John Lennox recently appeared on The Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett — the second most popular podcast of 2025. An 82-year-old Oxford mathematician sitting across from one of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, talking about God, AI, consciousness, forgiveness, and the meaning of life.
Who Is John Lennox?
John Lennox is a mathematician, ethicist and public theologian. He is a retired Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University and has spent decades writing and debating at the intersection of science and faith - often seeking to defend the reasonableness of the Christian faith against the likes of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Peter Singer.
If there was a modern-day C S Lewis, I think it would be a battle between Timothy Keller and John Lennox. Lennox actually attended the last lectures of C S Lewis on John Donne when he began his studies at Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1962, shortly before Lewis passed away.
Like Lewis, Lennox is highly logical in his thinking - a benefit of his training in Mathematics. He is a capable bridge from the worlds of academia and public discourse to the church with his deep commitment to scripture and the gospel.
Lennox is a questioner, a searcher after truth, and he writes honestly about how he has wrestled through the various intellectual, cultural and moral problems of life.
His honesty and personal faith was on full display in The Diary of a CEO conversation. Asked whether he could be wrong about his beliefs, Lennox responded:
"My academic mind says theoretically, yes. But practically, no. It would be like asking me - you've been married to Sally for 58 years. Could you be wrong that she loves you? Well, theoretically yes, but actually the evidence all points in the other direction."
On AI: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways
Lennox has become a critical Christian voice on artificial intelligence. His take is neither technophobic nor naively optimistic. As he put it simply in the podcast:
"I look at AI like a knife. A good knife. You can use it for surgery or you can use it for murder."
That balance - taking seriously both the value and the genuine danger of AI - runs through all of his writing on the subject. He is particularly concerned about the transhumanist agenda driving some of Silicon Valley’s elites: the drive to solve physical death as a technical problem and to engineer humanity toward something divine. Lennox sees in this an old story - the human reach for self-deification - and he has written about it with rigour and pastoral concern in his main work on AI – 2084 and the AI Revolution.
On Faith: Something Nobody Else Offers
Lennox has spent over sixty years having his faith interrogated in his debates with the world's leading atheists, and yet his conviction has only deepened. His critique of atheism is based on logic:
"Atheism goes too far. It undermines the very rationality we need to do science, let alone to believe in atheism."
But Lennox’s faith is not academic, it is personal. He continually pushes against abstract ideas of truth towards the understanding that God is a personal God who must be trusted and followed. Not that we can earn our way to God. Lennox understands deeply what grace means:
"The trust is based on what someone else has done - what Christ has done - not what I have done."
What does that faith look like from the outside? The podcast host Steven Bartlett - openly agnostic - noticed something. After the conversation he said:
"One of the most compelling arguments for God that you've presented... is not anything you've written in your books or anything you've said. It is actually you. You have a certain peace and contentment that I rarely see in people that I interview."
Lennox, unlike Bartlett, understands where that peace and contentment comes from:
"Christ offers me something nobody else offers me. Nobody else offers me peace. The peace of knowing that I have real forgiveness."
Throughout his writing and discussions, he repeatedly returns to the core ideas of the gospel: the incarnation of Christ, his death and resurrection, the forgiveness of sins and the hope of glory as truths which provide the solid foundation we need to face current cultural challenges as well as the universal problems of life and death.
Where to Start
John Lennox is as thoughtful and engaging in his writing as he is in discussion and debate. Here is where to start if you’d like to dig further into his thinking.
If you want to understand AI through a Christian lens, start with 2084 and the AI Revolution (2nd Edition). This is Lennox's primary work on AI - an excellent introduction and overview of the technology as well as the moral, ethical and societal challenges we face with its rise.
He does not shrink from AI's value but equally does not shy away from the problems with the transhuman agenda of some of its creators. And he refuses simplistic solutions, instead encouraging us to place our hope in Christ and the resurrection.
When discussing AI and where history may be heading, Lennox regularly quotes one of Lewis’ most important, but underrated works, The Abolition of Man, and its fictional counterpart, That Hideous Strength. Both are highly prophetic and relevant to our modern times.
To discover Lennox’s view of scripture, pick up one of his Biblical studies books – Against the Flow is about Daniel, Friend of God considers the life of Abraham and God, AI and the End of History is a careful commentary on the book of Revelation, with some applications to how we should consider AI.
If you want Lennox on science and faith, Can Science Explain Everything? is the place to start. Lennox captures many of the key components of his God-versus-science debates and outlines his logical, evidence-based approach. It's a great book for a sceptical friend who claims that science disproves God.
For younger readers - or children you want to equip before they step into a science classroom - Science and God: Do You Have to Choose? (co-written with Katy Morgan) takes the same ideas and presents them in a genuinely engaging way for ages 12 and up.
If you want the man himself, his memoir My Story: A Spiritual and Intellectual Autobiography has just been released. At 82, after fighting for the Christian faith for over sixty years, Lennox has taken the time to tell his story. It is a riveting journey through the life of a remarkable man.
Pick up one of his books at Koorong today and meet the man for yourself.
