let's kick off with a few of these very popular questions um so you've you've spoken at length about science and Faith this evening but one of the most popular questions here is do you think there could be other forms of life in the universe and I suppose I would like to ask and if there were would it matter I was asked I was at a launch of a book by Professor Paul Davis a physicist and his book is called are we alone and I was interviewed and I was being interviewed by a certain station called
Premier Christian radio I don't know whether you remember I remember the interview well it was one of the first times I'd had you on the show and I brought you on with with Paul Davis that's right and Paul Davis said it as a scientist he thought that we weren't Al we were alone but as a person he hope we weren't alone and then I was asked uh did I believe that there were other intelligence in the universe I said yes and one very big one called God and quite seriously from a Christian perspective there are
other intelligences in the universe of course there are and God is the greatest one but there are others because we are told that there are beings in some sense above us the Bible calls them Spirit beings they're not uh made of matter as we understand it angels and so on so there are others this whole universe is much more comple complex than we think and our vision we don't see everything so I think there are and it does matter infinitely because if we were the only intelligences around we'd be left uh with the question as
to where we come from but because we know about God then we've got a huge answer to that question thank you so much from the sublime to the almost ridiculous um in this question there are lots of theories in our internet age um floating around and interestingly one of the ones that has sort of had a bizarre Revival is the idea that we're living on a flat Earth and and someone and this has been this is the most popular question according to the likes what do you think about the Flat Earth debate John nothing at
all really I I mean but in all seriousness there's it for me it's it's a sign of the fact we live in an age where almost anything can get air time these days and that's true was the CH Chester say that if people reject God they don't believe in nothing they end up believing in anything and and it just shows there's masses of ridiculous things that people believe and that is the thing that staggers me taking the question seriously they will believe that kind of thing for which the evidence is all contrary And yet when
it comes to seriously set forward uh arguments and reasons for believing in God they won't even listen to them there's a double think and I would go as far as to say that there's a reason for it there a very interesting statement that Paul made that the God of this world has blinded the minds of those who don't believe that there is an enemy who sets the thought forms of the world and Paul analyzes the intellectual darkness that comes about in Romans when people reject God they end up worshiping stones and inanimate things they ascribe
Creator power to Nature because they don't believe in God and some of it is utterly absurd and yet that is what happens and I would describe it as intellectual Darkness but there's an enemy behind it thank you this is a very popular question what do you think why do you think Christianity is on the decline in Europe especially amongst young people that's very complex I think historically you you're probably better positioned to answer that than I am there are roots in history going back to the enlightenment of the the the evils perpetuated by some professing
branches of the Christian church have died hard the fact that in the whole EU Constitution the word God is not mentioned at all the fact that our major institutions are all of them virtually as Tom Holland and Jordan Peterson and other people are pointing out are all traceable back to scripture yet that's a brushed out of History so that we are educating young people we're in that sense brainwashing them and not telling them the facts so that they just don't know and it's not surprising you see let me put it very crudely if you tell
people constantly young people that there's no meaning in life they are simply animals moderately sophisticated animals they'll end up Bel leaving you and therefore their behavior will not be governed by any sense of morality and it it is frightening to read things like this a class of students asked this um give an example of a moral dilemma answer what is a moral dilemma we are in serious trouble folks but I'm glad you said in Europe because there are other parts of the world where Christianity is growing and thriv thriving and they are often the parts
where there's been much more persecution and somebody pointed out to me the other day if you take the whole of the Bible how much of it was written at a time when there was no persecution and trouble very little and we have had an experience in Europe at least until relatively recently without War for an unusual period of time and unfortunately into the vacuum there has poured all this kind of uh stuff postmodernism atheism all the rest of it and it has had an effect in our society but please feel free to add to that
justtin because from your perspective I I I wouldn't disagree with anything that that you've said there John I I think that we are living in the Wake if you like of many different forces that have led to the the way in which religion is now seen as a a private hobby almost and to that extent it's part of the the fact that our cultures are increasingly mobile fluid many Community institutions have broken down because of the the focus on individualism in our culture and so there I think there's a lot of things and alongside that
goes obviously the this materialism this this story of materialism that obviously convinces people without good foundation that that there is no God and so on I think I'm encouraged and part of the the story I tell in in my new book is that actually people can only live on those those thin versions of reality for so long though until actually people do start to come back and ask is this the way life is meant to be lived and and I'm encouraged actually that I see a lot of young people almost as we reach a point
where there's almost no familiarity with the Christian Story one of the the good things about that is that you don't have the the assumption that you know what it is uh and and it's sometimes it's actually easier to start telling people what it is when they don't know anything about it rather than those who who think they know what it is but actually have a rather a false false idea of it in their head so I think I think we should we should be encouraged I mean let me skip to this question since we're talking
about this and this is obviously um you know a lot of people here from the Romanian diaspora and someone asked what is your advice for the Romanian Community specifically the Christian Romanian Community for improving the belief climate in the UK any any thoughts on that John well I have had the privilege of being in Romania several times the first time I went I was poisoned deliberately by the secret police and it wow it nearly killed me gosh and I looked back to that and the Lord preserved me because I went to visit some marvelous Christians
there but I've been back since and they don't feed you poison anymore and they don't have the poison I think I could say but you need to ask Samuel about that they haven't been infected by all the poisons of atheism that we have in the west so I I think you've got and what I saw at my brief visits you got much more sense of togetherness as Christians well let's ask a Romanian yes I think Samuel needs to You' probably be very well positioned to to this question of how how how Ro the Romanian Christian
Community can specifically en encourage belief in in in the west well I think the Romanian diaspora Community is very strong here in London and in the UK there are many Evangelical churches in London and I think one of the reasons that Romanians believe in God and keep their faith although they they live in a very secularized society and culture is because of Communism and communism promoted atheism as the national ideology and Romanians have lived this uh for several decades and experien what that means and it simply doesn't work so that's one of the reasons that
Romanians and Eastern Europe in general remained a very religious Society it still is and I think Romanians and other International diaspora communities such as this the Polish diaspora Community for example can and may indeed um uh revive Christianity and bring a new new energy in terms of Living Faith in a secular culture as the UK I think that's absolutely true and I spent many years I started going to Eastern Europe in 1976 and traveled many times particularly to Hungary Poland and above all East Germany and I came to the conclusion that many of our modern
mod day so-called new atheists or P have not got a clue about what atheism does to a culture and as Romanians you know and because you know you can be a force for enormous good in our society when people start talking about these things you could just say just wait a minute let me tell you what it was like to live under the securitate and the secret place and I saw this again and again in East Germany which was almost stalinist and I went there many times you've got a huge contribution to make and I
think Samuel's absolutely right and I would encourage you to be a source of push back against this kind of thing I remember once talking in Russia actually in Siberia to an academ miss about the difference between the east East and the west and he said in the both parts of the world you've got materialism you've got the material we haven't but it's the same philosophy and that's the tragedy the stuff that you were taught under Marxism is very a very little distance Bel below the surface of some of the leading intellectuals in the west today
it's the same materialis as a philosophy but it's mixed with the consumerism that you didn't have in those days and because you know what it's like to be deprived of many things because of an ideology the Christian ideology or worldview is much more precious to you because of what it's done and so you have a huge contribution to make just before we go to a question from the floor there's just one more that links really well in with what you've just been talking about John which is Andre who asks can you share with us a
short short story from your experience before 1990 behind the Iron Curtain that could help our faith because this is a fascinating aspect of your life that perhaps not that many people know that that you moved and and worked among people you know in Soviet Russia and so on yes well before 1990 I wasn't in Russia I went there first in in 1989 90 but let me go years before that to East Germany and I'll tell you one story of a girl called Esther and she was a very bright girl she'd been top of her class
in school and I happened to be there I'm a German speaker that's why I could move easily in East Germany and she came home from school weeping our heart out while we were there and we said Esther what's wrong she said the teacher has just told me I've got to leave school and go and work in a slipper Factory now this girl had been top of her class in every year but at the age of 13 she was asked to take an oath of public allegiance to the atheistic State and she said I'm a Christian
I can't do that and she was crying and we were weeping with her but I said Esther what did you say to the teacher I'll never forget her answer said Uncle John I said said to the teacher sir one day you will stand before God and you will answer for what you've done to me this day I never forgot that it stealed me to redouble my efforts to fight this ideology for the rest of my life and that's what I've tried to do with God's help to fight what is driving the most extreme things on
the planet and one of them is the persecution of the Wagers but all this kind of stuff comes from not a rejection of God but a hatred of God and just that one thing encapsulates it wonderful let's have a question here many wars are fought in the name of God if God really cares why is he allowing these things to happen and the next is even many lives are lost in natural disasters innocent lives where is God when all these things happening well thank you that's the hardest question you can ask it's the hardest question
for anyone of any world view the problem of evil and suffering and I would want really to be fair to your question to have an hour to talk about it at least because there are no simplistic answers to this but I'll try and say something briefly you referred very briefly and concisely to two problems there's a problem of moral evil the bad things people do to one another Wars as we see it horribly these days then there's a problem of what's called natural eval which is a bit of a a misnomer and that is catastrophes
diseases cancers tsunamis all earthquakes all that kind of thing now how do we face that and I I'm going to cut to the middle of that and tell you where I begin to see a possibility I have no simplistic answer because there isn't one but there are two ways of looking at it the person who's suffering sees it in a very different way from say me who's watching The Suffering in other words cancer looks very different in the eyes of a a young mother who's just been told she's got 6 months to live and in
the eyes of the oncologist who's treating her so there are two different size and the person that's watching tends to have a more intellectual response they're full of big questions the other person is in utter pain and needs comfort and help and encouragement now how do we face it well I'll tell you how I begin to face it the way you formulate the question is a very common one and it's been there for centuries if there's a good and all powerful God how is it that the world is like this now let me look at
it from the theoretical perspective first because I'm afraid I'm a theorist above all and if you want to me to tell you about suffering just see me in a dentists um seriously though many people respond to this and say therefore there's no God and many of my friends do and I've been in oits many times and I've wept every time it it breaks my heart to see what's going on in a country that I love in Ukraine been there many times all those cities I know them all so what how do we respond well there's
no God now people that take that view think they solved the problem they've got rid of God that's true but they've also got rid by definition of all hope the situation for them is totally hopeless but actually they've got rid of the problem of evil now this is a more serious philosophical point so if you don't like philosophy go to sleep and tell you when to wake up um the whole concept of evil I believe is directly related to the existence of God dovi the famous Russian novelist said once yes if God does not exist
everything is permitted in other words he didn't mean atheists Can't Behave he meant there's no reason for believing in Good and Evil and Richard Dawkin says exactly that he says this universe is just what you'd expect it to be if at bottom there's no good no evil no justice DNA just is and we dance to its music that's atheism removing moral Concepts but that doesn't work because Dawkins doesn't even work for him because he knows he's a moral being and therefore he talks about the problem of evil so there are many reasons that atheism doesn't
work intellectually but that's not going to help a person who's suffering come now to the other side very briefly when I was a student we used to have long discussions well if God is all powerful and he's all good and we never solve the problem never I've never heard a good answer to the solution now I'm a mathematician and when mathematicians try for centuries to solve a problem they usually ask themselves are we asking the right question so let me reformulate the question what are we faced with a mixed picture I call it Beauty and
barbed wire Beauty and bombs we look out at a story night we see the Andromeda galaxy and the it's absolutely magnificent and then we turn on the television and we watch what's happening in Ukraine Beauty and bombs we all have to face that now how are we going to face that mixed picture there's Beauty that's a mystery if everything's evil how is it that we get like like that and now I ask myself a question that's just as hard and it's this we've all got to grant that it's a mixed picture is there any evidence
anywhere that there's a God that we could trust with it that's an equally hard question but I believe that question brings us further and it takes us directly to the cross because the claim is and I often say to people please listen to what Christianity claims before you reject it the claim is that the one on the cross is God himself God incarnate so what if I I put it bluntly is God doing on a cross suffering well it certainly means that he hasn't remained distant from our human suffering but but has become part of
it that's the first thing the heart of God revealed now of course if that's where it had ended we'd never have heard of Jesus the next bit is where the Resurrection comes into Central role I would have no hope I wouldn't be sitting here trying to answer your question if I didn't believe that God had raised Jesus from the dead and that's where the Hope comes you see atheism is a hopeless Faith literally hopeless there's no hope now where can we get hope what has the atheist got to say to the young mother with cancer
nothing have I got anything to say as a Christian I can't promise her that she'd be cured although I know God has the power to do it but what I can bring to her is a message of hope that she can have a personal relationship with Christ that will transcend death and have something there to leave her children with now I was in Christ Church New Zealand the same week as the earthquake and I spoke about this and when I'd finished a huge audience one of the biggest that they'd seen in the church for many
years there was a note left from for me from a lady and it just said I lost my husband last week and she said what you said is the first glimmer of hope I've got glimmer of hope and I believe scripture analyzes this very carefully I haven't time to go into it in detail sir but in John 11 there is the story of what happens when people suffer Lazarus died the sisters expected Jesus to be there and cure him he wasn't there Jesus let the man die and it nearly brought them to doubt the love
of God and when he eventually came and Lazarus was dead the sister said if you had been here he wouldn't have died and then he suddenly told Martha I am the resurrection and the life now that whole story I believe shows us how this problem on the one side can lead people to doubt the love of God but how Christ answers it by being the Resurrection on the life my final point is I've tried to put this together briefly in a little book that circled the world it's called where is God in a Corona virus
world but that'll have to do for that well thank you so much I with a apologies to many other people who have wanted to ask a question in person because time is drawing to a close I'm just going to finish with with a final question from slido John and this is um well I'm going to give you two actually because I think they're substantially the same question both um very popular someone asks when Muslim people do what we do which is believing what they're taught by their parents and carrying on their faith what makes them
wrong and us right and to sum up that question someone else asks how do you prove that Christianity is the true religion and other religions are false thanks for that I'm glad to hear that question because it's it's important I never try to answer that question without saying this when we start to talk about the differences between religions there is huge danger of looking down at other people now it is very important to go back to something that Samuel said in our interview every man woman on the planet is a person of infinite worth made
in the image of God and often you find that in essence the differences between religions are not moral differences there are differences in what people believe about how you relate to God and you will find that many of our Muslim friends and Hindu friends and others have a strong moral code why is that from where I said it's because they're made in the image of God their moral beings and scripture tells us clearly that pagans can sometimes put professed Believers in God to shame Abraham in particular the father of faith and a pagan Egyptian pharaoh
had a higher moral standard than he did now it's so important to say that because the moment you start to critique people think you are assuming you're better than they are morally we not my atheist friends could put me to shame and you know Christians have been caught out in all kinds of things so we need to be very careful that we first recognize that the people we're talking about are made in the image of God and therefore as creatures of God have infinite value now once we've said that we can now come to the
next question because there's respect there the second point is well let me take the three great monotheistic religions or we'll be here all night Judaism Christianity and Islam now you could leave Christian ity out Judaism and Islam are not going to agree about well what is Central to Christianity I might as well bring it in again think of Jesus or Esau as Muslims call him Yeshua uh as the Jews call him my Jewish friends believe that he died and didn't rise my Muslim friends believe he didn't die I believe he died and Rose those three
things cannot be simultaneously correct and when I find I talk about this in public my Jewish and Muslim friends are not they agree they just do not agree on what is Central now how are you going to decide it well I know of no other way on a matter of evidence and then we discuss that but there's another approach and that is this and this is I think uh the Crux of the matter people often say to me you know you're a scientist and you talk about evidence for God the universe and all that's marvelous
but you're a Christian how do you bridge the gap between belief in God as the god of the universe and a specifically Christian message well I say let's look at it this way the heart of Christianity is rather different from what many people expect and if I am to explain that I often ask people I say first of all tell me what a religion is what do you think a religion is and I come up with a little illustration of it I often put it to them and say is your view of religion like this
you've got a ceremony at the beginning some sort of initiation that puts you on a path and I usually draw a wavy line ups and downs and you stay on the path the sick full path or whatever whatever it is the way Etc and you've got various people to help you priests gurus imams all the rest of it and then you come to a gate at the end where I draw some scales of justice and at the end you're faced with an assessment of your behavior and your Deeds up to that point and if you
pass the grade you get accepted into whatever it is nirvana heaven or whatever and most people will tell me that is what we believe and I say perhaps the best way to think about it is like a university course you have an entrance and then you study at the University every University in Britain and around the world works this way the professors may be the best in the world but they cannot guarantee you a degree why because the whole principle of universities is you get a agree on the basis of your Merit and if you
don't earn it Merit it you don't get it yes and many people say yes that is religion I've been told that by hundreds of people well I said you see that isn't Christianity and they say oh yes it is now here where the problem lies many people think that Christianity is like that you pile up your good deeds you try and please God and you hope at the end that he won't take his law too seriously and we'll let you in but you see it's not like that folks Christianity the acceptance is not at the
end of The Journey at the Judgment it's at the beginning of the journey at the cross now this is utterly revolutionary in that sense Christianity is not a religion it isn't it certainly has a path and a way but the path follows acceptance it doesn't come before it because the unique thing about Christianity is that at the very beginning what Jesus offers me is that if I Repent that is turn away from the mess I've made of life and maybe other people's lives sadly and trust him as Savior and Lord who died for me then
he will give me then right then the acceptance that's hugely important you see let me give you an illustration this is so important because I meet dozens of people that don't understand this even in this country 56 years ago now nearly I met a girl she was lovely so I decided I'd like to marry her so I came along and I gave her a lovely present it was wrapped up and I said Sally I'd like you to be my wife now here's a present so she opened it and it was a cookbook so I said
read page 153 apple cake Thou shalt take so much flour Thou shalt take so much sugar Thou shalt take and thou shalt put in the oven and bacon so on now I said my dear I would like you to take this book and if you keep these rules let's say let's be reasonable for the next 40 years then I will accept you otherwise you can go back to your mother why are you laughing folks that is how millions of people think about God you would never insult a fellow human being and I mean this very
seriously you would never insult a fellow human being by making acceptance dependent on their performance do you think God does that that's turning God into a monster and that's why you laughed it's is ridiculous of course I didn't do that now the amazing thing is she accepted me it's not amazing that I accepted her but it's amazing she accepted me and what does that do does that mean she doesn't care about how she lives and how she cooks of course not but she's not cooking to earn my affection she's cooking because she's got it and
here am I tonight talking to you interviewing why do you think I do it do you think I'm doing it to earn Brony points that God will accept me not at all all I'm doing it because I know my acceptance doesn't depend on it and that's the difference now let me put it this way so it's really sharp in your minds and it could help you to explain this to people Christianity does not compete with any other religion why not because Jesus offers me something none of them offer me so it's no brainer here to
accept from him something that nobody else offers me nobody else offers me forgiveness on such terms and acceptance and love at the very beginning under a relationship and that's the reason I'm a Christian thank [Applause] you
