"You Should Be Dead" Surgeon Told Me - John Lennox

[00:00:00]I think sometimes Christians don't realize the corollary of what they say when they attribute good things to God. When they say, you know, I believe that that God, you know, cured my illness or I believe that, you know, it it's providence that like allowed me to be where I am today or whatnot, that the sort of implication of that is that in all those cases where somebody isn't cured, God decided not to. You write about this, too. After your Dawkins debate, you were taken quite ill in hospital and you thought you might die.

[00:00:38]>> Yeah.

[00:00:38]>> And people, I remember that I recorded that for the very reason that you've raised it now.

[00:00:47]In that, what I usually say is people say, "Well, are you grateful to God for that?" I say I am, but I realize that that very same year, my sister lost her 22-year-old daughter to a brain tumor.

[00:01:02]Now, I need to be very careful how I describe my own reaction, because I need to be able to say that to her as well.

[00:01:12]In other words, you can become very narrowly focused on yourself. And isn't God good to me and all this kind of thing? We must realize this back to what you mentioned earlier, barbed wire beauty.

[00:01:30]Yes, thankful to God. He's given me an extra lease of life, which I'm very aware of sitting in front of you, because medically I should have died on that occasion.

[00:01:40]As the the surgeon, he said, "I don't know what to say to you. You should be dead." He actually used those words.

[00:01:47]I said, "Why?" Well, he said, "Your right coronary article artery wasn't Nothing was going through it." He said, "You should have had a massive heart attack." And he said, "If you'd had any survival, which is unlikely, you'd have had 5% quality of life." But he said, "No damage, you can go home tomorrow."

[00:02:05]>> Mhm.

[00:02:06]>> Well, the relief was immense. I said goodbye to my wife, and that's interesting, too, in that context. She was at the door, they were running down the corridor of the JR here.

[00:02:18]>> Mhm.

[00:02:19]>> And I said goodbye to her because I didn't think I'd see her again, not on this earth.

[00:02:25]But both of us had complete peace.

[00:02:28]Uh that's a testimony, in a way, from a near-death experience, and I couldn't explain that to you. Calm as anything.

[00:02:37][clears throat] >> Yeah.

[00:02:38]>> And he threw me on the table, he said, "You want to watch?" I could remember it so clearly. I said, "Yes." I could see, and there was nothing moving.

[00:02:47]And he said, "I have to work quick."

[00:02:48]Dead silence for 40 minutes, and suddenly, on the screen above me, I could see blood flowing everywhere.

[00:02:55]He said, "We're in."

[00:02:57]And that was it.

[00:02:58]>> Mhm.

[00:02:58]>> So, you're you're absolutely right. We must be sensitive.

[00:03:02]>> Yeah.

[00:03:03]>> And that kind of selfish, God is good to me, and God will do things for you if you've got enough faith, that is very dangerous stuff, and you don't get it in the New Testament.

[00:03:15]>> No. No, I think Yeah, I we'd probably both agree that the the the biggest thing Christianity gets wrong is just forgetting the message of Jesus. And And you you said this to to Christopher Hitchens, like he he rails against the the abuses of of of religion. I mean, the the abuses that religion has participated in by by sort of killing and and wars and oppression and all this kind of stuff. And And you sort of say, "I I agree." And And one of the biggest critics of the misuse of clerical authority in history was Jesus of Nazareth.

[00:03:49]>> I know.

[00:03:50]>> And so, why aren't you on his side, you know?

[00:03:52]>> Yes, Christopher said to me afterwards, that was heavy stuff. I said, Christopher, it was right. You ought to be on his side in that sense because he of all people was on your side in denouncing false religion. And it is an aspect that the new atheists got partly right.

[00:04:13]>> Mhm.

[00:04:14]>> What I mean by that, Alex, is they got right that bit, but they didn't do what they should really have done.

[00:04:23]And what John Gray did in his book, The Black Book of Communism, denounce atheism for the extremes of its persecution.

[00:04:31]>> Yeah.

[00:04:32]>> They're pretty silent about that. And John Gray, who's an atheist, actually, uh wrote very powerfully about that in his book, The Black Mass.

[00:04:42]>> Yeah.

[00:04:43]>> And we need to balance it up.

[00:04:45]>> Yeah.

[00:04:46]>> Though of course >> someone like Hitchens would say that, and and Dawkins with him, that yes, atheists have done great evil, but never like motivated by atheism. They don't sort of burst in and go, "In the name of no god." Whereas the belief in the it's like the inversion of the of the Dostoevsky thing. It's without God anything with with God anything is permissible cuz you have this divine permission. On atheism at best you're sort of you're neutral.

[00:05:15]You could commit evil, you could do good. And and either way, you don't believe you have God on your side. The danger is when >> I'm not sure that they were right about that.

[00:05:24]I certainly Solzhenitsyn wouldn't have agreed with them.

[00:05:27]>> Mhm.

[00:05:28]>> And in my travels in Russia, I asked a lot of Russian intellectuals and others about that question. And they said, "No, no, no. This destruction was done in the name of atheism. A lot of it you cannot say it wasn't done in the name of God."

[00:05:46]And you remember Solzhenitsyn's famous speech in America when he came out. "If you ask me," he said, "why a hundred million of my compatriots perished, we have forgotten God." Well, it was more than that. They denied God and they perpetuated their pogroms and persecutions of Christians.

[00:06:07]Certainly Stalin did.

[00:06:09]>> Mhm.

[00:06:10]>> Because of atheism.

[00:06:12]>> Yeah.

[00:06:13]>> And well, I just think that that was an attempt by the new atheists to smooth out something that they didn't like in atheism. But I think historically they weren't right.

[00:06:26]>> And I think also perhaps they overplay the extent to which so-called religious conflicts are religious.

[00:06:36]>> Oh, massively overplayed. There's a book in German, it's not in English, called Toleranz und Gewalt, tolerance and and violence >> Mhm.

[00:06:48]>> by a German author called Angenant. I think it's about that thick. And he does an investigation of that. That's a conclusion he comes to from a historian's point of view.

[00:07:00]>> Yeah.

[00:07:00]>> That it's seriously overplayed, even in the case of the Inquisition, all that kind of thing. Religious.

[00:07:07]>> Religious.

[00:07:07]>> Yeah.

[00:07:08]That it is overplayed. And that again is what John Gray provided a corrective to, pointing out the atheistic regimes that have been behind so much violence >> Yeah.

[00:07:20]>> in the 20th century.

[00:07:22]It's it's it's very sad.

[00:07:24]>> Yeah.

[00:07:25]>> But we got to get back, I think, now in the 21st century and um try our best, I think, to put into the public space at least I I feel that there is a plurality of worldviews.

[00:07:44]>> Mhm.

[00:07:45]>> And I like to think that Christianity can sit at the table as well.

[00:07:50]>> Yeah.

[00:07:51]>> And that we can be open and encourage people to think and give the evidence from our perspective and trust people to be able to make up their own minds.

[00:08:01]>> I think so.

[00:08:02]>> And that's what I said to Richard Dawkins and he agreed with that.

[00:08:05]>> Yeah.