59Brian Keating?

  Well, this has been incredibly illuminating. I do wonder if perhaps, although we might not be around to witness it, that there will come an ascension of ASI or AGI, if it ever comes, which, again, I'm quite dubious about, but maybe it will withdraw or, you know, subsume into some higher realm, and maybe it will leave us alone, and maybe it will be for our good, as we say, and will go as it's known from strength to strength. But John, I do want to bless you and wish you a wonderful Christmas and meaningful Christmas season to you. Recording this in early December, just after Alfred Nobel's death day, you know, that they celebrate the Nobel Prize are awarded on the day of his death, not

• 1:19:43Brian Keating?

  the day of his birth. It's kind of interesting. And that's December 10th, or today's December 11th, but the Nobel Prize were just given out. But John, I want to wish you and your family a wonderful, wonderful, and meaningful holiday season. Maybe by the time this comes out, it'll be Greek Orthodox Christmas in January, whatever that is. And it'll still be timely that I'm wishing you a merry, a happy Christmas, John.

• 1:20:06Speaker 04

  Well, I wish you the same. And I want to say, Brian, this has been by far one of the most interesting chats I've had for many years. And thank you very much for honoring me by inviting me on. It'll give me a lot of thought, and I'll be up for conversations anytime, but you've really got me thinking, and it's so encouraging. But just on your last point. When people come and tell me, like Harari, that the big agenda item for this century is, one, to solve the problem of human death.

• 1:20:46Speaker 04

  It's just a technical problem, he says, and we're going to solve it by technical means. And then his second agenda item in his book, Homedaeus, is increasing human happiness and giving people some sort of eternal life and existence. I have had some very interesting reactions, as you may have gathered from my book, when I say to people, "You're too late." They say, "What, we haven't got there yet, AI is not there yet." I said, "But look, the problem of physical death was solved 20 centuries ago, when Jesus was raised from the dead. And if you're talking about uploading your brains and all the rest of it,

• 1:21:28Speaker 04

  and having eternal life, he offers it to anybody who trusts him. And one day, when he returns, there'll be the greatest uploading of all, because he'll take those who trust him home to heaven." I'm looking forward to that increasingly. And I wish you and your family all the best, Brian. Thank you for doing what you do. You've got a most interesting handle of things. And I say again, I have immensely enjoyed this. You've honored me greatly.

• 1:21:59Brian Keating?

  Me too, John. And you inspire us, and I do wish that you'll continue to inspire to the ripe old age of Mea the Astrium, 120 years, John. Hallelujah. May you live and be healthy, and your family too, and continue to have these blessings of your intellect, of your spirit, your joyousness. I mean, when you see, I believe, I'll just end with this, I got this from my friend Dennis Prager, that, you know, when it says that, "You shall not take the Lord's name in vain." It doesn't mean that you can't say God. I mean, you and I have said God many times today. I don't think that's what it means, at least in Judaism, it doesn't mean God. God is not his name. That's an English version of good, right? Good comes from God. But it's that you carry...

• 1:22:44Brian Keating?

  A negative countenance. You profess to be religious. I'm not saying you, I'm saying when one claims to be religious and believe in God, and they're miserable and they're unhappy and that's why I love this group of Jews, I'm not, called Habad, because they're incredibly joyous and they bring everything with joy. And when you see somebody like them and like you, that has this joy of life, you are the best type of ambassador. Whether you believe or not, again, John and I, I'm forbidden to proselytize. John, you know, has the motivation of his words and his intellect. But for me, the fruit of the tree, you shall judge them by the fruit, right? Judge them by their deeds, as Jesus said.

• 1:23:26Brian Keating?

  So, John, I just want to continue to bless you that you'll have this inspiring effect for good, for the world, your mind, your intellect, your spirit. It's incredibly inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us. And again, have a wonderful, meaningful Christmas season.

• 1:23:42Speaker 04

  You're an inspiration as well, Brian. Keep at it. And bye bye.

• 1:23:47Brian Keating?

  Maybe we'll be again together soon, maybe in the new year. Bye, John. Thank you so much.

• 1:23:51Speaker 04

  Bye bye.

• 1:23:53Brian Keating?

  If you enjoyed this conversation with John Lennox, especially the collision between technology, power, religion, and science, and what it means to be human, then you're gonna love my episode with Stephen C. Meyer. Watch that next. Stephen goes straight at the deeper question underneath all of this. When we look at life and the information-rich structure of biology, are we seeing an accident or something more like agency? Check that out here and don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe. It really helps us with our AI algorithms that are all too prevalent, not just in 2084, but in 2026. See you over there now.

• 1:24:39Speaker 05

  Now at Kroger, your points add up to more ways to save every trip. Use them your way to take dollars off groceries at checkout or save at the pump. You can even save up to $35 on your next fill-up. Same points, more choices. And with low prices on fresh, quality food, plus digital and personalized offers tailored to how you shop, your dollar goes further. Redeem your points online or in the app. Kroger, fresh for everyone. Restrictions apply. See site or store for details. Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side.

• 1:25:24Speaker 05

  Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com.

• 1:25:36Brian Keating?

  Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee. Build your front end, back end, and product logic in one place with Base44. Describe what you're building and how it should work. You build the interface and the logic behind it in the same place, including authentication, back end, and hosting. Then go deeper. Define access levels or connect an external API using plain language to build and iterate. Spend less time assembling infrastructure and more time getting your product live. Go to base44.com.