John Lennox Calls Out Stephen Hawking

Speaking of, of Stephen Hawking, he was certainly a materialist. Um, and I think that he had, at least he was honest. He was very funny. I met him once. I asked him, why'd you write this book? A brief history of time. It was back in 1995 at a Royal society meeting. He could still respond in more or less real time. I said, Stephen, no one's read this book. And basically said, well, it's not important that they read it. It's just that they buy it. But the reason that he wrote it was that he needed to pay for his daughter's private education. So he was honest, but at the end of his book, he says, you know, if we, when we not, if we, but if, when we discover the laws of string theory, which are the mind of God, we will know the mind of God was that cynical. Did he insert that God? Because it would also lead to book sales. You know, every equation he said, cut your book sales in half, but every mention of God, he said doubles your books. What do you make of this, this relationship that he had with this, this kind of worship of science and the natural world and this acuity that he had, but also this kind of blindness to maybe what is really going on behind the scenes? Was it utilitarian? How did you, how do you think he viewed or would view LLMs and AGI right now? I have no idea. I always think it's, it's difficult to second guess what, what people really think, but I noticed this because I did read that book from beginning to end. And I noticed this and I thought, well, is he leaving a door open there, but in later life, he shut the door. It seemed he very clearly shut the door, at least as far as his public utterances went. But there's, there's another side. I understand that he began to attend church and he showed interest in that kind of not only spiritual dimension, but Christian dimension. I've met one or two people who talk to him about these things, but how deep it went, it's very hard to say. I think, I think Lord Rees made a point about Stephen and Lord Rees admired him. You know him, I'm sure very well. He's been on the podcast. He said about Stephen, he said he'd written papers with Stephen. I know Stephen very well and he knows virtually nothing about religion and very little about philosophy. And I wouldn't have done either of those things. What struck me about his books, very honestly, I was, I was hugely surprised. I saw an advanced copy of his, the last official book he wrote. And I wrote about it. I wrote a book called God and Stephen Hawking to try and put my thoughts together, which is still in print. And of course I never got any reaction to it from, from the Hawking side, but I just felt that with all his genius and logic and mathematical ability, his understanding of philosophy was extremely weak. I mean, that shouldn't surprise you. For a man to say that philosophy is dead and then write a book, the rest of his book on the philosophy of science wasn't exactly clever. I find that strange. I never met him, Brian. I remember seeing him because he was just beginning to show signs of his illness, walking around Cambridge. I went up in 1962, which is roughly the same time as he turned up a bit older than me to be a PhD student. So I remember him and he clearly was an absolute genius. And I've talked to people who worked with him. Einstein, you mentioned, is useful, of course, for many reasons. And one of the things is his famous rather dry observation that the scientist is a poor philosopher. That's right. Well, it goes back even to Galileo, you know, in his, in his first encounters with the telescope that he would say things like, well, the telescope obliterates the need for philosophers because you can prove with your eyes that the Milky Way is made up of stars, for example, which is wrong. And it's just amazing to look at how many of these great men and presumably, you know, their, their colleagues, you know, that they had great flaws. And I think when we lionize and we venerate them, we kind of worship them as gods, especially, you know, I've written about this in my book about the Nobel prize that we kind of, it's sort of a kosher idol, you know, for a voto Zara for idol worship, because it's not bad. Right. I mean, you're doing science and, but you literally, John, you go to Stockholm, you bend, you bow down, you receive a gilded graven image of Alfred Nobel, who's the patron saint or, you know, whatever of dynamite of dynamite, you know, the, the merchant of death, he was called, but getting back to Hawking. So one of the final things that I remember Roger Penrose has told me many times is that Steven was the best person to make a bet with, because no matter what side of the bet he chose, he would always flip flop. And so you'd be right. And you'd win the bet.