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From AI to COVID-19: UK Christian apologist John C Lennox tackles big issues in new books

John C Lennox

DAVID ADAMS speaks with world-renowned Christian apologist and Oxford University mathematics professor John C Lennox about his most recent books – one tackling the issue of artificial intelligence and the other the coronavirus pandemic…

At first glance, a conversation about the world of artificial intelligence, usually referred to simply as ‘AI’, may seem far removed from any conversation concerning Christian theology.

But world-renowned Christian apologist and Oxford University mathematics professor John C Lennox – who has just written a book – 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity – on the subject – says it’s his hope that Christians will look to engage more in discussions about the role it’s already having – and may yet have – in our world.

“I hope that my book will have the effect of informing Christians so they actually realise what’s going on rather than having a grey cloud of fear in front of them…” he tells Sight during an interview conducted over Zoom from Oxford, England, last month. 

John C Lennox

 Professor John Lennox. PICTURE: Supplied.

That includes being aware that most of us are already using AI in our everyday lives – in our smartphones, for example – but also that there are two different types of AI which Lennox goes to considerable lengths to distinguish between.

The first, termed narrow AI, is an AI system that “does one thing and one thing only, [it] does it fast and well, but it’s a thing that’s normally done involving human intelligence,” explains Lennox, who doesn’t claim to be an expert in the field of AI but notes in the book “one does not need to know how to build an autonomous vehicle or weapon in order to have an informed view about the ethics of deploying such things”.

2084

 

“It’s being taken seriously by some very serious thinkers so it’s being put out there into the public space and I think it’s very important for Christians to be aware of it, for everybody to be aware of it, in fact,  – and the pros and cons and the positives and the negatives and so on.”

– John Lennox, speaking about the idea of artificial general intelligence

He gives numerous examples in his book – from the algorithms Amazon uses to trace the products you buy online to the use of AI in the design of energy efficient buildings and, in an example he elaborates on during his conversation with Sight, how AI is aiding people in the medical field, particularly around the use of X-ray photography. 

“Let’s say we construct a large database consisting of a million pictures of lungs with various diseases that are all labelled by the world’s top doctors…” he says. “Then you get ill and an X-ray is taken and what the system does is compare your X-ray with the million and within a few seconds it suggests that the nearest match is this disease, so you’ve probably got it. Now that technology has now been developed to the extent that you’re likely to get, on average, a much better diagnosis that way than you’d get at your local hospital.”

Lennox says in a narrow AI system, the system itself is not intelligent – “the programmers are, the people that created the computer and put together the database are”. ”So the word artificial means that it’s not actually intelligence but it looks like intelligence, so it’s simulated intelligence.”

He contrasts that with what he calls artificial general intelligence, “the attempt to build something so that it becomes a super-intelligence” through the pursuit of two basic ideas: firstly enhancing human intelligence using using “bio-engineering, genetic technology, drugs, all kinds of cyborg-like mechanical implants and attachments”, and, secondly, uploading our brains onto silicon or some other material and therefore creating “not only a super intelligence but a super intelligence that doesn’t face dying or death”.

Lennox – who is the subject of an upcoming documentary, Against the Tide, which also features US actor Kevin Sorbo – tackles everything in the book from Dan Brown’s novel, Origin, to Israeli professor Yuval Noah Hariri’s book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, as well as the intersection between AI and morality and how AI might relate to the Biblical concept of ‘End Times’ and the Book of Revelation.

While he says talk of AI can very rapidly get into the realm of science fiction, with real-life applications of narrow AI already occurring and much thought being put into the development of general AI, it was important for Christians to get into the debate around the associated ethical concerns.

“It’s being taken seriously by some very serious thinkers so it’s being put out there into the public space and I think it’s very important for Christians to be aware of it, for everybody to be aware of it, in fact – and the pros and cons and the positives and the negatives and so on.”

And the ethical considerations don’t just apply to things like autonomous weapons systems. He mentions the decisions programmers are already making in creating autonomous vehicles, for example, as well as the growing use of AI as a recruitment tool.

Lennox says that like anything else in life, AI can be viewed as a knife, an instrument which can be used for evil – like murder – or for good – like surgery. He mentions, for example, the work of Rosalind Picard, of the MIT Media Laborator.

“[S]he’s actually started a whole branch of computing – affective computing – and is using facial recognition technology to study the faces of children who may be likely to have seizures and so on and has developed ways of predicting that, so they can save these young people,” he says.

“She’s already patented a number of methods – now this is wonderful stuff for Christians to be working in…There are huge areas and, of course, there’s so much space for pioneering in this, people with imagination, etcetera. But we’ve got to realise that narrow AI in the form of facial recognition technology that Robyn Picard is using for positive benefit, is now being used to suppress whole populations – for example, the Uighurs in Xinjiang in China, as I mention [in the book]. And that may come in the West, indeed, it’s probably being used already…”

“My parents were very credible believers because they lived it. So the first I knew about it was being lived out in front of me in a consistent way, with great integrity and so on. And secondly, my parents, very unusually in Northern Ireland…they didn’t force Christianity down my throat but they encouraged me to think.”

– John Lennox

Lennox – who, as well as penning numerous books in defence of Christinaity, has famously publicly debated high profile atheists including Richard Dawkins, Peter Singer and the late Christopher Hitchens – honours his parents for their role in the making of his Christian faith and, in particular, for encouraging him from a young age to think things through.

“My parents were very credible believers because they lived it,” he tells Sight. “So the first I knew about it was being lived out in front of me in a consistent way, with great integrity and so on. And secondly, my parents, very unusually in Northern Ireland [Lennox hails from Armagh]…they didn’t force Christianity down my throat, but they encouraged me to think.”

From an early age (he’s now in his mid-Seventies), Christianity was for Lennox a “mind-expanding thing”. 

“It got me interested in history, it got me interested in philosophy and my father even encouraged me to read alternative worldviews. So it was a very different initial experience from that of many of my contemporaries who, the moment they got out of Ireland to university, they just gave everything up because they’d never had personal conviction.”

Where is God in a Coronavirus World

Thinking is, of course, central to Lennox’s approach to his faith and when stay-at-home orders were issued in the UK earlier this year, he started thinking about what he could do with that time and decided to put his thoughts on the intersection of the coronavirus pandemic and Christianity into writing. The result was his 60 page book, Where is God in a Coronavirus World?, which has since garnered attention all around the world.

“I wrote it in a week…” he says. He recalls that he felt “driven” to write it, and describes the resultant book as “something to encourage believers and perhaps comfort them in a way but also to demonstrate that actually Christianity has something sensible, non-trivial, to say about this kind of catastrophe”.

The problem of suffering is one of the big issues tackled in the book. In his conversation with Sight, Lennox uses the account of how Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead – contained in the Gospel of John, chapter 11 – to illustrate the two-fold approach of Christ in addressing both intellectual questions around suffering but also to offer comfort to those who are suffering.

The passage describes how Lazarus’ sisters had sent Jesus a message because their brother Lazarus was ill but that by the time He’d arrived in response, Lazarus had died.

“And when He arrived, Martha said ‘Lord, if you’d been here, my brother would not have died’,” Lennox says. “That brings us straight into the pandemic…’Why doesn’t [God] do something? Is He in lockdown? Why is He so distant?’ That was the whole issue – ‘If you were here, you could have done it, but you weren’t here’.”

Lennox says Jesus then entered into what he calls a “pretty rigorous” discussion with Martha about the resurrection.

“[B]ut when Mary came, she said the same words ‘If you’d been here my brother wouldn’t have died’ and then she started to cry. And instead of engaging on a theological discussion with her, Jesus wept.”

Lennox describes it as a “marvellous story” that points to the fact that while there are is necessarily an answer to question of suffering – that “we may have to go through death, even from COVID-19”, the teaching of the resurrection is something Christians can offer to the world “because, of course, atheism has nothing to say to someone dying of COVID, no ultimate hope”.

In the book he also stresses the importance of maintaining perspective and cites a quote from CS Lewis written about how Christians should respond to the threat posed by the atomic bomb in which he warns people not to exaggerate the “novelty of our situation”, noting some of the calamities that he previously affected people in England including past plagues, Viking raiders and air raids.

“I think Lewis is dead right – the one thing he said years ago that sticks with me is that the vast majority of Christian history was lived when there were no anesthetics – just thinking of that in terms of dentists, let alone hospitals…boggles the mind.”

Lennox says he’s not looking to provide simplistic answers in the book but that it’s instead about “opening windows of possibility” for people.

“And” he adds, “at the same time just gently point[ing] out the inadequacies of alternatives like atheism or pantheistic karma doctrines or ‘God is judging you’ or that kind of stuff…[I’m] giving Christians something to be able to say to their friends and contacts who say ‘Come off it, isn’t it obvious there is no God?”.

 

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