Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
I come in here, and the first thing I'm doing is I'm catching the sight lines and looking for an exit. I see the exit sign, too. I'm not worried. I mean, you were shot. People do all kinds of weird and amazing stuff when they're scared. I can tell you the license plate numbers of all six cars outside. I can tell you that our waitress is left-handed, and the guy sitting up at the counter weighs 215 pounds and knows how to handle himself.
I know the best place to look for a gun is the cab of the gray truck outside. And at this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Now, why would I know that?
That's my wife Buff's favourite man. Well, that's how it feels. Matt Damon as Jason Bourne in The Bourne Identity. Talking about his amazing abilities, as yet unaware that he got them through a combination of advanced drugs and psychological tampering. It's an exciting, deadly example of transhumanism.
Transhumanism is the transformation of the human condition through sophisticated technologies that modify our physiology and intellect. We're continuing our theme from last episode, artificial intelligence. And again, we've got Professor John Lennox and doctors Vicky Lorimer and Grenville Kent. The question is, how close are we to the homo deus, the human god? I'm John Dixon, and this is Undeceptions.
Thank you.
Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Reflectives' new book, How to Talk About Jesus Without Being That Guy, by Sam Chan. Each episode, we explore some aspect of life, faith, history, culture, or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we'll be trying to underseive ourselves and let the truth out. ♪
First stop in our attempt to understand transhumanism is Professor John Lennox and his book 2084, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity. John has a long career at Oxford and elsewhere specialising in mathematical group theory, whatever that is, and the philosophy of science.
Transhumanism gets a long section in your book. Again, it's good and bad. What do you think is good and bad about wanting to upgrade humans? Well, here I'm talking to you and our listeners can't see it, but both of us are wearing glasses. So we've upgraded our eyesight.
And we can think of many other things. And of course, increasingly, bionic implants are becoming a practicality and neuro implants, for example. And it seems to me that although there's a gray area here, there is a difference between repair and enhancement.
And some of the enhancements may be very useful. For example, I like birdwatching, so I could do a telescopic vision. Where I begin to have deep concern is where we're attempting to reconstruct humanity. And the transhumanist program is very much geared to that kind of a reconstruction of humanity. That is, it's
stated aim and Harari in particular he says that right
We want to improve the human condition. Yuval Noah Harari is an Oxford-educated Israeli historian and technology philosopher. His famous 2016 book, Homo Deus, literally Man-God, describes what he sees as the probable emergence of a new super race of men and women endowed by technology with supreme abilities, including perhaps eternal life.
Dr. Vicki Lorimer studied genetics and biochemistry before completing her doctorate at Oxford University in theology and science. Yes, that is a double discipline, under the famed professor of science and religion, Alastair McGrath. Transhumanism is her specialty, the study of it anyway. How far back in history can we see the human longing to shape humanity?
If we think about things like education and training as means to shape ourselves, you know, we could go back quite a long way. I think the renaissance, I want to say, is a particularly significant time period when it comes to this idea that we can shape ourselves. At this point, we have the rise of humanism, capitalism,
this sense that humans are malleable really came into its own as part of the Renaissance. So Pico, for example, is one of the Italian humanists and he described humans as the free and the proud shaper of your own being. And if we look at what was going on at the time in Renaissance Florence, for example, there was this explosion of art and of architecture and even the precursors to modern science. So I guess these are some of the
sort of historical events that kind of come into this idea of shaping ourselves. But if we want to move to maybe a more contemporary understanding, which starts to be sort of biological, I guess the history of understanding ourselves as beings
something that can change, that can grow, that sort of really came into its own during the Renaissance, was then sort of influenced by that rise of modern science less than a century later with Bacon. This sense that we could master nature, we could almost undo the effects of a fallen world through science and maybe even master ourselves as well. Francis Bacon, the
The father of modern science was very much concerned with undoing the effects of the fall. It was a deeply Christian kind of sense that led to this understanding of dominion and of mastery. And then there's a more secular version that you were, I think, about to jump to when people began to think of humans as animals that are evolving and therefore...
Yeah, something that could evolve into something else perhaps. We really see this shift now
even with Bacon, from comparing humans to God and realising just how very insignificant we are in comparison, to instead comparing humans with the rest of creation, with non-human creation, and therefore emphasising our superiority. So all of this kind of fuels this dominion or progress narrative that sort of marches forward to the point where, you know, I think this idea of shaping ourselves is an old one, but with Darwin and with
the idea of biological evolution with the discovery of genes certainly has taken on new characteristics and aims as our understanding has developed. We met Dr. Granville-Kent last episode. He says that this dominion narrative is alive and well, even if the real breakthrough always seems just beyond our reach.
We can go back a generation to people like Ray Kurzweil, who wrote a book called The Age of Spiritual Machines in 1999. We can go back to the 70s and find academics who say, by the year 2000, there will be marriage between robots and humans, and you won't be able to tell them apart. And they all say that stuff because they assume that robots are no different from us. We are just highly evolved robots made of matter. That's all that is in us.
And so if that's your worldview, well, of course, it just is a bit, it's just a matter of getting more technical and more, you know, evolving more skillful mental and physical features of a robot. And then you'll be able to, sure, enjoy them as much as a person. But if robots fail to deliver the pleasures we're looking for, we can always alter ourselves to achieve what we're after.
What are some of the more interesting human enhancement technologies that you've seen in the literature that are maybe on the horizon?
That's such a great question. And I think, you know, the more you read, the more, I mean, this is not original. So many people have made comparisons between science fiction and sort of transhumanist and human enhancement visions. And it is pretty hard at times, I think, to sort of separate out what's actually feasible and what's sort of, you know, blue sky thinking. But, yeah.
I think we can sort of maybe identify a few themes. So radical life extension would be a particular kind of goal, whether that's sort of biological. So there are researchers working on all the various molecular processes that contribute to ageing and trying to halt those or even reverse them.
That in some ways, that's an intermediary to some kind of more permanent kind of state of immortality, which many transhumanists would see as a digital undertaking. So this idea of mind uploading, I think, is really fascinating. This proposal that the human brain can be subliminal.
scanned and read and copied and all of the information encoded could then be uploaded onto a computer so that we can live forever in digital form. Let's talk briefly about science fiction. Now, this is the point where producer Mark
just is in raptures listening in to us because he is a sci-fi nerd. I just want you to confirm for me that sci-fi is rubbish, right? That's your basic. Oh, yes. No, that's no good. I just stuck out a chapter of my thesis for you. In all seriousness, you think sci-fi can help us see both the longing for
and limitations of the humanist project for redemption or improvement, yeah? Absolutely. I mean, I think science fiction is really, you know, in some sense it's a laboratory for the future. It gives us a chance to sort of speculate about how potential technologies might be used, what the consequences might be. You know, some have even spoken of speculative fiction as really a projection of the present onto the future, you know,
And I think we have to ask questions like, why is so much science fiction dystopian? What's the reason for that? And I wonder if we're constrained in some way by our present condition and our imagination can only take us so far and our technologies that we develop can only take us so far. So I think it gives us a way to...
to imagine what the possible ends of any given technology is in a language and a medium that is much more sort of accessible and popular and I think appeals to the imagination and just hugely important in this.
Upgrading humanity fascinates storytellers. Imagine being able to engineer custom bodies to populate other worlds, like in Altered Carbon. Your body is not who you are. You shed it like a snake sheds its skin. You transfer the human consciousness between bodies to live eternal life. How long have I been down? 250 years.
Another strategy is giving birth to better babies, like in the film Gattaca. You have specified hazel eyes, dark hair, and fair skin. I have taken the liberty of eradicating any potentially prejudicial conditions, premature baldness, myopia, alcoholism and addictive susceptibility, propensity for violence, obesity, etc. We didn't want...
I mean, diseases, yes, but... Right. We were just wondering if it's good to just leave a few things to chance. You want to give your child the best possible start. Believe me, we have enough imperfection built in already. Your child doesn't need any additional burdens. And, frankly, who wouldn't want a child that was able-bodied and intelligent? John Lennox says it's just one of the steps along transhumanism's grand evolutionary ambitions.
We have gone through the animal stage and now we've got Homo sapiens, but now we're going to upgrade human beings by genetic engineering and various perhaps robotic implants and produce something that is super intelligent. In other words,
Homo sapiens becomes Homo Deus, a man who is God. And there's going to be unprecedented change to human beings by perhaps cybernetic engineering and so on within a few decades. So it's very much in the air that we are going to produce gods. And I don't know whether Elon Musk
warning is going to be heeded. He talked about AI as summoning the demon. But the idea of humans becoming gods is very ancient, it's embedded in history, and we've seen the immense suffering to which it has led.
Not only in the ancient past with the Roman Caesars or the Babylonian emperors, but we've seen it in essentially modern times with Stalin and Mao and all of these people who wish to be treated as God. So it's very much in the air. And of course, as power centers in our world get concentrated ever more into individual hands,
The danger is absolutely with us, this kind of invincible power. And there I see a major ethical problem because currently, as you know, the
normal kind of ethics is, well, Peter Singer's preference, utilitarianism, something like that. Utilitarianism is the idea that an action is right if it maximizes good in the world and wrong if it hinders the good. The adage, going back to the 19th century philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, is the greatest amount of good for the greatest number.
It sounds logical. The problem is working out what is the good. Many utilitarians say pleasure is the good or happiness. So an action that makes more people happy is good. And if it doesn't, it's not good. There are at least two problems, though. What if an action makes more people happy at the expense of other people? Is that still good?
And what do we say to other cultures and times that defined the good not as happiness, but say, honour, duty, justice, Islamic law, or Christendom? Utilitarianism starts to get pretty interesting at that point. Well, for now in our culture, happiness seems to be thought of as the good. And that's the goal most transhumanists are aiming at, making more people happy.
John Lennox isn't convinced. And utilitarianism as a philosophy works moderately well if you've got equal centers of power. But once I have enough power that I don't care what you do, utilitarianism doesn't work because if you say to me, look, if you do this, I will, I'd say, you know what?
If I've got the power, I don't care. And Hitler showed that very clearly. He made political treaties on the way up, but once he got the power, he tore them to pieces. And so we're facing a huge problem because in the reach for homo deus, the forgotten element is the flaw in human nature. And that flaw is not going to be corrected by genetic engineering.
AI raises a huge philosophical question, not just the ethical ones. Are we naturalists or supernaturalists? Naturalism is the view of most atheists today. It says that material things are all there are. Everything can be reduced to matter and energy. Even our mind and consciousness are just weird illusions that emerge from the firing of neurons.
Supernaturalism has of course been the default view through human history. It isn't necessarily about believing in miracles and ghosts. Supernaturalism is just the intellectual conviction that the very structure of the material world itself points beyond itself to rationality or a mind or consciousness that undergirds the rational elegance of nature.
Naturalists tend to say that their view has the advantage of being concerned with what we can see and touch and test. Supernaturalists tend to say that their view has the advantage of encompassing all of those visible, tangible things, plus providing an explanation of why those things seem so ordered and rational in the first place. Why nature has produced minds, our minds, that can detect that order.
Here's how the great Oxford and Cambridge don C.S. Lewis challenged naturalism in an essay titled On Living in an Atomic Age. Most modern people claim to be spirit, that is to be reason, perceiving universal intellectual principles and universal moral laws and possessing free will.
But if naturalism is true, they must in reality be merely arrangements of atoms in skulls coming about by irrational causation. We never think a thought because it is true, only because blind nature forces us to think it. We never do an act because it is right, only because blind nature forces us to do it.
It is when one has faced this preposterous conclusion that one is at last ready to listen to the voice that whispers, "But suppose we really are spirits. Suppose we are not the offspring of nature."
For really, the naturalistic conclusion is unbelievable. For one thing, it is only through trusting our own minds that we have come to know nature herself. If nature, when fully known, seems to teach us, that is, if science teaches us, that our own minds are chance arrangements of atoms, then there must have been some mistake. For if that were so, then the sciences themselves would be chance arrangements of atoms, and we should have no reason for believing in them.
There is only one way to avoid this deadlock. We must go back to a much earlier view. We must simply accept it that we are spirits, free and rational beings. Matter only versus mind and matter. That's the challenge thrown up by AI. Is a super complex robot just the same kind of thing as a human?
Or is consciousness a trans-natural or supernatural reality that robots, by definition, can't experience? Why do you think the best argument is on the side of information and mind being more basic than matter? Well, my main reason for that is scientific, of course.
There's also a biblical reason, but as physics has moved on, we've discovered that things have moved towards mind dependence. Many people I meet do not realize what a revolution was brought about in the first 25 years of the 20th century by quantum mechanics.
Because what quantum mechanics did was it began to, let me put it this way, dissolve matter. And by showing that the human mind is involved.
In other words, that John Wheeler, the famous physicist, said this is a participatory universe. Minds have an effect. Minds are actually very real. John Lennox's mind is very real and very big, and he expects us all to know all this stuff about quantum mechanics and observation. Quantum mechanics is the branch of physics that describes mathematically the behavior of subatomic particles.
At this quantum level, our regular descriptions of size and movement cease to be useful. And the super weird thing about it, and the thing John is alluding to, is that it seems that our human observation of particles affects the behavior of those particles. It's as if nature knows we're looking and even planning to look at
We'll put a really cool BBC article in the show notes that explains this principle. As Lennox puts it, quantum mechanics doesn't just begin to dissolve what we think of as matter. It challenges any philosophy that says matter is all there is. Therefore...
we got people, even like Paul Davis, people with no theistic part to their being saying, look, we've always thought it's bit from it. In other words, matter is fundamental and information and mind are derivative. But what if it's the other way around? What if it's mind that's fundamental and matter is derivative? And some of the early quantum theorists
Heisenberg, Bohr, and so on. They very much favored this. And this revolution actually in physics, for me, spells the end of materialism without any theological or philosophical argument. Materialism is dead.
because of that. And what's so very interesting is that there's a very interesting physicist that I came across recently, Henry Stapp, who worked with five Nobel Prize winners, I believe.
And he's not a theist again. But what he says about quantum mechanics is it crumbles, it causes to crumble the whole classical physics system of the billiard ball universe that's completely deterministic and so on. That comes crumbling down and it replaces it with a view of reality that gives human persons
undermines ultimate significance. And then he adds, fascinatingly, and I'm only paraphrasing here, that you cannot see in this any argument against the religious worldview. In other words, it opens up the possibility. Now, if I wear a Christian hat for a moment,
In the beginning was the Word, is the opening line of John's Gospel. All things came to be through the Word. In other words, Word is primary. And it seems to me that that actually is a conviction that not only is given to us by quantum mechanics, but mathematics itself, the mathematical describability of the universe, and perhaps also
In biology, the fact that the longest word we've ever discovered is a chemical word, it's the human genome. And wherever we see words that carry meaning, semantic dimension,
We know of no other explanation that fits the bill than that of mind. It's not a knockdown proof, but it's much better than the naturalistic, which gives us no grounds for trusting our human minds when even when we do science.
Transhumanism isn't just an ethical battleground. It's a philosophical and theological one as well. And after the break, we explore how close transhumanism is to achieving the homo deus, the godlike human, and whether this does away with the...
This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today.
And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.
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You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions.
68-year-old Tirat was working as a farmer near his small village on the Punjab-Sindh border in Pakistan when his vision began to fail. Cataracts were causing debilitating pain and his vision impairment meant he couldn't sow crops.
It pushed his family into financial crisis. But thanks to support from Anglican Aid, Tirat was seen by an eye care team sent to his village by the Victoria Memorial Medical Centre. He was referred for crucial surgery. With his vision successfully restored, Tirat is able to work again and provide for his family.
There are dozens of success stories like Tarat's emerging from the outskirts of Pakistan, but Anglican Aid needs your help for this work to continue. Please head to anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Tarat.
So for you, what's the biggest challenge AI poses to theology? And what's the biggest challenge theology poses to AI?
Well, AI poses challenges to theology and ethics in that here it is rushing ahead. We're seeing human beings made in the image of God. And incidentally, I was fascinated watching Jordan Peterson the other night
giving a lecture on Genesis. And he cited the statement that God made man, men and women in his own image. And he said, man, he said, this is the cornerstone of civilization. We neglected that our peril.
So that aspect of belief, that theological statement, is a huge challenge to the redefinition of humanity that AI is causing. Now, AI challenges theology almost in the same way because it's saying, look, we know what human beings are, you don't. There is no God dimension. And if we construct God,
in the end, something that functions exactly as a human being, that will exclude God. And of course, that's nonsense. Because if the human mind can construct life, that simply shows that life can be
constructed by a designing intelligence, which I believe in the beginning anyway. But there are huge questions, practical questions, even with autonomous vehicles.
as to how you build in the ethics, to say nothing of autonomous weapons, of intrusive surveillance and all this kind of thing. We desperately need theologically, ethically trained people who can take a sane and not a crazy look at these things and guide humanity into sensible decisions. But one really does fear with the rate at which
governments are getting away with highly intrusive uses of AI, that it may be completely unstoppable. So Vicky, have you got any tips for us about how to discern the good and the bad in transhuman technologies? Yeah, I think firstly we need to start from a proper understanding of where we fit in. So if we consider that God graciously
allows us to participate in what God is doing in the world, you know, and even if that's as very junior partners, then that actually does give us responsibility to use our creativity and our ingenuity well. So there's responsibility on the one hand. You know, I think we see engaging in these technologies as something not necessarily to avoid, but it is something for discernment. But
But then if we also understand that God is the ultimate agent of redemption, you know, it's not something we can engineer for ourselves, then we're freed from that burden too. So it ends up becoming kind of like any other technology that we discern around. So we need to consider the end of the particular technology being proposed, right?
That's not always clear given how speculative most of these technologies are. So that's where, again, I think the imagination is an important tool. We can explore possible futures through fiction. We need to listen to lots of voices to make sure that the people sort of developing and reflecting on technology are not sort of all the same and all guided by a single vision of what the good life is.
What do you say to those who would push back and say, but all that moral and religious questioning of technology is hindering progress? I mean, the church has always tried to hinder progress. And here you are trying to slow it down with all this ethical, religious mumbo jumbo. Well, I'd first say that you've got to define what progress is.
And the idea that the church has hindered progress scientifically is sheer nonsense, because the pioneers of modern science, like Galileo and Newton and Kepler and so on, were all believers in God. It was their faith in God that drove the rise of modern science. Now, of course, there are certain iconic incidents with Galileo and so on, but when you examine those, they do not support that thesis that
that Christianity is against progress. I mean, I believe that both of us are involved with universities that are Christian foundations. If belief in God has hindered progress, whence came Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, and all the rest of them? The fact is, as we look back over the centuries, in the early days, particularly, and you as a historian, I think, would have a lot to say about this,
that it was the Christians that out-thought their competitors in the ancient world. And so it's simply a slander on the name of God that they're against progress. Now, the morality side is vastly important because once morality is jettisoned, then anything goes and that leads to chaos, anarchy, and a great deal of suffering.
We need that moral dimension, if only to give our lives real meaning. And that's exactly the suggestion of a lot of those pesky science fiction writers Director Mark is always going on about. Once technology frees us from moral constraints, we become the worst version of ourselves.
In the cult TV show Westworld, human beings are set free by science to behave towards unbelievably human robots in unbelievably inhuman ways. The only limit here is your imagination. You start in the centre of the park. It's simple, it's safe. The further out you venture, the more intense the experience gets. How far you want to go isn't entirely up to you.
Westworld's technology promises to satisfy our deepest desires, but in the end it reveals our deepest defects. John Lennox reckons this is where Christianity comes into its own.
You end your book with a pretty robust account of Jesus' life, death, resurrection, and return, and all the apocalyptic stuff with that. And you put it to readers that this is the ultimate answer to the human longings raised by AI and transhumanism. Can you give me the short version of this wonderful reflection of how
Christ and the whole show answers the longings that you see in AI. Well, let me put it this way. Take Harari's agenda. Conquer physical death. That's number one agenda. The next thing is to enhance Homo sapiens into Homo deus and upgrade humanity so that we will have eternal life in that sense. And when people say that to me, I say, you're too late.
And they say, what do you mean you're too late? Well, I say both of those problems have been solved in a historically and experientially credible way. The heart of the Christian faith is that Jesus rose from the dead. Now, if that's true, it means that a solution has been found to human physical death. And if we investigate it a bit more closely, we'll discover that the Christian message is that if we accept Jesus as
as the Son of God and Saviour, that the resurrection gives evidence of, then we too will receive a new life called eternal life, which will, although we may die, it will outlast death because we will be raised from the dead when Christ returns. So
They're too late in that sense. And as for the upgrade, well, it amused me when I thought of this. I didn't think of it immediately, but I realized that what Christianity offers is actually a kind of wonderful upgrade because
because it says, look, death has been conquered. There's a new world coming. There's a resurrection of the dead coming. There are new heavens and a new earth, and you're going to have new potentialities. If you want to know anything about them, have a look at the capacities that Jesus had after he was raised from the dead. You can be involved in all of that. So the Christian message, which has been running for 20 centuries now,
I believe has a wonderful promise embedded into it that is evidence-based. As Jesus rose from the dead and the New Testament historian Luke tells us that finally he left them and he ascended vertically into the sky.
and then was received out of their sight. He didn't just go up and up and up and up. He went up to demonstrate that he was going to a realm that in a sense was above our world, and then he disappeared in what I call a junction, or C.S. Lewis called a junction between the two worlds. And the early disciples who were gazing at this incredible sight
were spoken to. Why do you stand gazing up into heaven? The same Jesus shall so come in the way you saw him go. So I understand the ascension to be a thought model of the return of Christ. So there is a real homo deus. It's Jesus himself. He is the man who is God, and he is going to return. And those who trust him
are going to be raised from the dead, and they will move into a new realm that seems to be very much beyond this realm in terms of the capacities that we shall have, although we'd be connected with what we are at the moment. I find that immensely exciting to put against the vast panoply of scenarios that are
conjured up by physicists like Max Tegmark or people like Harari and so on and so forth. So my argument simply was this. Look, if we're prepared to take seriously these futuristic scenarios based on very little evidence, but based on projections of AI, let's put beside them a scenario that's been around for a very long time.
and which at least has some strong historical and experiential evidence to support it. I want to end with a more personal question about how John Lennox thinks about things. So just bear with me. Near the end of the book, you quote C.S. Lewis, as you are fond of doing, to the effect where he said...
There's no point worrying about Christianity if it is a watered-down Christianity. It's either the supernatural Christianity or it's nothing. And that seems to be a strong theme through your whole ministry. You are an incredibly rational professor of mathematics and all of that, but all that I've known of you over these years and in your works is
you are not interested in a watered-down Christianity, the kind of Christianity you'd expect someone like you to adopt in order to appeal to a skeptical world. Instead, you just seem like this jolly brick wall of Christian orthodoxy. And I want to ask, why is that so central, that supernatural, unwatered-down Christianity? It comes from a conviction that goes back to my childhood, that Christianity is true.
In other words, it's not a set of moral or ethical rules or a comforting kind of scheme to be believed in to help you through life. It is true as a descriptor of where we are, the universe we live in, and our significance as human beings. And I was very early on attracted to find out
what evidence there is for the truth of Christianity. And I suppose it's simply that the more I investigated, the more I discovered two things. First of all, the rationality of accepting that there is a supernatural dimension. And Lewis helped me enormously very near the beginning when I suddenly realized that he was saying you don't have to start with the miracles of
in Scripture to get to the supernatural. You simply have to start with the fact that we can reason as humans, because there must be a supernatural dimension to reason itself, that it's giving us a mirror. If there's a purely natural explanation of it, then reason wouldn't be reason. We wouldn't know, in that sense, what we were talking about. So very early on in my teenage years,
These ideas were being built into me. And when I got to university, I could see that the only thing that changed people's lives in the practical sense was...
a supernatural worldview, that once we confine ourselves to a closed system of cause and effect, well, we end up, in my view, with meaninglessness, with atheism, and with nothing really to live for. Now, that, of course, doesn't prove Christianity is true, but if it's true, you would expect that people get transformed. And that's why wishy-washy Christianity never happens.
I was about to say never washed with me. It just appeared to be to be something and nothing, and it wouldn't change lives. And it's always very helpful to discover that you're not the first one to be committed to what Lewis called a thoroughgoing supernaturalism.
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Next episode, well, ever been approached by some guy wandering up to you in the local mall and asking if you know Jesus? I was that guy once. We've got Dr. Sam Chan, and we're talking about the scandal of Christian proselytizing. See ya. ♪
Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kayleigh Payne and directed by Mark Hadley. Editing by Nathaniel Schumach. Hey, before I go, a random shout out to NCLS Research, who have just begun a landmark study into domestic violence in churches. God bless your work. For more information, go to experience.ncls.org.au.
This is episode 32, editorial 6. In 3, 2... Upgrading humanity fascinates storytellers. Imagine being able to engineer custom bodies to populate other worlds, like in Altered Carbon, my favourite film. It's a TV series. Oh. LAUGHTER