Amen.

Gareth, uh, thank you, uh, very, very much, uh, for that, uh, for that welcome and those kind words.

And let me just, uh, reiterate, it has been an absolute pleasure, uh, to be with, uh, with you all at New Horizon.

My first time here at this amazing, amazing event, and, uh, it's been great having not just sp- the bril- the ability to speak up here, but I've also really valued the, the individual conversations that I've had with many of you, conversations over coffee, in the queues, uh, whilst waiting for the toilets, and, uh, whilst wondering about the weather.

It's been an amazing, uh, amazing week.

And if you're, uh, like me, you're probably at the, uh, the point, uh, in this, uh, this amazing festival, uh, where you may be tired, uh, but your hearts are, are full.

But this is also, I think, the point, uh, in the week where we perhaps need to, I wonder if we need to maybe begin, uh, shifting our focus slightly.

[laughs]

We trust you will be blessed through this ministry.

Well, good evening once again.

It is absolutely wonderful to be with you this week at the New Horizons Festival here in our beautiful Northern Ireland.

This is my first time here at New Horizons, so it's a real privilege for me to be here this evening.

Just out of interest, am I alone in that? Raise your hand for a moment if this is your first time at New Horizons.

No, we have got some newbies.

That is great.

But, uh, I, I wanna give you four minutes now, uh, to say from your perspective, who is God, and what is God like?

Is God like.

Well, I want to say, by the way, Yasir, thank you.

So you said something really important a moment ago that I just wanna highlight for folks.

You, you said God doesn't need a couple of times, and that's a really interesting place to begin.

Because if God is the, is the, uh, ultimate cause, if God is the one who not just brings the universe into existence, but holds it together, and of course, you look at the size of that, of that universe, it's incredible.

And to start thinking, well, that God needs us in some way is gonna cause you all kinds of problems.

So to answer the first question, uh, the Quran very clearly says, "

what's wrong with the world according to both those faiths and then the bible and the quran's cure for that thing so could we go through each of those four and just get an understanding because i think it would help to ground this because i think a lot of people want to have this conversation but probably just don't have the facts and the understanding of these things let's do it that would be great so so maybe the first one then so the bible and the quran what is their view of god

Yeah.

So let me say straight away, Graham, though, that question is a crucial one.

It's probably the most crucial one.

When we think about other religions and how to navigate the difference, we tend to assume that everyone's talking about the same thing.

That's a fundamental mistake.

If you went down the pub with a bunch of your colleagues and you had a bunch of extreme Marxists around the table and you had a bunch of extreme capitalists around the table and they thought all lunchtime, you went back to the office and you told your friends, oh, it was lovely.

How would you advise them to go and explore this next in a respectful way that captures all that nuance?

publisher on the title at all?

Well, yeah, I could say that with all confidence, with no sort of fear of lack of humility, because I didn't come up with a title.

I'm terrible at titles, Jeff.

I think I can write all right, but titles, I just go to pieces.

And it had some ridiculously long, unwieldy title.

And the publisher, I think, just said to me something like, well, you know, it must be a better title.

And then I went, well, I did once do a seminar in Alberta, Canada, called How to Talk About Jesus Without Looking Like an Idiot.

It's accessible and understandable, and you don't need a degree in Islamic studies to understand.

So what do you think's going on? What's your sense of the cultural moment that we're living through at the moment?

Oh, I don't hate you for that question.

I might hate you for that shirt because it outclasses mine.

But again, that's a great question.

Blame my wife.

Blame your wife.

I think there's a few things going on, aren't there? I mean, the way you described it is really interesting with the Greens and reform kind of peeling off to the sides.

So what do you think? What do you think as people listening, both Christians or curious non-Christians, how are you approaching? How do you feel about it? Do you have concerns or are you optimistic about this increase in this religion? Oh my

Do all religions believe in the same God?

Well, that's a great question, Adam.

And by the way, we didn't say in the intro, I'm unusual.

I'm a Christian philosopher, but my PhD, I have a PhD, is actually in Islamic studies.

I spent seven years diving into the Arabic of the Quran, looking at how the Quran was put together.

And in fact, now 30 years of engaging with Islam.

So I've always been thinking about this question.

If the Christian God is the only God, why would he let other religions exist?

Who loves the idea of AI, gets very excited? Who's more ambivalent? Who here is more nervous? And one of the reasons we get nervous, right, is because for years it was easy to go, "Humans do all of this stuff that machines can't do."

do."We create, we, uh, produce content.

Machines are very good at, you know, doing spreadsheets, but there's a clear difference.

Along come large language models like ChatGPT and, and others, and suddenly it's, "Oh my word, I feel unnerved now because machines do things that we can do." And this is a...

You're right into this area of the creativity piece.

Can machines create like humans do? No, they, no they can't.

Can they create? Yeah, they can, and Nigel's given a, a very good i-illustration of that.

One of my closest friends is a, is a child psychologist-