John Lennox TRUTH BOMB That Everyone MISSED? | Pastor Reacts

John Lennox on the Serpent, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and Objective Morality

John Lennox, one of the most important Christian thinkers alive today, in my opinion, has a fascinating conversation with Jordan Peterson. It's got over half a million views in just a few weeks' time, but what caught my eye is the most replayed moment in the entire interview.

I think people watched this and did not even realize that Lennox drops a truth bomb in the middle of the conversation that I think powerfully argues in favor of the Christian worldview. What is that moment?

We'll get right into it. If you're new here, my name is Nate Zala, and this is Wise Disciple, where I'm helping you become the effective Christian that you are meant to be. I'm not calling myself wise, okay?

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So that knowing good and evil. So, I think the Luciferian temptation is that—is part of that offering of becoming as gods is to offer to people the possibility of defining good and evil as subjective creatures,.

Right?

So—.

That's a fascinating take. I hope you're taking notes, okay, guys, because we're going to go quick. Peterson almost always has such thought-provoking content, and this is no exception. So Peterson is suggesting that what the serpent did in the Garden by tempting Eve was way more than disobey their Creator.

The temptation was designed to turn Adam and Eve into their own gods. And once you become your own god, then you get to define what good and evil is, right and wrong. That's what Peterson says essentially happened in the Garden of Eden.

It's a fascinating take, because in, you know, my circles where I roll, I often run up against folks who advocate for something called social contract theory, which is the idea that groups of people get together and they decide what is right and wrong for them.

This would be like in a societal context, and this is usually done in connection to the notion that God does not exist, and therefore objective morality does not exist. What Peterson is suggesting is this whole activity is an exercise in becoming your own god.

So the prohibition that God places on humanity in Genesis is to not eat of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, and it's a very complicated narrative trope. But one of the, what would you say, the connotations, right, the implications, is that there are moral guidelines that are absolute, that aren't within the human realm of the knowledge.

It's partly the knowledge, the ability to manipulate, the ability to change or even to define. The fundamental moral propositions are transcendent and axiomatic, and they're not in the proper domain of human maneuvering.

It's something like that. And the serpent says to man, no, you can take it all. You can have full knowledge even of the moral axioms. And that seems to be something that's, what would you say, that's off limits if the game of being itself is to progress without catastrophe.

So that's, to a lot of people, what Jordan Peterson just said is going to sound like gobbledygook. But what I think Peterson is searching for, because it seems like he's searching for the words, is a way of describing, again, what happened in the Garden of Eden.

Here's what happened. Genesis chapter 2 verse 16,. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.

So what happens next? Chapter 3,. Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, Did God actually say, You shall not eat of any tree in the garden?

And the woman said to the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.

Now, what's interesting about that is God never said that, lest, neither shall you touch.

It.

That's not what God said. Video for another time. Verse 4, But the serpent said to the woman, You will not surely die, for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.

So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.

Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. This is one of the most famous stories of all time, okay? And what Peterson is suggesting is, the reason why the tree was forbidden, which also explains the serpent's motivation to entice Eve to eat of it in the first place, is because mankind does not have the capacity to have this kind of knowledge.

Whatever the tree of the knowledge of good and evil represents, Peterson is suggesting that it represented a level of knowledge that only belonged to the Lord, who is the objective moral standard of what is good and evil.

And when Adam and Eve ate of the fruit, sure they gained something out of it, but they didn't truly become like God, they actually became their own gods, which is precisely when they started to die.

I think it's exactly like that, because what is interesting about Genesis is that the first encounter we have with morality in the pages of Genesis, morality is defined not horizontally between humans, but vertically between humans and God, and that's crucial.

It's God that defines it ultimately, so there is a transcendence from the very beginning.

This is interesting too, because the first sin, right, is the moment that Adam and Eve seek to know something without God's involvement, right? And what is that something, morality? They want to know morality, good and evil, without God, without God giving them the fruit of that knowledge from himself.

And then what happens next? Cain kills Abel, right? The blood cries out of the ground. Sin becomes so rampant that just a few chapters later in Genesis 6, it says, verse 5,. So it's not random that the tree is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

The moment that Adam and Eve ate of that fruit, subjective morality is born. Hey, real quick, I'm so grateful that you're watching. If I've earned the right to get your sub, I'd love it if you would just click the like and subscribe button.

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And it's the loss of that transcendence that we're seeing damaging our culture today because we've lost that common sense of values that, however distorted it has been over the centuries, that we did owe to the biblical tradition, and now we wander in total confusion.

And it interests me greatly that the pressure, particularly on young people today, is to look inside for answers to these questions when what we need to be teaching them is, no, look outside and have your mind open to the fact that transcendence is real and that there is a God and there is something bigger.

There's something more than materialism is giving you.

That's one of the central themes of Paul Gould's book, Cultural Apologetics. It's a great read. Highly recommend that read to you. It came out a few years back. But in the book, he says that creation is haunted.

There is transcendence in this world. There is a spiritual dimension, an unseen realm, as Michael Heiser put it. But we all walk around as if it's not there. Even many of us in the church, we act like practical atheists throughout the day.

Why Subjective and Consensus Morality Fail

Okay, so let's take that apart a bit. You could imagine that there could be three sources of moral knowledge. That's the kind of knowledge that orients you in the world. And one source could be the subjective.

Now, we've already talked about the limitations there is that while you don't live very long and what the hell do you know and what do you mean by the subjective, like which part of you, and then there's the danger of elevating yourself to the status of final moral arbiter, which is a kind of Luciferian presumption.

Okay, so those seem like bad pitfalls. The next objection you might say is like, okay, well, you can't do it just subjectively. I am who I am, which is certainly the proclamation in our culture. You could do it by consensus.

So we're nearing the moment that is the most replayed of this entire conversation. This is why I wanted to make the video with you. Okay, but here's the setup. So pay close attention.

You know, and that's more of a, that's more of the view that, well, the group gets together and sort of decides by general agreement what right and wrong is, and that can shift with time and place. But as long as everybody is willing to abide by the same principles, then we can define them canonically as good or as good.

But there's the problem with that is you run.

Yeah, go on. There's a huge problem with that. You tell me what your problem with it is, and then I'll tell you mine.

Well, my problem with that is the Nazi Germany problem. It's like, well, what the hell happens when the whole herd stampedes towards hell? If you're a consensus person and there's nothing else there, it's like, well, there's no hell.

That's consensus. And so the consensus, by definition, is right. And so if everyone decides that no Jews would be better, who the hell are you to stand in.

The way?

And, you know, if—.

Yeah, so this has always been one of the obvious outcomes of social contract theory, which is Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. And what is the response from the social contract theory folks whenever Christians bring this.

Up?

They all of a sudden flip and become objective moralists. They all of a sudden secretly sneak in some axiomatic objective moral values into the system in order to get it up and running, and then they want to back off and do social contract theory the rest of the time.

There is no logically consistent answer for someone who says morality is purely subjective and wants to adopt social contract theory. When they get pressed and someone asks about the Nazis, which is a real world example of what that looks like, all of a sudden objective morality exists, guys.

That's what happens. That's what most people do. There are always some outliers who try to be logically consistent, but then they have to say with a straight face that what the Nazis did was not objectively evil, which always leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

If you're willing to stand up and say, well, you should stand in the way, well, right. So upon what grounds do you make that claim? Because it's not merely subjective. So that brings us back to the problem of transcendent morality.

OK, so you were going to talk about the problems of consensus.

Yes, it's exactly right. That is the problem with utilitarianism.

OK, here's the moment that is the most rewatched. OK, check out Lennox's comments right here.

Treating others as you want them to treat you and by consensus is fine if you've got equal centers of power. If you've got a whole lot of equal centers of power vying with one another, then you can say if you don't do this, I won't do that.

But the very interesting thing about the case in point you mentioned, Nazi Germany, Hitler, in his political youth, made treaties, but he tore them up once he had the power. And if people say you shouldn't do that, he said, what do you mean you shouldn't?

I've got the power. So it doesn't answer the question why ought you to go with the herd and murder so many Jews? And that's a huge weakness. It's all right if you're dividing ice cream among children, then utilitarianism is fine.

Give an equal amount to all of them or you'll be in trouble. But at the higher level, it's shot through with this problem of the total absence of any transcendence. The oughtness has to come from above.

Why Transcendence Is Necessary for Moral Meaning

Ah, I don't know if a lot of folks appreciate what just happened in the span of like 60 to 80 seconds right there. What Lennox just said, which is so profound, is essentially this. If you try to scratch beneath the surface in order to determine why social contract theory is horrifically flawed, you'll get to might makes right, right?

Which is what they were talking about just a moment ago. You know, I have the power, Hitler, all that. That's might makes right. Okay. Might makes right alone should be a powerful talking point to undercut social contract theory.

That's what he's, again, the whole thing about equal but separate spheres of power, that's what he's referring to. You know, these equal but separate spheres, they need to exist in order for one sphere not to get power hungry and take over the other spheres, which is exactly human nature for folks to do, right, who get power.

I grew up hearing absolute power corrupts absolutely. You know, I don't hear that anymore in school, but that's what I heard. If you're my age, maybe you can give a like on that. Hitler tore up the agreements that he made with other groups because he had the power, right?

That's might makes right. But it's even worse than that for nonbelievers, because the moment you deny transcendence is the moment that you completely erase good and evil in an individual's actions. Let that sink in, it's one thing to use our words and call things good and evil, but most of us don't realize that we're doing that because the words we're using are describing people's actions.

The moment that you remove transcendence, and by that I mean objective moral values and duties, right? That's, you know, the William Lane Craig sort of characterization. Then nothing anyone does has any moral meaning.

That means that all of our actions are amoral. They have no morality baked into them at all. But yet, for some reason, we walk around in society using moral words, OK? That means morality only exists in our language.

They don't exist in our actions at all. If there is no transcendence, think about that. That means that essentially like we're like children drawing pictures of things that we've never seen and that do not exist.

They're just lines on a piece of paper that have no ultimate meaning. That's what it's like to walk around using words like good and evil and also saying at the same time that there is no such thing as objective good and evil.

And that has to be the toughest pill you have to swallow. If you want to deny that objective morality and in essence God exists. I saw this in the classroom when I was a public high school teacher. You know, I had students come in every year with the same affliction.

They had no idea that there was transcendence in the universe. They were taught that the only things that exist are the physical. Beauty is not transcendent. Morality is certainly not transcendent. None of these things are.

And yet deep down, I knew they felt differently. Somewhere deep down, they knew on a felt level that what they were being implicitly taught is not true. And so I tried to set the stage with my students in the first couple of weeks because, you know, that's where you're getting to know each other.

The students are getting to know me. I'm getting to know them. Right. And I would talk and propose three things that I asked them to consider and agree with me on right in the first week. Three key propositions.

Life is a mystery that must be solved. The only things that should be believed are those supported with the best reasons. And truth. So this is capital T truth, right, is objective. It's not subjective.

If I got my students to agree on those things, the whole world was our oyster. We could now start talking about the things that truly mattered in a way that set my students up to understand the world as it really is.

And you see how, like, none of this was me proselytizing in the class, right? I wasn't doing any of that at all. And yet if I wanted to, there are some very easy doorways into conversations about God.

And one of those doorways is what I'm trying to communicate to you today. One of those doorways is transcendence. Are there truths, things that are true, that transcend our subjective experience? Are there moral values and obligations that transcend us all and therefore obligate us all to align to them?

Are there things outside this universe and is there something about ourselves that is transcendent, that transcends the physical? And the answer is yes. The moment you say no, that's impossible, right?

You end up in these goofy outcomes like social contract theory, which makes all human action amoral and paves the way for all kinds of heinous acts of evil. Hopefully this gives you some pieces to chew on and think about as you get out there and engage others for Christ.

Closing Reflections and Patreon Sign-Off

So grateful for John Lennox, thankful for his brilliant mind. But that's all the time that we have for this interview. Okay, now it's your turn. Okay. Did you see this interview with John Lennox and Jordan Peterson?

What are your thoughts about it? Let me know in the comments below. As always, if you made it this far, you need to join my Patreon community. The time is now, okay? Even just to read the Bible with me, you can join Patreon for free and jump into my Bible studies.

I've made them completely free. We're doing a Bible study together over there on Patreon. You can also get exclusive access to videos like this before they make it to YouTube and you can join me for exclusive live streams and ask me anything that you.

Want.

The link for the Patreon is below. I will saunter off as usual, but I will return soon with more videos. And in the meantime, I'll say bye for now.