I really enjoyed “Diary of a Ceo’s” Steven Bartlett interviewing John Lennox, Professor of Mathematics and also President of the, “Oxford Center for Christian Apologetics” the other day. The link to that podcast is right here.

(All in good fun, it’s probably the Oxford “centre,” but I’m hopelessly American.)

“Diary of a Ceo” is already an interesting podcast that has some really good guests on who I am actually interested in. Also, Steven is a good interviewer, he usually doesn’t talk over people or get all strident. The show has gotten ten times more interesting since Steven started exploring Christianity, asking questions, as we say. He is somewhat agnostic, which is also really refreshing.

John Lennox is charming, too. He’s written many books and I regret to say I have not read a single one. I have however, enjoyed many of his lectures and interviews. They billed him for the show as the, “No.1 Christianity Expert,” which kind of made me chuckle. He recently wrote a book called, “God, AI, and the End of History,” all themes that were pretty much the subject of this podcast.

I appreciated all the points that were made and have absolutely no disagreement with anything that was said. (LOL, write this day down in history. Not only was I quite content with the whole discussion, I was delighted to listen to it.)

Something that jumped out at me was the truth of materialism, the reductionist worldview, the left brain perception. In fact, we’ve even divided our own brains into two completely separate hemispheres! As a result of our reductionist worldviews, “We now know how almost everything works but we understand the meaning of nothing.”

(Kind of interesting how the more logical and rational focused we become the more insane we get, but that’s a paradox for another day. Therapeutic psilocybin is big here and ironically seems to help some people escape their reductionist, rational worldview long enough to gain some clarity or become more sane. NOT advocating psilocybin at all, just noting the paradox. The “bigger picture” beyond our own reason and materialism seems to serve a vital and necessary purpose when it comes to our well being.)

The point being a reductionist worldview is why we can say there’s really no difference between the output of AI and the output of a human. I mean, in terms of production only, AI can create, write poetry, produce stuff, therefore it is exactly like a human. We’ve completely taken consciousness out of the equation, experience, wisdom, intuition, “knowing,” the existence of the soul. AI can recognize patterns of colors, but it cannot “see” red, it cannot process it, cannot assign the color red meaning or context. It cannot experience it. It has no connection to any Greater Consciousness.

Shocking I know, but there are some people I don’t like very much who also serve absolutely no purpose in my life. One reason why I am motivated to be civil or kind or even to just ignore them is because I believe they were made in the image of God. When we remove the Imago Dei from our worldview and reduce the world to an entirely materialistic one, we lose our ability to even explain why the output and experiential intelligence of a human being has more worth and value then say that of a lawnmower.

Lennox and Bartlett also spent some time chatting about apologetics, mainly the questions we all have, the ones that we kind of need to work out ourselves because the answers we need are kind of tailored to us as individuals. Things like, why does a good God allow bad things to happen when He has the power to intervene? I could write volumes about that one question, in fact I probably already have, but the answers are designed to satisfy my own soul. The Bible says, “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” a verse I really like for that very reason.