I really love your observation of John Lennox. And indeed, it's the way he applies tricks of language. It's also in the way he speaks with that smug looking face and tone of voice like it is obvious that he's right and atheists are all idiots, of course!

Take for instance this short video where he proudly tells how he confronted 'an atheist' with 'his belief system', namely that he believes in nothing. And then stating that atheists therefor have a belief system too, just like Christians. See the trick here? It's the way he plays with words. You see, an atheist 'does not believe' and that linguistically is not the same also 'believes in nothing'. The last statement is even nonsensical, you can't even believe in 'nothing', it is just bad grammar. Not believing means ‘no belief’, not even in nothing. No matter how John tries to twist this truth, the ultimate difference between believers and non-believers is still very obvious indeed, the first group has a belief, the second refuses to belief.

If you analyze this even further, you can ask what 'believing' in this context even means. In the case of religion, believing means 'believing some dogma, story or truth, told or written by someone without any proof or even the possibility of proof. When I 'believe' a scientists that has measured the speed of light, it means I'm confident he did the right measurement, I consider his professionality, his skills and education and decide to 'believe' him, knowing that the measurement can be redone, verified by myself or someone else. He could even show me the actual experiment and run in with me standing by and watching. If we choose to pick another word for this kind of belief we could better distinguish it from the kind of belief that religion is ‘accepting a world view, truth or paradigm based on something said or written with no proof at all and no way to verify the claims’. So I don’t ‘believe’ scientific evidence, I ‘accept’ scientific evidence based on logic, consistency, research, accountability, repeatability and consensus.

There is an additional difference, subtle but sweet. If I accept some scientific fact as truth, there is always a possibility that later discoveries or measurements change this fact, and I will accept this new insight. Not so much with religion, a religion is rigid and holds on to ancient truths, even though they fly in the face of reality, logic and science. So John Lennox is a clever little bugger, but a clever charlatan rather than a clever scientist. Have a nice day!