Oxford’s top maths professor John Lennox: ‘The devil could use AI to destroy the world’
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Peter Stanford
Peter Stanford is a senior features writer for The Telegraph, a regular broadcaster, and a former editor of the Catholic Herald. An Oxford-educated historian and author of acclaimed biographies on religious history and culture, he commentates on ethics, faith, and society.
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Published<br>22 June 2026 11:38am BST
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Religion,
Artificial Intelligence,
Christianity,
University of Oxford,
Richard Dawkins
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Prof John Lennox, 82, is devoting his formidable intellect and camera-ready persona to sounding the alarm about a future dominated by robots
Credit: Andrew Crowley for The Telegraph
Peter Stanford
Peter Stanford is a senior features writer for The Telegraph, a regular broadcaster, and a former editor of the Catholic Herald. An Oxford-educated historian and author of acclaimed biographies on religious history and culture, he commentates on ethics, faith, and society.
See more
Published<br>22 June 2026 11:38am BST
For someone whose latest analysis of the current plight of the world includes in its title the announcement of “the end of history”, Prof John Lennox is a remarkably cheerful soul. Though his message is stark on the risks posed by the breakneck expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) – the full title of his book is God, AI and the End of History – and the failure of governments to regulate it adequately, he somehow manages to share this dystopian picture with a smile on his face and the gentle lilt of his native Northern Ireland in his voice.<br>The combination is as incongruous as Lennox’s very public embrace of both religion and science. He has long been one of that rare cohort of world-renowned scientists – he is emeritus professor of mathematics at Oxford, author of 70 peer-reviewed papers – who is also a life-long devout Christian (he reports with undisguised pleasure that such ranks are swelling right now).<br>He has happily, he tells me, taken on the leading “new atheist” Richard Dawkins in a series of public platform debates. “They’re still online if you want to watch them.” When I did – and two million people viewed their 2008 head-to-head in Oxford titled ‘Has Science Buried God?’ – I found the two to be well-matched intellectually, but Lennox’s relaxed good humour and ability to keep cool under provocation most remarkable in the face of an uptight Dawkins’s taunts and sneering language about God.
Lennox, right, was taunted about God by Richard Dawkins, left, during their 2008 debate in Oxford
Lennox is very much in favour of open debate more generally, I should note. We meet shortly after the recent row in his own university over Michael Foran, a Keeble College law professor, whose lecture series on gender identity was cancelled after protests by pro-trans activists – a decision which he deplores. “All these people looking for safe spaces and not wanting to hear other things! Let them go home to their mummies. It is the beginning of a totalitarianism of the mind.”<br>“Universities moving towards teaching people only what they want to hear is the end of universities,” he adds. “And schools. We need to get back to the classical notion of teaching people how to think, not what to think.”<br>Totalitarianism is in his crosshairs when it comes to AI too. The 82-year-old is devoting his formidable intellect and camera-ready persona these days to ringing loud alarm bells about a future dominated by robots because of its risk of falling into the hands of the malign operator. “It is a risky technology to put into hands of bad actors because it has the capacity to support authoritarianism and totalitarianism.”<br>“The number one bad actor is the devil,” he adds, effortlessly switching between science and religion. “So you could say, AI can be used by the devil, but it can also be used by God.”<br>Note that glimmer of hope, because, despite the book’s title, that is what Lennox seeks to convey: that AI’s replacement of human beings with a machine isn’t inevitable. In his lived-in suit and blue, open-necked shirt, he is settled in a deep armchair opposite me in Yarnton Manor, a Jacobean manor house outside Oxford, now used as a theological education centre. It feels a strange setting to...