What does it mean to communicate truth in an age of artificial intelligence, deepfakes and growing scepticism towards the Christian faith? In this engaging conversation, broadcaster Justin Brierley talks to renowned Christian apologist Professor John Lennox, from the stage of the CBC Revive 2026 Conference in London, with Prof Lennox joining remotely.
Please note that this interview was recorded live using the studio’s automated conference recording system. As a result, sections where the speakers have been cropped are presented at a lower resolution than broadcast quality and there is occasional background noise. However, the conversation itself is exceptional and well worth watching. For the best viewing experience, we recommend viewing on a phone or tablet. You can also read the edited transcript below.
Drawing on decades of experience debating some of the world’s leading atheist thinkers, Professor Lennox reflects on the changing cultural landscape, the surprising openness to conversations about faith and the vital role of Christian communicators in today’s media. In this interview, you’ll discover:
- Why John Lennox believes people are becoming more open to Christianity.
- How to engage with those who disagree without compromising the truth.
- Why evidence-based faith still matters in today’s culture.
- The growing challenge of AI, deepfakes and misinformation.
- How Christian broadcasters, journalists, podcasters and content creators can become trusted voices in an age of deception, and
- Why the Gospel remains as relevant and powerful today as ever.
Whether you’re involved in broadcasting, journalism, digital media, church communications or simply want to communicate your faith more effectively, this conversation offers practical wisdom, thoughtful encouragement and a compelling vision for Christian engagement in the public square.
Edited transcript of John Lennox interview
Justin Brierley: Our special guest is John Lennox. He hardly needs any introduction. He is, though, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics and the Philosophy of Science at the University of Oxford and has written many books. Prof Lennox has engaged in many debates with leading secular thinkers and atheists and I’ve had the pleasure of hosting some of those debates over the years.
Perhaps the thing I should really direct you to is John’s memoir, John C. Lennox: My Story – A Spiritual and Intellectual Autobiography. This covers decades of incredible brilliance, but also some extraordinary stories of the way John has worked across the world, and especially been a huge influence in the media space when it comes to declaring the truth of the Gospel and engaging some of Christianity’s fiercest critics along the way.
So it’s my absolute pleasure to interview John about that journey and to hear what he can encourage us with as professionals in the media space.
John Lennox: It’s an absolute delight and really an honour to speak to Christian broadcasters. I first became aware of the value of Christian broadcasting when I came across little churches in Poland, actually, that had come into existence because of Trans World Radio. And when I was 14 I became a radio amateur, a ham radio operator, and radio played a very important role in my own education, in foreign languages particularly. So I’ve always appreciated the work of Christian broadcasters. So thank you for inviting me.
Justin Brierley: Well. John, we first started to get to know each other in a radio studio. It was in the previous offices of Premier Christian Radio. I always enjoyed those early encounters when I would bring you into the studio to engage with a secular critic of Christianity and so on. But you’ve been doing that in lots of different arenas all over the world for the past 20 years or more. Tell us, what have you been aiming to do in presenting the Gospel in that way, by engaging in these quite high-profile public conversations and debates with critics of Christianity?
John Lennox: Well, historically, the fact is I didn’t seek to engage these people at all. But I was encouraged, and indeed invited to do so, by a young American who wished to find new ways to engage secular society in his home state of Alabama. He asked me to help him and set up a series of excellent events for a visit I made to Birmingham. And shortly after that, he managed to persuade Richard Dawkins to debate with me in Birmingham. The result of that was that I had a worldwide platform, and that led to further high-profile debates with Dawkins, with the late Christopher Hitchens and Peter Singer, among others, over the years.
The motivation was to speak, yes, to the people and engage them, but also to speak to the public beyond them, because I was given very good advice before the first debate by a very well-known British journalist. He said, “Make absolutely sure that by the time you’ve finished, you have got your message across to the audience. Don’t just be reactive.” That was extremely good advice, and I have followed it ever since.
Justin Brierley: It’s very, very good advice. In a way, you’ve become someone who has had to tailor your message to the medium—to the media that you’re actually engaged with. What are some of your memories, good or bad, when it comes to doing that in the secular media space? I know you’ve been in front of lots of secular TV cameras and so on, as well as engaging in the Christian media space.
John Lennox: Well, I think one of the most memorable, Justin, was the first Unbelievable? broadcast from the United States that we did together. I think it was with Dave Rubin, was it not?
Justin Brierley: That’s right. Yes, you’re right. It was in California, wasn’t it? We had about a thousand people in the auditorium, and you were engaged with the secular Jewish talk-show host Dave Rubin.
John Lennox: Quite right. Yes. It was fascinating to observe him warming up to the whole conversation and becoming more and more open.That’s memorable.
The other very memorable one was debating Peter Singer in Melbourne Town Hall, which was absolutely packed. At the beginning of the confrontation I openly said that my parents were Christian believers who allowed me to think and loved me enough not to force their Christianity on me. When he got up to respond, the first thing he said was, “Well, of course, there’s my biggest objection to religious faith. People stay in the faith in which they were brought up.”
I thought to myself, “This is going to be terrific fun.” When I got the next opportunity I said, “Peter, I told the people quite openly that I come from a Christian background, but you said nothing about yours. Were your parents atheists?”
He said, “They were.”
I said, “So you’ve remained in the faith of your upbringing.”
His reply was astonishing. He said, “But it’s not a faith.”
And I said, “Oh, sorry, Peter. I thought you believed it.” And cyberspace at that point went frantic, saying this world-famous philosopher doesn’t seem to understand that his atheism is a belief system. Now, just listening to the opening remarks of your conference, I’ve noticed that there’s been a lot of reference to faith—that everybody’s a person of faith.
We need to realise that in our society, because otherwise many people think that faith is a religious word which means believing where there’s no evidence. When, in fact, it’s an ordinary word. So my contention is that we need to be very careful, especially in the media, always to qualify the word faith by asking, faith in what?
It’s faith in God. It’s not faith in humanism, or transhumanism, or the English football team. It’s faith in God. And that needs to be said because there’s huge confusion out there about the word faith. Singer really brought it home to me.
Justin Brierley: I was so glad that you were able to be there as a voice of reason and clarity in what was quite a confrontational dialogue and debate with Peter Singer. But it contrasts with that live conversation you had with me back in 2019, I believe it was, with Dave Rubin, because in that case there was a lot of warmth in the room.
It was a very congenial conversation. I even remember us joking with the audience that perhaps Dave Rubin was on the verge of converting on stage because he was so swept along and encouraged by the things you were saying. So I suppose you’ve had lots of different sorts of conversations. One of the things I know is a great strength of yours is that you bring both the academic rigour and the thinking, but you also try to make friends with people. I think that’s an important part of this, isn’t it?
John Lennox: It’s a hugely important part of it. Since we’ve been talking about Singer, the remarkable thing was the way he responded to me and became really quite friendly. The way I started was this. I’d read a lot of his books, and I’d had some horrible letters from professing Christians telling me to go for his jugular and rightly berate him for his terrible ethical attitude to the unborn and deformed children and so on.
So at the beginning I said, “Peter Singer and I disagree profoundly over ethics, but I think that his ethics proceeds from his atheism. But before we start, I want to recommend one of his books, which has been a huge challenge to me as a Christian. It’s called The Life You Can Save.”
So I said that at the beginning. At the end, Peter shook my hand publicly. Then he said quietly to me, “I want to thank you for today.”
I said, “What for, Peter?”
He said, “I’ve never been treated like this by a Christian. Never.”
And he said, “I want you to be the special guest at a lecture I’m giving tomorrow night.”
And I did that, with some difficulty. But it just shows that if you’re openly friendly without compromising the truth,, which is the challenge to all of us, you can get a long way.
Justin Brierley: What a great example. When it comes to the way that you’ve seen the mood develop in both the UK and the West in general, you obviously began having these kinds of conversations in what was arguably quite a hostile environment towards Christian faith.
It was the era of the so-called New Atheism. These were some of the characters you were engaging with in the mid-2000s. Have you noticed any shift? What might that tell us about how we can bring our message to the world as it stands?
John Lennox: Well, I certainly have noticed the shift. I’ve been able to understand it by reading your book, I think.
Seriously, Justin, you’ve done a great job in chronicling the shift that has meant there is, I think, a fairly distinct increased openness to God, both in the media and elsewhere. Several prominent figures are not only becoming Christians, but others have clearly begun to take steps on that journey.
I’ve discovered that the confrontational debates were okay for a time, but they were very expensive in terms of time, organisation and the amount of preparation. I’ve come to appreciate much more what we’re doing now, which is having a discussion, and particularly a moderated discussion.
That means you can get ideas across into the public space that are set up in contrast with somebody else’s worldview and encourage people to make up their own minds on the basis of evidence. So I am quite encouraged by what I perceive as a very real mood change in the culture out there.
Justin Brierley: That’s encouraging to hear that you’re sensing that as well, John. Obviously we’re a room full of media professionals who share a Christian faith. Often faith can still be viewed with suspicion. Even if there is a changing undercurrent, how would you encourage us still to be a light for Christ when faith can often be viewed with suspicion? What would you say are the key principles to bear in mind?
John Lennox: Well, that’s the type of question that’s not easy to answer since it’s person-specific. It depends on who the media professional is and what the area of expertise is. All I can say is that media is impotent and ineffective if it doesn’t have an audience to influence. So we need to find bridges.
We need to find bridges to the listeners that attract and inform them without becoming addictive, like so much deliberately targeted AI-powered social media. That creates a challenge because our audience connects with us using the very digital technology that is increasingly harming them mentally by creating addictions as serious as heroin dependence.
So we need to think through how we can wean particularly young people away from digital dependence, as described in a must-read book by Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation. But I think, as a general point, reverting to what I said a few moments ago, we really need to clear up the meaning of the word faith.
We’re too loose in its use. We talk about, for example, faith and science as if the two were opposed. But science involves faith. Not necessarily faith in God, but faith in the fact that science can be done, and so on. We need to be really specific that when we use the word faith, we’re talking about the Christian faith, and that it’s evidence-based.
Everyone is a person of faith. I can illustrate this by a phone call from the BBC. They rang up and said, “Professor Lennox, would you be prepared to come on Radio 4 and discuss faith schools?”
I said, “Certainly.”
He said, “How would you approach this?”
I said, “I’d first begin with the secular schools that are pumping out the atheistic faith into our society, because every school is a faith school.”
Well, that discombobulated him completely. He said, “Oh, I’d never thought of that, Professor Lennox. We’d get in touch.” But they never did.
Justin Brierley: I suppose that is the challenge for us: to address a culture that still remains quite sceptical, or even uninformed, about the nature of what faith is. How would you encourage us to go about doing that activity of persuasion?
We’re not all million-dollar apologists like you are, John. We don’t necessarily get to talk with some of the leading thinkers in the world, but we each have our own sphere of influence. It may be over podcasts, it may be over radio, it may be over video channels and so on. How would you encourage those gathered to use that influence to persuade people of the rationality and reasonableness of Christian faith?
John Lennox: Well, first of all, we should not listen to people who say that we should forget all that we’ve learned in the past because this is a post-truth age. That’s ludicrous, because people who expect us to believe them when they say this is a post-truth age are themselves believing one overarching truth. So they believe in truth as well. It’s nonsense. I think the important thing is to get back to what the early Christian apostles did. They stressed two sides: what I call the objective side and the subjective side.
- The facts concerning Jesus.
- The basic facts that are the fundamentals of the Christian faith.
Starting not with Jesus, but with creation, and the preparation through the history of Israel, the prophets, then the life, the preaching, the death, the resurrection and ascension of Christ, and then the coming of the Holy Spirit and His promise of return.
These are objective facts that are evidence-based, and we should give some of the evidence. But then, at the same time, bringing in the subjective side.
Paul’s main apologia, his defence of the Gospel, which we’re all called to, was his testimony to personal conversion. That’s hugely important. If Christianity isn’t, in that sense, changing my life, then there’s no point in me speaking about it.
People these days have, as you pointed out very well, shifted away from the more clinical science-and-religion type debate to questions of ethics, meaning and morality. They want to find a story that’s big enough so that they can fit themselves into it and receive real hope.
That gives us, I think, a real possibility to go in with a balance between the historical facts and the existential facts and experiences that show Christianity actually changes lives.
You see, to put it another way, people used often to say to me, “You’re a scientist. You can’t possibly be a Christian because Christianity is not testable.”
I realised, of course, that it is. Jesus Christ made certain claims that if we repent and trust Him as Saviour and Lord, then—to cut a long story short—we receive peace with God, forgiveness and a new power to live. That can be tested. Having seen that happen so many times gives one confidence to go out and speak that message into the culture without apology.
Justin Brierley: John, I wanted to mention again that so much of this wisdom is bound up in your new memoir, My Story. But some of your recent books have also dealt in a deep way with technology, AI and so on. You’ve already referenced the fact that we live in a technological AI revolution right now. That’s what we’re going through.
As Christians, as media professionals, we obviously have to embrace that to the extent that these are the ways in which we now reach new audiences. But it comes with all kinds of challenges and pitfalls along the way. So I wonder if you could speak to where you see that happening.
What do you think are the ways in which we need to be broadcasting a message that not only uses technology, but also, to some extent, stands against some of the pitfalls and the directions in which artificial intelligence may be taking us?
John Lennox: Yes, this is a hugely important question. My book 2084 and the AI Revolution, tries to deal with this in an informative way for believers mainly, but not only for believers. AI has two sides.mThe positive side, where it is an advanced form of finding out facts and organising things, is a great help. For example, in Christian mission, not only logistics, but also in aiding Wycliffe Bible Translators to translate exotic languages. All of that is extremely positive. Not to forget the marvellous advances in medicine that AI has brought.
There are huge dangers, though, because it’s going to make people inevitably lazy, and it’s already doing so. A recent study from MIT and Oxford, is pointing out that ten minutes of AI use a day—meaning something like Claude, Mistral or ChatGPT—is actually undoing our capacity to think straight and to think properly.
We need to be aware of it. Not enough study has been done into the effect of constant exposure to allowing a machine to do what you possibly ought to be doing for yourself. Studying the psychological effect is something that all of us need to be aware of.
Also, we need still to check what we gain from artificial intelligence searches because, to use the polite term, it can sometimes hallucinate. The proper term is that it can tell lies. It is the greatest spreader of deception that we know.
If I may just make a personal comment here regarding the media. A few weeks ago I had a letter from a very well-educated, active missionary Christian with a strong theological background. He said, “I’ve just listened to a talk of yours and I’ve enjoyed it so much I want to have it transcribed and published in a little booklet in a certain language.”
Well, I had never heard of the talk. So I looked it up and discovered, to my amazement, a website called ‘Lennox Logic’. It had been set up as a deepfake. It had a deepfake image of me and an AI-generated series of talks that had already attracted over seven thousand followers. Now that’s really scary.
Although it was clunky, anybody that knew me would have recognised it, nonetheless it deceived, to quote the Scriptures, “even the elect.” Even this man who wrote to me, and another after him. We’re going to have to face this a great deal more.
We got it taken down. Almost immediately two more similar websites appeared, which also had to be taken down. At least Google did take them down. But it brought home to me the warning that was on the lips of Jesus.Talking about His Second Coming, He said that the big thing that’s going to increase around the world is deception.
Paul says the same thing in 2 Timothy, and there’s a lot about this in the Book of Revelation—which is one of the reasons I’ve written a big book on Revelation just before the memoir that you mentioned. So we need to beware. Especially those of us in the media. We’re going to have attacks from deepfakes, and they are going to spread like wildfire. Putting those fires out is, I think, going to become increasingly difficult.
The deepfakes are going to become increasingly realistic. I looked at part of my talk and, in a sense, it was clever because it was a politicised mixture of things that I would never have said. It was going into very controversial areas of Middle East politics and all this kind of thing. I felt that this is a vulnerability that I would like to see plugged. So we have to do our best to be alert that this may well happen to any of us in this room today, learn how to deal with it, and share what we’ve discovered with other Christians who might be affected.
Justin Brierley: Yeah, well, I can reassure everyone that it’s the real John Lennox joining us. But I suppose that just brings home absolutely one of the specific challenges of the technological revolution we’re living through: how do we discern truth from falsehood? I suspect the next generation is going to have to become very canny at being able to do that, and being able to sift between what is real and what is not true.
I suppose it also brings to the fore the fact that there’s something unique about the Christian faith, which is that it is very much based in being human. God became human. He didn’t become an algorithm. And so I also wonder whether this digital revolution presents an opportunity for the Christian faith and for the Church, John, because I wonder whether people are going to be increasingly looking for authenticity and real human connection, given that we’re going to be drowning in a sea of AI slop.
Professor John Lennox: That’s absolutely correct. And I think we need to recover and put right at the centre of our thinking the glorious fact that we are made in the image of God as conscious beings. God has done something very special in creating human beings, in that He has linked intelligence with consciousness. Artificial intelligence is precisely that: it is artificial. It simulates things that normally require human intelligence.
But if you think of what makes us human, starting with our five senses: we can see; AI cannot. We can hear; AI cannot. We can touch and sense what feeling means; AI cannot. We can smell the roses and the flowers; AI cannot. We can taste nice lasagne, or something like that; AI cannot. Now that’s important. AI is not conscious. It doesn’t think. It doesn’t experience qualia. It doesn’t have any idea of the redness of red, or our emotions on seeing a beautiful sunset. And we need to concentrate on these things that make human life human.
But above all, AI is not God-conscious, because it’s not conscious at all. Human beings are. And we need to work hard, I think, to have on the tips of our tongues the differences between a human being made in God’s image and an artificial intelligence. And you mentioned what, to my mind, is the key value indicator of human beings like ourselves. God made us in such a way that He could become one. The Word became flesh. And, as you say, the Word did not become an algorithm or an AI system. And that’s very important.
The other point that I think gives us a way into the Gospel, which I have used in my book on AI, 2084, and my book on Revelation, which is called God, AI and Science and the End of History, is this: What is fascinating is that the Gospel is talking about a movement from God to humans. God became man. And to as many as received Him, He gave the authority to become what they weren’t before, and that is sons and daughters of God.
The advanced AI project is the exact reverse: it is human beings trying to become gods. And we need to take note of that, because serious scientists are suggesting it, and not just pop science-fiction people.
And the importance of it is that it is something that started in early Genesis: “God knows, in the day that you eat of that tree, you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” And right through Scripture we have, in the background again and again, leaders of empires claiming to be gods, particularly in the time of the Roman Empire.
And then Paul predicts that there will be a world figure who will be destroyed by Christ’s coming, who sits in the temple and claims to be God. So we need to be very aware of a push towards so altering, genetically or otherwise, human beings so that they become gods with a small “g”, as is the transhumanist agenda of people like Yuval Noah Harari. That’s why I interact with them so much, because I think this message needs to get out.
Because people are increasingly acquainted with the transhumanist agenda, I find that pointing out that the Gospel is saying the exact opposite has real traction. It’s very simple to do.
When people say to me, “I’ve got great hope that the problem of human death will be solved, and that one day I’ll be able to upload my brain onto silicon and so have eternal life,” I say, “You’re far too late.”
They say, “What? We haven’t even got there yet.”
I reply, “You’re far too late. The problem of physical death, as Harari puts it, was solved by God raising Christ from the dead twenty centuries ago.”
And as for uploading our brains onto silicon, I can tell you something far more credible. Anybody who trusts Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord, repents of the mess they have made of their own lives and the lives of others, will one day be raised from the dead and uploaded into the world to come.
AI cannot offer anything like that, and certainly there is no evidence for its promises. So there’s the Gospel injected into AI, which is why I’ve found many media outlets questioning me about the Book of Revelation in a way that never happened in the past.
Very fascinating. What times we’re living through.
Justin Brierley: John, as we end our conversation, what encouragement would you give to folk working in the media facing these kinds of challenges that you’ve spelt out? Given that we do believe in a Gospel of hope, even in what often look like turbulent, polarised and confusing times, what message of hope would you leave us with today?
Professor John Lennox: Well, I wrote a little book some years ago called Have No Fear, and I would encourage you to have no fear. Decide what you want to write or talk about. Construct a set of questions that you think will help, and then use them to engage with as many people as possible, together with literature, the internet and other resources.
One piece of advice I received many years ago has been extraordinarily helpful, especially with media appearances. Don’t simply think through the message you want to get across and how you want it to be understood. Ask yourself: How could my message be misunderstood? Given the variety of cultures and backgrounds among your audience, that’s a wonderful corrective. It can help you express what you want to say much more clearly than simply asking, “What do I want to say?”
Then keep going, and don’t give up. Always be ready to give an answer to those who ask you the reason for the hope that is within you. Do it gently, but don’t compromise the truth.
So thank you so much for allowing me to share a little time with you today. God bless you all. Your work is extremely important. Thank you so much.
