#151 John Lennox - What Nearly Dying Taught Me About God
Within Reason
Alex J O'Connor
4.9 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 13 April 2026
⏱️ 79 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Get all sides of every story and be better informed at https://ground.news/AlexOC - subscribe for 40% off unlimited access.For early, ad-free access to videos, and to support the channel, subscribe to my Substack: https://www.alexoconnor.com.-John Lennox is a Northern Irish mathematician, bioethicist, and Christian apologist originally from Northern Ireland. He has written many books on religion, ethics, the relationship between science and God, and has had public debates with atheists including Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. -
Exclusive discount: Listeners to my show can get 30% Off John Lennox’s autobiography, My Story when shopping directly from his publishers. Visit https://spckpublishing.co.uk/my-story and enter AOC30 at checkout to get 30% off. - TIMESTAMPS00:00 - How Pressure Can Produce the Best Work02:29 - Does the Incarnation Make Sense?06:22 - John’s Richard Dawkins Debate14:39 - What Did the New Atheists Get Wrong About God?26:21 - Science Cannot Explain Everything31:22 - What Did the New Atheists Get Right?35:18 - Why Does God Hide From So Many People?44:36 - Why Does God Allow Arbitrary Suffering?56:25 - Is Faith “Belief Without Evidence”?1:00:33 - How Could God Punish a Mere Lack of Faith?1:08:14 - How Christopher Hitchens Agreed with Jesus1:13:03 - Does Christianity Cause Evil?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | John Lennox, welcome back to the show. |
| 0:01.6 | Thank you very much, Alex. |
| 0:03.1 | How are you? |
| 0:04.9 | I'm good, better than I deserve, actually. |
| 0:07.6 | But I've lost a bit of weights as I last saw you. |
| 0:11.4 | So I'm actually feeling in good form. |
| 0:13.8 | That's good. |
| 0:14.3 | I was really glad to sit down with you last time and have a conversation which we were just talking about. |
| 0:20.8 | It attracted a lot of attention. It's got more |
| 0:22.8 | than a million views on the main video and interestingly it's a moment near the end that seems |
| 0:27.9 | to have captured people's attention where I, silly of me, I sort of bring up the problem of evil |
| 0:34.1 | when we've sort of got about maybe five minutes left in the tank and you say, oh well, |
| 0:58.6 | that's maybe a conversation for another time, but I'll give you one thing. And people really sort of took to that. That seems to be the main thing that people enjoyed about the podcast. That's interesting. Interesting. I find that sometimes when you are sort of making an offhand comment with not very much time and you're forced to make something very succinctly, it can be some of the most effective rhetoric. And this also happened to you with your first debate with Richard Dawkins, didn't it? It did indeed. Towards the end, we got a message |
| 1:05.5 | that neither of us expected, that we'd only got two minutes left. And in fact, we'd been told in advance that |
| 1:13.6 | we had nine minutes to make a concluding speech. And of course, I'd spent hours in doing this. |
| 1:21.5 | And two minutes, wrap it up, finish, you see. So I decided to go for the heart of Christianity, which was the resurrection. |
| 1:30.1 | And again, that bit went viral. You're quite right. People paid attention to it because Dawkins |
| 1:35.8 | reacted very strongly against it and said, how petty. We've been talking all about great |
| 1:43.0 | philosophical ideas and so on. And now we come to the resurrection of Jesus. |
| 1:48.8 | I almost remember his exact words, it's so unworthy of the universe. |
| 1:53.5 | And I remember thinking on that, if the resurrection actually happened, it's one of the biggest things because death is the ultimate mystery |
| 2:03.6 | and it comes to us all. But you're right, it did, it caught them at the end. And in fact, |
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