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.

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).

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 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.”

“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.”

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.”

“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.”

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 discuss the technology of the future, but he explains that he prefers it as a meeting place to his home nearby where Sally, his beloved wife of 58 years, is now largely housebound because of illness (he himself has recently suffered a mild stroke and a bout of shingles).

Family seems uppermost in his mind on the day we talk (the couple have three grown-up children and 10 grandchildren). On the journey here, he has just heard the news that Keir Starmer is banning social media for the under-16s. “I think it is probably worth trying,” is his judgment.

“From where I sit, something has got to be done. It seems very clear, especially from the recent court ruling in Los Angeles against Meta and Google, that these big companies are actually designing their websites to grab attention and keep it. And to produce addiction that psychiatrists and psychologists say is as serious as heroin addiction because it is rewiring people’s brains.”

The impact of putting such technology in the hands of children, he frets, is catastrophic. “They are not reading, or being outside. They go around like zombies, glued to their smartphones because they can’t get away from it. It could be disastrous for them in later life. We are raising them to worship the machine.”

And that is his biggest fear about AI: that, in encouraging such worship, AI enthusiasts and the tech bros in Silicon Valley who make billions (and, in the case of Elon Musk, trillions) are turning AI into a god created by humans. “In other words,” he points out, “the absolute opposite of the Christian message.”

Lennox was raised in Ireland’s ecclesiastical capital, Armagh, on the border between the Republic and the North, as the eldest of four boys. His father, Jack, ran a department store but was, he wrote in his recent 500-page memoir My Story, published in April, a “frustrated academic”. It was from his mother, Florrie, a teacher, that he seems to have inherited his happy countenance. “She would stick a handkerchief in her mouth to stop herself laughing in church.”

The family worshipped in an independent Evangelical church rather than as part of any larger denomination and that has been Lennox’s pattern ever since. Yet he rejects religious separatism or one-upmanship. “I don’t acknowledge any particular label. I stick with ‘Christian’, by which I mean that I am a follower of Jesus Christ. Through my life I have preached in almost every kind of church there is.”

Alongside his stellar academic career, in which he also completed a PhD in philosophy and an MA in bioethics, Lennox managed to fit in extensive travel behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s, distributing banned bibles in the Soviet Union and surviving a poisoning attempt by the secret police in Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania. It is his first-hand knowledge of totalitarian states that feeds his fears about AI today.

All great technological advances, he acknowledges, have a positive and negative side. “It’s like a sharp knife. You can use it for surgery or you can use it for murder. In medicine, you can see AI developing new vaccines, new drugs, robotic surgery, the logistics to reduce the NHS waiting lists. But it also brings us facial recognition. That is wonderful at picking a terrorist out of a football crowd, but not so good if you are suppressing an ethnic minority in Xinjiang in China. That’s the scary side.”

Scary is a word that peppers our conversation. “The danger is that AI will encroach more and more on people’s privacy. You get the huge tension between governments saying, ‘If you want us to keep you secure you will have to give up your privacy’, and an authoritarian government that sees AI as a wonderful way of encroaching into people’s private lives. And we give up our privacy so easily.”

He reserves particular criticism for what he refers to as the trans-humanist movement, those who advocate merging man and machine into some sort of “superbeing”, notably, Yuval Noah Harari, the scientist and best-selling writer, whose books include 2016’s Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. “He is saying quite openly that, with AI, we will turn human beings into gods and I want to say, ‘Be very careful of that because it misunderstands what a human being is.’

“The crucial thing is that AI is just a machine that is computing. It is not a conscious machine. It doesn’t have consciousness or any of our five senses. God, I believe, has constructed human beings by integrating intelligence with consciousness. No one in the AI world is even attempting to produce consciousness.”

For all those who share his concerns about AI he has a simple message. “Talk to your children and grandchildren first of all, then to your families and friends to generate discussion. Constant engagement spreads and gets a groundswell going.” By such time-honoured human processes the end of history may yet be avoided.

God, AI and the End of History (SPCK, £29.99) is out now