Iain Morris
John, as the Producer – or at least one of them – of this film, Against the Tide, it’s a privilege to talk to you, the central character in it. I’ve a number of questions I want to pose to you. And the first question I have for you is this: who are you? Who is John Lennox? What makes him tick?

John Lennox
Well, John Lennox is a person who was brought up to think and, coming from a profoundly real Christian background, I think what characterises my life more than anything else is the desire to know the truth – the truth about the big picture. I’m a mathematician; I’m a kind of scientist and interested in what nature can tell us. But that’s only part of a bigger question. Where do the natural sciences fit into the big picture? Do they tell us everything about reality? And because I believe in God, from a very early age, I wanted the evidences that would back up that belief and I spent most of my life attempting to understand those evidences by a very simple means; and that is to expose my faith in God and Christ to its opposites, to all manner of philosophies and religious and arguments that question it and all of these years I’ve tried to be open and honest. In other words, I’ve tried to listen to agnostics and atheists and people of other persuasions. I’ve tried to walk in their shoes and see with their eyes so that when I come to my own conclusions they are based on having considered what other people think and not simply being blinkered by blind faith by simply saying; I believe it.

Iain Morris
Blind faith. I heard you say that you believed from a very early age. Can I infer from that that there are problems lurking in the shadows for people who believe from a very early age and may just go on to accepting everything without challenging it?

John Lennox
Of course there are! But, you see, the basis of my belief when I was young was the hard evidence of seeing that Christianity was real in the life of my parents and they were unusual parents because they helped avoid the problem that you just mentioned by encouraging me to question my own beliefs. I always questioned my own beliefs before even I reached teenage and that was wonderful. In other words, let me put it this way. My parents encouraged me to think. They were convinced of the truth of Christianity and they wanted to give me the kind of education they didn’t have themselves and so from an early age they encouraged me to put Christianity against the background of questioning; in other words, they did the opposite of attempting to form a ghetto around me to protect me from the big world outside. They introduced me to the big world outside and, by doing so, through reading, through listening to lectures and so on they prepared me for it.

Iain Morris
What do you say to people who are a little bit afraid of this direction of travel and who would be concerned that, if we encourage people to ask questions, they may end up rejecting it all?

John Lennox
Well, there’s always that risk but you see that comes from a certain instability and fear. If Christianity is true, then we’ve nothing to fear and the only way to overcome the fear is to face the questions and not try to repress them or to supress them and I have found increasingly that, if you give people information and if you demonstrate to them that the arguments that they feel are so strong against God and against Christianity aren’t so strong after all, bit by bit their confidence increases; but if they never do that, you see they will grow up maybe to become professional people highly educated, but their spiritual knowledge will grow very slowly indeed and of course their peers will notice the difference and that increases the fear and results sadly for many people that their faith becomes privatised and then it disappears altogether under pressure.

Iain Morris
In your view, what is the intellectual firepower of atheism in relation to the Christian worldview?

John Lennox
Well atheist firepower I think is that atheism boasts quite a number of high powered public intellectuals. They’re given a lot of space on the media so that the public never gets a balanced view and gets the impression that the evidence for atheism is everything and there’s no evidence for anything else but the public never get the chance to hear the anything else and that is where I want to step into the frame and say: hold on minute; there are alternatives to this atheism and they are very much more powerful because their explanatory power is much greater of all that we see around us.

Iain Morris
A difficult question in a way. When you stand up against atheism, do you think you and the Christian view stand up tall or do you emerge bloodied but not bowed?

John Lennox
That’s a leading question I would say. I would incline to the fact that you might get a bash on your nose once or twice but intellectually, morally, spiritually, Christianity stands up tall because atheism, it’s atheism that crumbles. As a scientist, the very bottom line for me is that atheism doesn’t even give me a reason to trust the mind with which I do science because it tells me that the mind with which I’m doing science is essentially equal to the brain and the brain is the end product of a mindless, unguided process. Well no scientist I have ever asked would trust a computer if he or she thought it was the end product of a mindless, unguided process. So there’s a big black hole at the bottom of atheism’s thinking when it comes to science. Whereas, as a Christian I think, look, the justification for doing science, why science arose in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is that the pioneers believed in a God, an intelligent God who was behind the universe which was therefore a rational universe and therefore studying that universe could even be part of their worship for him. To me, there’s no competition between the atheist explanation and the Christian explanation.