Into The Abyss: Recent Episodes
Todd Decker
Todd enters into the Abyss of thought in conversations with friends on topics that interest them. Philosophy, religion, psychology, politics, ethics, and the arts.
The question “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” is typically used as a mocking retort to the sorts of philosophical and especially theological questions that are thought to be of little usefulness and a general waste of effort. It’s especially used in reference to philosopher theologians of the Middle Ages like Scholastics including Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. While the material conditions of people in the world were those of misery and squalor (so it is supposed) these folks were sitting in their ivory towers thinking about useless questions instead of doing science and inventing things. As you might guess, I don’t share this perspective and as a kind of subversion of the retort I’d like to appropriate it. The question “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” is not a question anyone actually ever asked. It’s a straight up caricature. But Medieval Scholastic philosophy did have plenty of talk about angels. Why? And could angels have any modern intellectual relevance?
In what follows I propose that angels were used in Medieval Scholastic philosophy as subjects for thought experiments. In such thought experiments the properties of angels were not those primarily of angels as described in biblical texts but more of an idealized notion serviceable to philosophical exercises. I propose that these sorts of philosophical angels can still be used to explore questions we find interesting today in thought experiments pertaining to cognition and consciousness. With an understanding of thought experiments as idealizations which transcend particularity in order to achieve generality I’ll go through various stages of generalization of consciousness from its particular human form to its most general form. This process moves into the complete abstraction of consciousness from any of its particular physical instantiations in order to explore its most essential features, though with our present knowledge this can only be the outline of a conceptual scaffolding since we don’t currently know what the essential features of consciousness actually are, or what it even is. And this will lead back to speculation about the nature of angels and what their nature might be.
When Medieval philosophers like Aquinas and Scotus talked about angels they did not get into historical scholarship about the way angels were understood at the times that the biblical texts were written. Or the way angels were understood during the Second Temple period with the writing of pseudepigraphal texts like the Book of Enoch. This is a fascinating subject and on this subject I’d recommend the work of Michael S. Heiser in his books Angels and The Unseen Realm. In Biblical texts angels are messengers. That’s what the Greek angelos (ἄγγελος) means. Also the Hebrew malak (מֲלְאָךְ). There’s not much information given about their metaphysical nature. But it is their metaphysical nature that is most interesting to the Medieval philosophers.
The most important attribute of angels for philosophical purposes is that they are non-corporeal. Angels do not have physical bodies. So they are very unlike us humans. Yet they are also like us humans in a very significant aspect: they are conscious beings. They’re not only conscious but also self-conscious, intelligent, and rational, again like humans. In our regular experience we only know of one kind being that is self-conscious, intelligent, and rational: human beings. And we have good reason to believe that these attributes are essentially connected to our physical bodies and especially our brains. The idea that a being could be self-conscious, intelligent, and rational without a physical body or even just a physical brain conflicts with our regular experience. But that’s why it’s interesting.
An excellent resource on the use of angels in Medieval philosophy is Martin Lenz and Isabel Iribarren’s Angels in Medieval Philosophical Inquiry: Their Function and Significance, which is a collection of essays on the subject. In particular I recommend the chapter by Dominik Perler titled Thought Experiments: The Methodological Function of Angels in Late Medieval Epistemology. In his essay Perler works with a definition of the thought experiment from The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, given by Timothy Gooding, whom he quotes: “A thought experiment is an idealization which transcends the particularity and the accidents of worldly human activities in order to achieve the generality and rigour of a demonstrative procedure.” I think this is an excellent definition for a thought experiment. If you want to get at the essence of a concept a thought experiment is a way of looking at it in the most generalized way possible. There are certain concepts like language, rationality, and possibly self-consciousness (of the most reflective sort) that we only find in human beings. How can we think about these concepts in their general form when we only have one kind of example from actual experience? We have to use our imaginations. And so we make thought experiments.
Perler notes that thought experiments take different forms in different ages. I would say that they make use of the images that are readily available in the culture. “Today, of course, philosophers hardly speak about angels. They prefer talking about brains in the vat, brains separated from the body and sent to another planet, zombies, or people living in a black-and-whiteworld.” We take our ideas from the culture: from religion, myth, literature, and film. But are these necessarily fictional? Perler makes an interesting distinction: “Of course, one needs to make a crucial distinction when talking about thought experiments. They can be understood either as scenarios involving purely fictitious entities (e.g., brains in the vat), or as scenarios appealing to entities that have real existence or could in principle have real existence, but are considered under ideal conditions (e.g., the scientist Mary who has all knowledge about colours). Since medieval authors took angels to be real entities, endowed with real causal power and interacting with other real entities, they were certainly not interested in thought experiments in the first sense [fictitious entities]. They were rather focusing on thought experiments in the second sense, analyzing angels as real creatures that transcend the material world and therefore enable us to examine cognitive activities in its purest and most ideal form, which is not subject to material constraints.”
I mentioned before that no Medieval person really asked “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”. But we can find examples of something kind of close. In the Summa Theologiae Thomas Aquinas asked the question: “Whether several angels can be at the same time in the same place?” (Summa Theologiae, First Part, Question 52, Article 3) This he answered in the negative: “I answer that, There are not two angels in the same place.” I’d actually answer the question differently I think. But what’s important is that the question makes sense to ask. We assume here that angels are immaterial. So there are questions that arise regarding the relation of immaterial things to space. Does something immaterial take up space? Could it take up space under certain circumstances? If the specific question about angels seems too remote, think about other immaterial things. First, consider mathematical sentences like 1+1=2. Does that take up space? It would seem not to. It’s just not a spatial kind of thing. Second, consider a field as understood in physics? A field is “a physical quantity, represented by a scalar, vector, or tensor, that has a value for each point in space and time.” Some fields probably have actual physical existence. In quantum field theory certain fields are understood to be the most basic building block of physical reality that give rise to everything else. But other fields are more abstract, especially since we can invent all kinds of fields to suit our purposes. For example, we can imagine a temperature field where every point in a given volume has a certain scalar temperature value. This kind of field would obviously be spatial in nature since it is defined over a given region of space. But it’s not exactly a physical thing either. It’s just a set of numbers. These two kinds of immaterial things have very different relations to space. For any kind of immaterial thing, including angels, it’s reasonable to ask which kind of relation to space it has. How many mathematical sentences, such as 1+1=2, can fit on the head of a pin? In the asking of that question we can see that mathematical sentences just aren’t the kinds of things that take up space or subsist in space at all. That’s an interesting feature of mathematical sentences.
Let’s look at another Medieval example. In his article Dominik Perler looks at the work of Duns Scotus and William of Ockham on the subject of perception. They framed the issue as one of how angels could have cognition of things in the world. Physical beings perceive the world through their physical senses. But nonphysical beings wouldn’t have sense organs of this sort. They would need other sorts of cognitive devices “to make things cognitively present to them.” Both Scotus and Ockham held that “every cognition requires a cognitive act and a cognitive object.” But they had different views about what that cognitive object would be. For Scotus, “the appropriate object for an intellectual act is the essence of a thing.” For Ockham, “the appropriate object for an intellectual act is the individual thing with its individual qualities.” Both Scotus and Ockham then think about how cognitive objects become cognitively accessible. And they use angels in their thought experiments to make this as general as possible. They don’t even refer to sense perception. Rather, there’s simply something that makes the cognitive object cognitively accessible. That something could be sense perception but it doesn’t have to be. So it’s thoroughly general. For me, as a physical being with physical senses, before I cognize something like a chair I perceive it with my senses. But after I perceive it with my senses there’s an intellectual act by which I cognize it. For Scotus the object of this intellectual act is the essence of a chair. For Ockham the object of this intellectual act is the individual object, which happens to be a chair. These are two very different ways of understanding cognition. And by using angels, nonphysical beings, in their thought experiments they bracket everything that comes before the intellectual act because it’s that intellectual act specifically that interests them. It doesn’t matter if what makes the cognitive object cognitively accessible is sight, smell, echolocation, electroreceptors, or what have you. This can apply to humans, bats, sharks, computers, or angels. That’s why it’s fully generalized. They are just interested in what happens in the intellect.
So how does the cognitive object become cognitively accessible to the intellect? For Scotus, the cognitive object is the essence of a thing and “to make the essence of a thing cognitively accessible, the intellect needs a cognitive device: the intelligible species.” For Ockham, the cognitive object is the individual thing and “to make an individual thing cognitively accessible, the intellect simply needs a causal relationship with that thing.” For Scotus, “the intelligible species determines the content of an intellectual act”. For Ockham, “the individual thing itself determines the content of an intellectual act.” What does this look like in practice? I expect that Ockham’s view will seem most plausible up front. Going back to the chair example, the essence of a chair sounds kind of fictional. Isn’t it just the thing itself we’re dealing with that we then understand to be a chair? Nevertheless, I’d say that in the history of philosophy these two views are pretty evenly represented. Just to comment on it briefly, it’s arguably that our cognition always has some intentionality to it. It’s always directed towards something. We don’t just cognize the thing but also what we can do with it. A chair, for example, is not just an elevated platform with four legs and a backing. A chair is something to sit on. And it’s arguable that that usefulness is the first thing we cognize.
Perler comments that for both Scotus and Ockham, “their detailed analysis was motivated by an interest in the general structure of cognition… They both wanted to know how cognition works in principle, i.e. what kinds of entities and relations are required in any cognitive process.” The philosophy of mind understandably tends to be very human-focused. But that leaves out many other ways of cognizing, both real and imagined, from bats to sharks to computers. By using angels in their thought experiments Scotus and Ockham were able to think about these issues in a way that transcended the particularity of all these cases and think about cognition as such. I think that Medieval people had an easier time thinking about human attributes in this more general way because more of them believed in a universe populated by beings of an unseen realm that had many human-like attributes. Part of the “discarded image” as C.S. Lewis called it. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins called these kinds of beings “metapersons”, something he proposed recovering and studying in a “new science of the enchanted universe” (see The New Science of the Enchanted Universe: An Anthropology of Most of Humanity). This worldview of a heavily populated unseen realm led Medievals to come up with useful concepts that they otherwise might not have. This is something Joseph Koterski has argued, with the case of Boethius in particular (see Natural Law and Human Nature). In his writings about these various kinds of human-like beings Boethius had to come up with a technical term and stipulate an appropriate definition to refer to all of them, both human and non-human. He used the term “person”, which he defined as an individual substance of a rational nature. A wonderfully general definition that preserves the essential core.
Could we make similar use of angels in modern thought experiments? I think they could be used in a similar way as used by the Medievals, i.e. to transcend the particularity and accidents of human beings and explore concepts in their most general form. One topic that interests me and where I can see application of this is to consciousness, or more especially self-consciousness. This is a distinction that Roger Scruton has made (see The Soul of the World, p. 40). Consciousness is the state of being aware of and able to perceive one’s environment, thoughts, and feelings. This is something that many animals would seem to have. Self-consciousness is a higher level of awareness where an individual is not only conscious but also aware of themselves as a distinct entity with their own thoughts, feelings, and identity. It involves reflection on one’s own mental states and actions. Humans are certainly self-conscious. As humans we know this because we have direct, first-person access to this higher level of awareness and reflection. And we assume, rightly and non-solipsistically, that this is common to other humans as well. We can also talk to each other and infer from our conversations that we share this self-conscious nature. Other animals might be self-conscious in this way as well. Or they might not be. We don’t really know because we are not of the same species and we can’t talk with them. No other animals have language. It’s possible we Homo sapiens are unique in our self-consciousness.
Let’s consider a progression of abstraction from human consciousness to hypothetical consciousness in other physical beings, to general consciousness as such, abstracted from all particular instances.
We start with human beings. We know a lot about human physiology, psychology, and neurology. All these contribute to the human experience, including our experience of self-consciousness. We know our mental operations are highly if not entirely dependent on our brains. At a very basic level our brains are composed of neurons and the synaptic relations between neurons. Our brains are also further organized into structures whose activity we can observe under various scenarios and activities. We’ve amassed a good deal of knowledge about our brains but there is still a great deal we don’t know. And ultimately we don’t have an answer to what David Chalmers has called the “easy problem of consciousness”: how all our mental experiences like perception, memory, and attention correlate to specific brain mechanisms and processes. We don’t have a complete “map” of the brain. We can’t read people’s minds by looking at their brains. So we still have to speak in rather general terms.
I think the next step removed from human beings would be other species that are closely related to us in the genus Homo. Unfortunately all other species of our genus are extinct so we can’t observe them or talk with them. It’s reasonable that it may have been possible to talk to some of them. Neanderthals seem to have been very similar to humans. They may have had very similar brains, similar enough to have similar capabilities but different enough to be interesting and to make some generalizations about our common features. That’s no longer possible, but that was a very close step removed from human beings that would have been useful for generalization.
To move another step from humans we may have to look beyond our planet and our evolutionary relatives. This would be an organic alien lifeform. We may never encounter such a being but I put it before an artificial lifeform, which we may encounter much sooner, simply because we can imagine such beings being, for lack of a better word, organic: organisms composed of organic molecules with water-based biochemistry, probably composed of cells, with genetic information encoded in molecules, and evolutionary history. Basically, not computers or machines. We can only speculate what such beings might be like. And I suspect we’ll have more insight into the nature of their consciousness after we develop artificial consciousness, for reasons I’ll explain. What might their brains be like? Would they have the basic cellular unit (like neurons) with a complex structure built up on the relations between them?
The next level removed would be beyond any organic physical entity, human or alien, to artificial entities: artificial intelligence or artificial consciousness. The consciousness of artificial consciousness would be considered artificial because it would not be naturally occurring but instead be a product of human engineering and design. What I’m talking about here is not just artificial intelligence of the sort that started showing up everywhere in 2023, when it seemed like almost everything was getting AI capability of some kind. These are large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. A large language model’s artificial intelligence processes and generates human-like text based on patterns learned from large sets of text data. But LLMs lack actual awareness and subjective experience. Artificial consciousness, on the other hand, would entail a system having self-awareness, subjective experiences, and a sense of understanding its existence and environment.
We may well encounter artificial consciousness before we encounter alien life. So even though alien life might be more similar to us, being organic, if we don’t encounter it we won’t be able to learn much from it or make comparisons to the particular physical features that give rise to their consciousness. Nevertheless we may be able to infer certain features that a self-conscious alien species would have to have from features held in common between human consciousness and artificial consciousness.
What might be analogous to the brain in artificial consciousness? We can imagine that an artificial consciousness would have physical similarities to modern computers. They would probably have processing units and memory systems. Although existing artificial intelligence in the form of large language models may not be conscious, artificial consciousness may end up having similar features like a neural network structure consisting of layers of interconnected nodes (like neurons) that process data through weighted connections.
What kinds of features would be held in common between all sorts of conscious entities: humans, Neanderthals, aliens, and artificial consciousness? Right now we can’t know. But we can speculate. I suspect that there will be some kind of structure common to all. This might not be the case, which would be very confusing indeed. But let’s suppose there would be some kind of common structure. I would further speculate that it would have the form composed of basic objects plus the relations between objects. For example, in human brains the basic object is the neuron. And the brain is organized as a system of relations between neurons, the synapses. What constitutes the object and the relations might be rather different from one entity to the next. But I suspect that basic structure will apply to all conscious beings. The definition of the structure will be very complex. It’s not just that there are objects and relations between objects. Many structures would meet that description without being conscious. For example, a three-dimensional matrix of neurons in which every neuron was simply connected synaptically to its nearest neighbor wouldn’t be much of a structure. Consciousness-producing structures are much more complex. In all these cases so far each entity is physical and has some consciousness-imparting structure. In Aristotelian terms these entities are composites of matter and form, a notion called hylemorphism. In each case there is a material substratum for the consciousness-producing form or structure.
This brings me to the final level of abstraction where we pull away the material substratum leaving only the consciousness-producing structure itself; the form without the matter. This moves beyond all physical conscious entities to the completely abstract and nonphysical. The features that I’ve speculated are held in common between conscious entities have the features of a mathematical structure: a set of objects having some additional features such as relations between objects. Fully abstracted, the actual objects themselves don’t matter. These instead become open slots. This is how Verity Harte describes structures generally. Structures are the sorts of things that make available open slots that can be filled by particular objects. When the slot is filled by a physical entity, like a neuron, the structure has a particular physical instantiation. But when the slot is empty the structure is abstracted from physical instantiation. Here the structure is at its most generalized state.
The highest levels of abstraction bring up some interesting philosophical issues. Let’s start with artificial consciousness. Here the question of the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin, or the matter of space, comes up again. The volume of an adult human brain is around 1300 cubic centimeters. That’s not even counting the rest of the body that’s needed for the brain to survive and operate. Our consciousness requires space to operate. Artificial consciousness would also take up space. Maybe a single artificial conscious entity would require even more space than a human body or human brain. But let’s hope that it could be less. Could there be a kind of corollary to Moore’s Law for consciousness. Moore’s Law is the trend in the semiconductor industry for the number of transistors in integrated circuits to double every two years. Since individual transistors are being made to be progressively smaller, more can fit in a given area. Could an artificial consciousness fit in the volume of a modern smartphone? Or maybe even smaller? Could multiple artificial consciousnesses fit on the head of the pin? That might give renewed relevance to the never-actually-asked question of angels dancing on the head of a pin. How many artificial consciousnesses could operate in a space the size of the head of a pin?
Artificial consciousness also brings up questions about embodiment. In humans this is a question of the way our minds relate not just to our brains but to our whole bodies and even to our environments. Hubert Dreyfus was an important contributor to philosophical work on this question, notably in his book What Computers Can’t Do. Dreyfus was drawing on the thought of Martin Heidegger. Maurice Merlau-Ponty would also be relevant to the subject. Dreyfus referred to Heideggerian concepts such as being-in-the-world, ready-to-hand, present-to-hand, and mood to explain the necessarily embodied nature of consciousness. Dreyfus argued that human understanding is fundamentally embodied and situated in a social and physical context, that much of human expertise is tacit and non-reflective. We tend to be very brain-centered in our thinking about human beings. But we are much more than just our brains. If a human brain could be separated from the rest of the body and survive it’s hard to speak for that quality of life, if it could even qualify as a life. Notably, even Dreyfus wasn’t arguing that artificial intelligence or artificial consciousness weren’t possible. Just that they would have to have those sets of features he identified. Would an artificial consciousness then require not only processing and memory but also motility and some form of embodied existence in the world?
Then there’s the highest, nonphysical level of abstraction. An abstract, nonphysical entity that has all the essential structures of consciousness. What is the nature of such an abstraction? Could such an abstract entity actually be conscious? Or would it have mere hypothetical consciousness, in the event that the open slots happen to be filled by physical objects? Does it even make sense to think of such nonphysical, abstract entities as existing at all? This last question is the basic question of platonism? Do abstract objects in general have any existence when we’re not thinking about them or using them in some way?
We can imagine the case where this nonphysical abstraction only becomes conscious when it is physically instantiated. It’s embodied in some way, whether that body by organic or computer. This would be like the relationship of the concept of a machine to the machine itself. We might have the concept of a machine like an engine but this concept doesn’t actually perform work. For that we actually need to build the physical machine. But even with the abstract concept of a machine we could say true and false things about it. Any concept for a steam engine, for example, has to have features for heat addition, expansion, heat rejection, and compression. Any concept lacking these features could be said to be nonfunctional, even in the abstract. In the abstract neither the concept for the functional design nor the nonfunctional design produce any work. But if we were to build them, one would work and the other would not. A philosophical angel might be the same way. It’s not actually conscious in the abstract but the abstract structure would be conscious if it were physically instantiated. So we can still refer to it, like Scotus and Ockham, and talk about cognition and consciousness, and how they would work in any kind of physical instantiation, be it human, Neanderthal, alien, or computer.
Or we can imagine the more extravagant case where this nonphysical abstraction actually is conscious, even when unembodied. That’s difficult to imagine. And there are a number of objections we can make. Maybe not the most obvious of these objections but one I think is important is the matter of temporality. Consciousness seems to be essentially temporal in nature. It’s a process. Our brains aren’t static but change from moment to moment. And our brain states are constantly changing. So how would a nonphysical abstraction do the things that conscious entities do across time? We think of abstractions as being atemporal. They don’t ever change. That’s true in a sense. They don’t change with respect to actual time. But some abstract objects could have multiple elements that are organized in a way like a process. For example, an algorithm with multiple steps is a kind of process. The steps in an algorithm aren’t moments in time but they have an ordering and sequence similar to temporal processes. To take another example, a piece of music, when played, is played in time. But we can also look at a whole page of music at once. In the abstract the piece of music is no longer temporal, but it still has order and sequence.
Another objection is that it seems like a nonphysical abstraction just isn’t enough. It needs something more. Stephen Hawking put this thought quite poetically in A Brief History of Time: “Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?” Of philosophical angels we might ask, what breathes fire into them? Do they need physical instantiation to be conscious?
In the foregoing I’ve also operated under an assumption that consciousness is a structure of some kind. And that we find these kinds of structures instantiated in multiple ways that constitute individual conscious beings. This is reasonable. We always find them together. We don’t observe human consciousness without human brains. But what if that assumption is not correct? Maybe consciousness is not the structure but the structure is a condition for consciousness. And consciousness itself is something more basic. Maybe consciousness itself is a kind of monad, a fundamental, indivisible unit that possesses perception and self-awareness. A theory of such monads was developed in the thought of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. There are some modern theories based on the idea that consciousness might be a basic component of the universe, rather than something reducible to anything else. Not a structure but a unit. See David Chalmers as one prominent philosopher in this area. That’s a very different picture.
In the monad view the complex structures associated with brains and computer systems would not have some structural essence identical to consciousness. Instead they might produce conditions under which it can appear. As an analogy, a generator built to create an electric current has a complex structure. But this structure is not the electric current. The electric current is something else, and something much simpler. The generator produces the conditions under which an electric current can appear. But neither the generator nor its structure are the electric current itself.
In all of this my thoughts about angels have been instrumental. Not so much a question about what actual angels might be like, but about the utility of a certain concept of angels for philosophical exercises. But what of actual angels? Could any of these ideas about angels be correct about actual angels? Granted, that question will only be interesting if you think angels might actually exist. Well, I do. So it is an interesting question for me. I like to think these kinds of metaphysical speculations are on the right track. But I definitely won’t make any strong claims to that effect. As in scripture, the angels will just have to tell us themselves what they are like, if they feel so inclined.
But to be honest what got me onto this whole subject and thinking about it was just that derisive line about angels dancing on the head of a pin. I enjoy reading Medieval philosophy and I just don’t find the characterization of their thought as endless circling around useless questions to be at all accurate. Their thinking was deep and touched on the most foundational issues of knowledge and existence. And when they did talk about angels they were talking about timeless issues on the subjects of cognition, individuation, and language. So one response to the derisive line could be that it’s not really the “own” you think it is. Medieval philosophers didn’t actually ask how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. But even if they had, I’m sure it would have been interesting.
One of my favorite restaurants is Buca di Beppo. The whole thing between the food and the decor is just a rich, overwhelming sensory overload. The portions are huge. The smallest plates feed at least two people. And the decor is an excessive splash of vibrant color and kitsch. The images are a jumbled mix of saints and sinners: nuns playing soccer, busty women sporting cleavage, iconography of the saints, ostentatiously nude statuary, and a giant bust of His Holiness the Pope. The bathroom might be the highlight of the whole experience. I haven’t seen the women’s room but the men’s room is a burlesque artistic celebration of the most undignified bodily functions. Yet the whole thing is somehow just barely “family friendly”. An American with less of a balmy Mediterranean and more of a conservative Puritan cultural background leaves the place wondering, “What just happened?”
I thought of Buca di Beppo when I first read an article by Alessandra Bocchi titled Cultural Christianity, Italian Mentality. What is it about Italian Catholic culture that makes it possible for Christian piety to coexist such uninhibited sensory indulgence? One possible response is that some indulgences that we think of as peccadillos aren’t really in conflict with piety and righteousness anyway. Wine and dance are not in themselves sinful. But Bocchi brings up another point that I find interesting, which is a certain understanding of human sinfulness and the function of forgiveness. An American said to Bocchi, about Italians, “so you just live in sin, and repent.” Bocchi says to this: “I couldn’t think of a better description. Individual, moral failures don’t negate the need for a moral structure of repentance and renewal — on the contrary, the evidence of the sin is proof for the necessity of upholding the Christian culture.”
A collection of the sayings of the Desert Fathers shares the following story: “A hunter in the desert saw Abba Anthony enjoying himself with the brethren and he was shocked. Wanting to show him that it was necessary sometimes to meet the needs of the brethren, the old man said to him, ‘Put an arrow in your bow and shoot it.’ So he did. The old man then said, ‘Shoot another,’ and he did so. Then the old man said, ‘Shoot yet again,’ and the hunter replied ‘If I bend my bow so much I will break it.’ Then the old man said to him, ‘It is the same with the work of God. If we stretch the brethren beyond measure they will soon break. Sometimes it is necessary to come down to meet their needs.’ When he heard these words the hunter was pierced by compunction and, greatly edified by the old man, he went away. As for the brethren, they went home strengthened.”
I’m simultaneously inspired both by the Biblical call to perfection – “Be ye therefore perfect” (Matthew 5:48, KJV) – and with the Biblical recognition that human beings are not – “the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” (Matthew 26:41, KJV).
Not only that. We’re also supposed to enjoy and appreciate the world: Deuteronomy 8:7-10. JPS:
“For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with streams and springs and fountains issuing from plain and hill; a land of wheat and barley, of vines, figs, and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey; a land where you may eat food without stint, where you will lack nothing; a land whose rocks are iron and from whose hills you can mine copper. When you have eaten your fill, give thanks to the Lord your God for the good land which He has given you.”
Deuteronomy 12:7, JPS: “Together with your households, you shall feast there before the Lord your God, happy in all your undertakings in which the Lord your God has blessed you.”
In the Jerusalem Talmud Kiddushin 4:12 it says that “In the future, a person will have to give an accounting before heaven for every good thing his eyes saw, but of which he did not eat.” Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch made sure that he took a trip to Switzerland before he died and explained: “When I stand shortly before the Almighty, I will be held accountable to many questions… But what will I say when… and I’m sure to be asked, ‘Shimshon, did you see My Alps?”
“To every thing there is a season” (Ecclesiastes 3:1, KJV). We eat food, but we don’t eat all the time. Sometimes we eat a lot of food, but we shouldn’t eat a lot of food all the time. We can drink wine, but we shouldn’t drink wine all the time. We can indulge our sexual appetites, but we don’t do it all the time, nor should we indulge all of them. Anyway it’s really the cyclic, non-constant nature of these things that make them enjoyable. We abstain for long enough to build up our desires so that it will be all the more enjoyable when they are satisfied.
C.S. Lewis related this to our nature as beings who exist in time, experiencing reality successively. In The Screwtape Letters, speaking in the mouth of a demon he said: “The humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change. And since they need change, [God] (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable. But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme. He gives them in His Church a spiritual year; they change from a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast as before.”
This is something I appreciate about Mardis Gras and Ash Wednesday. There is a time for Lenten asceticism. But there is also a time for feasting. I also think that there’s something to be said for both a minimalist aesthetic and for an aesthetic of sensory excess. There’s the great commandment to love the Lord your God with all your strength, בְכָל־מְאֹדֶֽךָ (be-kol meod-eka), with all of your “muchness” (Deuteronomy 6:5). Alessandra Bocchi’s writing about Italian culture reminds me of another Italian, Camille Paglia. Paglia has often spoken about her persisting appreciation of Italian Catholicism’s aesthetics of “florid pictorialism”, which she attributes to a certain retention of paganism. I don’t know about that, at least theologically, but aesthetically that might be right. She fondly recollects from her upbringing: “I loved the cult of saints, the bejeweled ceremonialism, the eerie litanies of Mary… My baptismal church, St. Anthony of Padua in Endicott, New York, was a dazzling yellow-brick, Italian-style building with gorgeous stained-glass windows and life-size polychrome statues, which were the first works of art I ever saw.”
Paglia explores her interpretation of Italian Catholicism in her book, Sexual Personae:
“Paganism is eye-intense. It is based on cultic exhibitionism, in which sex and sadomasochism are joined. The ancient chthonian mysteries have never disappeared from the Italian church. Waxed saints’ corpses under glass. Tattered armbones in gold reliquaries. Half-nude St. Sebastian pierced by arrows. St. Lucy holding her eyeballs out on a platter. Blood, torture, ecstasy, and tears. Its lurid sensationalism makes Italian Catholicism the emotionally most complete cosmology in religious history. Italy added pagan sex and violence to the ascetic Palestinian creed.”
You get a sense there of Paglia’s over-the-top, shock-value style, which I wouldn’t take fully at face value. And this might not be the aspect of Catholicism that Catholics would want to highlight. But, I think it’s an interesting compliment and can be taken as such. It reminds me again of a feast day at Bucca di Beppo.
Here’s another passage from Sexual Personae that includes some personal recollections:
“To this day, relatives in my mother’s village near Rome visit the cemetery every Sunday to lay flowers on the graves. It is a kind of picnic. I remember childhood feelings of chill and awe at the candle kept burning by my grandmother before a photograph of her dead daughter Lenora, the small, round yellow flame flickering in the darkened room. A sense of the mystic and uncanny has pervaded Italian culture for thousands of years, a pagan hieraticism flowering again in Catholicism, with its polychrome statues of martyred saints, its holy elbows and jawbones sealed in altar stones, and its mummified corpses on illuminated display. In a chapel in Naples, I recently counted 112 gold and glass caskets of musty saints’ bones stacked as a transparent wall from floor to ceiling. In another church, I found a painting of the public disembowelling of a patient saint, his intestines being methodically wound up on a large machine like a pasta roller. Nailed like schools of fish to church walls are hundreds of tiny silver ears, noses, hearts, breasts, legs, feet, and other body parts, votive offerings by parishioners seeking a cure. Old-style Italian Catholicism, now shunned by middle-class WASP-aspiring descendants of immigrants, was full of the chthonian poetry of paganism. The Italian imagination is darkly archaic. It hears the voices of the dead and identifies the passions and torments of the body with the slumbering spirits of mother earth.”
It all seems very earthy. Perhaps appropriate for beings who are made of earth. The historian Eamon Duffy talks about this material aspect of Christianity in his book Royal Books and Holy Bones: “Christianity is and has been, first and foremost, a materialistic religion. It is rooted in the belief that in the Incarnation the eternal Godhead took on human flesh… So any attempt to understand Christianity must engage with the multifarious temporal practices and artifacts by which it has expressed that central incarnational conviction… Christianity, for most of its history, has also been a religion in which the divine has been understood as immanent in and accessible through created matter: in the material elements of the sacraments (bread and wine, oil and water); in the painted or carved images of Christ and the saints; in the music and ceremonies of the liturgy; in the landscapes, routes and journeyings in which the shrines of the saints were located; and in the very flesh and bones of the holy dead themselves.” I think this is a good way to think about and understand the interest in holy relics, like those 112 gold and glass caskets of musty saints’ bones that Camille Paglia counted in a Naples chapel.
Paglia’s talk of “sex and sadomasochism” in Christianity sounds a lot like something out of the Marquis de Sade, who is another one of Paglia’s scholarly interests. But there’s an important difference and it’s a difference that makes all the difference. And that’s partially hinted at in her comment that Italian Catholicism is the “the emotionally most complete cosmology in religious history”. In Christianity the raw physicality and lurid sensationalism is not gratuitous, as it is in the Marquis de Sade. It’s wrapped up in an infinitely meaningful, cosmological and salvific story of enfleshed deity and deified flesh. It’s all part of a larger purpose.
I think we see this too in the seasonal extravagance of Mardis Gras. Whatever chaos is there serves a constructive purpose. The philosopher Charles Taylor has a fascinating discussion of this idea in his book A Secular Age, in a chapter where he talks about Carnival and such festivals of reversal generally. Think of the “Feast of Fools” in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He refers to what he calls “equilibrium in tension”:
“Another way in which this feature of equilibrium in tension emerges in this society became evident in Carnival and similar festivities, such as the feasts of misrule, or boy bishops, and the like. These were periods in which the ordinary order of things was inverted, or ‘the world was turned upside down’. For a while, there was a ludic interval, in which people played out a condition of reversal of the usual order. Boys wore the mitre, or fools were made kings for a day; what was ordinarily revered was mocked, people permitted themselves various forms of licence, not just sexually but also in close-to-violent acts, and the like.”
Taylor argues that all of this unleashed chaos serves a larger structured purpose and that the bacchanal is ultimately not serious. He quotes a French cleric saying: “We do these things in jest and not in earnest, as the ancient custom is, so that once a year the foolishness innate in us can come out and evaporate. Don’t wine skins and barrels burst open very often if the air-hole is not opened from time to time? We too are old barrels.”
Very similar to the story of Abba Anthony and the bow.
Taylor says: “The festivals were not putting forward an alternative to the established order, in anything like the sense we understand in modern politics, that is, presenting an antithetical order of things which might replace the prevailing dispensation.” That would be exactly what the Marquis de Sade was in fact calling for, for example, in his book Philosophy in the Bedroom. Throw off all restraints. Embrace chaos and nihilism completely. A complete anti-order as an alternative to the established order; a culture of anti-culture. But that’s not what’s happening in Carnival, says Taylor. “The mockery was enframed by an understanding that betters, superiors, virtue, ecclesial charisma, etc. ought to rule; the humour was in that sense not ultimately serious.”
Speaking more generally of similar festivals of reversal in many religions, like for example in the Roman Saturnalia, Taylor offers the following as one possible interpretation: “The intuition supposedly underlying these is that order binds a primitive chaos, which is both its enemy but also the source of all energy, including that of order. The binding has to capture that energy, and in the supreme moments of founding it does this. But the years of routine crush this force and drain it; so that order itself can only survive through periodic renewal, in which the forces of chaos are first unleashed anew, and then brought into a new founding of order. As though the effort to maintain order against chaos could not but in the end weaken, tire, unless this order were replunged into the primal energies of chaos to emerge with renewed strength. Or something like this; it’s hard to get it entirely clear.”
I get a kick out of that closing remark: “Or something like this; it’s hard to get it entirely clear.”
As of this writing and recording I’m in the height of the Halloween season. I love Halloween. I love its rowdy ridiculousness and excess. Maybe it’s my Mardis Gras, since I don’t actually do Mardis Gras. It’s just guts and gore and craziness. There’s something of reversal to it as well I think. Children can be whoever and whatever they want to be. They go up to strangers’ homes at night and threaten them with trickery and demand candy. And lest we forget, it’s all leading up to another Christian holiday: All Saints’ Day. There’s a lot going on with it. Children are confronted with death and decomposition in a way that’s contained, not traumatizing, and humorous. We get to open our minds obliquely to the possibility of an uncanny, otherworld of spirits and mysterious forces, but again, in a way that’s not too serious in a way that we can’t handle. We can’t face such notions head-on. And for a few weeks we’re loaded up and stocked with sugar, replunged into the primal energies of chaos to emerge with renewed strength.
This is not my usual form of piety. I actually find the asceticism of the Desert Fathers and medieval mystics quite inspiring. A kind of spiritual athleticism that I try to emulate at least partially. I appreciate moments of stillness and the opportunities they give for kenotic emptying and spiritual receptivity. But we live life, even and especially religious life, in time and through different seasons. Each season has its unique aspects. So even though it’s not my usual mode I also appreciate the exuberance and excess of the feasts and frivolity. It plays a part in an emotionally complete cosmology of spirit and flesh. And so, I think I’m actually due for another ridiculously oversized meal at Buca di Beppo this weekend.
Notes:
Isaiah 6:10
Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and convert, and be healed. (KJV)
הַשְׁמֵן֙ לֵב־הָעָ֣ם הַזֶּ֔ה וְאָזְנָ֥יו הַכְבֵּ֖ד וְעֵינָ֣יו הָשַׁ֑ע פֶּן־יִרְאֶ֨ה בְעֵינָ֜יו וּבְאָזְנָ֣יו יִשְׁמָ֗ע וּלְבָבֹ֥ו יָבִ֛ין וָשָׁ֖ב וְרָ֥פָא לֹֽו׃
LXX: “For the heart of this people has become gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes have they closed; lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and be converted and and I should heal them.”
ἐπαχύνθη γὰρ ἡ καρδία τοῦ λαοῦ τούτου καὶ τοῖς ὠσὶν αὐτῶν βαρέως ἤκουσαν καὶ τοὺς ὀφθαλμοὺς αὐτῶν ἐκάμμυσαν μήποτε ἴδωσιν τοῖς ὀφθαλμοῖς καὶ τοῖς ὠσὶν ἀκούσωσιν καὶ τῇ καρδίᾳ συνῶσιν καὶ ἐπιστρέψωσιν καὶ ἰάσομαι αὐτούς
The Hebrew hashmen, “make fat”, is an imperative. The Greek epachunthe, “made fat”is not a command but is a third person past tense or aorist. It’s saying what did happen. The hebrew va-enav hasha, “shut their eyes”, is an imperative. The greek ekammusan, “they shut”, is again a third person past tense or aorist. Saying what did happen.
“The charge for the obduracy of the people is removed from divine agency and placed squarely within the realm of human responsibility.” (Theological Ameliorative Translations in LXX Isaiah 6)
Exodus 15:3
The LORD is a man of war the LORD is his name (KJV)
יְהוָ֖ה אִ֣ישׁ מִלְחָמָ֑ה יְהוָ֖ה שְׁמֹֽו׃
LXX: “The Lord bringing wars to nought, the Lord is his name.”
Κύριος συντρίβων πολέμους, Κύριος ὄνομα αὐτῷ.
In place of the Hebrew ish milchamah, “man of war”, the Greek uses suntribon polemous, “bringing wars to nought. From suntribo, συντρίβω, “shatter, crush, beat, win”. But it is polemos, πόλεμος, “war” itself that is the object of this defeat.
Psalm 9:20
Put them in fear, O LORD that the nations may know themselves to be but men Selah (KJV)
שִׁ֘יתָ֤ה יְהוָ֨ה ׀ מֹורָ֗ה לָ֫הֶ֥ם יֵדְע֥וּ גֹויִ֑ם אֱנֹ֖ושׁ הֵ֣מָּה סֶּֽלָה׃
LXX: Appoint, O Lord, a lawgiver over them: let the heathen know that they are men. (Psalm 9:21)
κατάστησον, Κύριε, νομοθέτην ἐπ᾿ αὐτούς, γνώτωσαν ἔθνη ὅτι ἄνθρωποί εἰσιν.
Insights into the Hebrew Language
The Septuagint can give us some insights into the Hebrew language as well. The most notable example is the change in pronunciation of the Hebrew letter ayin, ע. Today the ayin is silent but in ancient times there were two forms, one of which had a kind of ‘g’ sound to it, called a ghayn, still present in Arabic. It since merged with ayin in most Semitic languages except for Arabic. Biblical Hebrew, as of the 3rd century BCE, apparently still distinguished the phonemes, based on transcriptions in the Septuagint. In Hebrew the word for Gamorrah is עֲמֹרָה (‘Ămōrā). In the Septuagint this is rendered as Γόμορρᾰ (Gómorrha). So we know that that form of ayin was used for that word.
Septuagint as and Inspired Translation
“We are right in believing that the translators of the Septuagint had received the spirit of prophecy; and so if, with its authority, they altered anything and used expressions in their translation different from those of the original, we should not doubt that these expressions also were divinely inspired.” (Augustine, City of God 15.23)
“Accordingly, when anyone claims, ‘Moses meant what I say,’ and another retorts, ‘No, rather what I find there,’ I think that I will be answering in a more religious spirit if I say, ‘Why not both, if both are true?’ And if there is a third possibility, and a fourth, and if someone else sees an entirely different meaning in these words, why should we not think that he was aware of all of them?” (Augustine, Confessions 12.31.42)
This image was referenced in the discussion:
Source: https://www.christianbook.com/page/bibles/about-bibles/about-translations
Translation Examples:
Genesis 22:17
כִּֽי־בָרֵ֣ךְ אֲבָרֶכְךָ֗ וְהַרְבָּ֨ה אַרְבֶּ֤ה אֶֽת־זַרְעֲךָ֙ כְּכֹוכְבֵ֣י הַשָּׁמַ֔יִם
NIV: I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky
NRSV: I will indeed bless you, and I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven
KJV: That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven
KJV mimics the pattern of the Hebrew use of the repeated verb: barek abarekha, harbah arbeh. The infinitive absolute immediately precedes a perfect of imperfect verbal form of the same root in order to emphasize the verbal meaning.
Genesis 4:1
וְהָ֣אָדָ֔ם יָדַ֖ע אֶת־חַוָּ֣ה אִשְׁתֹּ֑ו וַתַּ֙הַר֙ וַתֵּ֣לֶד אֶת־קַ֔יִן וַתֹּ֕אמֶר קָנִ֥יתִי אִ֖ישׁ אֶת־יְהוָֽה׃
NIV: Adam made love to his wife Eve, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Cain. She said, “With the help of the LORD I have brought forth a man.”
NRSV: Now the man knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, “I have produced a man with the help of the LORD.”
KJV: And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the LORD.
Jeremiah 1:17
וְאַתָּה֙ תֶּאְזֹ֣ר מָתְנֶ֔יךָ
NIV: Get yourself ready!
NRSV: But you, gird up your loins
KJV: Thou therefore gird up thy loins
The Hebrew tezor mateneka, does literally mean “gird your loins”. Mothen means “loins”.
Genesis 31:35
כִּי־דֶ֥רֶךְ נָשִׁ֖ים לִ֑י
NIV: I’m having my period
NRSV: the way of women is upon me
KJV: the manner of women is with me
וַיְחַפֵּ֕שׂ וְלֹ֥א מָצָ֖א אֶת־הַתְּרָפִֽים׃
NIV: So he searched but could not find the household gods.
NRSV: So he searched, but did not find the household gods.
KJV: And he searched, but found not the images.
1 Samuel 25:22
אִם־אַשְׁאִ֧יר מִכָּל־אֲשֶׁר־לֹ֛ו עַד־הַבֹּ֖קֶר מַשְׁתִּ֥ין בְּקִֽיר׃
NIV: if by morning I leave alive one male of all who belong to him!
NRSV: if by morning I leave so much as one male of all who belong to him.
KJV: if I leave of all that pertain to him by the morning light any that pisseth against the wall.
Qir is “wall”. Mashtin is a participle of shatan, meaning “to urinate”. KJV chooses to use the Hebrew idiom.
On arguments for the existence of God from the principle of sufficient reason. The principle of sufficient reason is the principle that everything must have a reason, cause, or ground. This principle has been applied to argue for the existence of God as the ultimate reason behind all things.
This is a follow-up to some things discussed in our last group episode on artificial intelligence. Since that conversation I’ve been digging more into the subject and wanted to share some ideas about it. I’ve been interested in artificial intelligence for a number of years. Part of that interest is because of its practical usefulness, which we’re really seeing explode now, with ChatGPT in particular. But I’m also interested in artificial intelligence as a model that could give us insights about human intelligence.
I have to say that the performance of these most recent models, like ChatGPT-3 and especially ChatGPT-4, is something that has really surprised me. If someone had told me a couple years ago that in 2022 & 2023 a deep learning model would be able to perform as well as these do I wouldn’t have believed it. I’m typically predisposed to doubt or at least be very critical about the capabilities of artificial intelligence. But in this case I think I was wrong and I’m happy to have been wrong about that. I don’t mean to swing too far to the other extreme and get too exuberant about it and overstate the capabilities of these models. But just a little bit of excess excitement might be excusable for the moment.
One claim that would be too extreme would be that these deep learning models are actually self-conscious already. Now I have no philosophical reason to suppose that an artificial device could not be self-conscious. I just don’t think we’re there yet. Another, less extreme claim, but one that would still go too far would be that deep learning models actually replicate the way human speech is produced in the brain. I think the implementations are still distinct. But that being said, I think there are enough similarities to be useful and interesting.
For comparison, there are insights we can gain into sight and hearing from cameras and audio recorders. Obviously they are not the same as our own sense organs but there are some similar principles that can help us think about how our senses work. The comparisons work both at the level of physical mechanisms and at the level of data processing. For example, I think there are some interesting insights about human senses from perceptual coding. Perceptual coding is a method used in digital signal processing that leverages the limitations and characteristics of the human sensory systems (auditory and visual) to provide data compression. For example, in audio, certain sounds are inaudible if they’re masked by louder sounds at a similar frequency. Similarly, in an image, subtle color differences in areas with high spatial detail are less noticeable than in smooth areas. Perceptual coding takes advantage of this by selectively removing the less noticeable information to reduce the data size, without significantly impacting perceived quality. This is done with MP3s and JPEGs. Extending this comparison to large language models, I’d propose that models like ChatGPT might be to human language production what cameras, JPEGs, audio recorders, and MP3s are to sight and sound. They aren’t the same but there are some parallels. ChatGPT is not the same as a human brain any more than a camera is an eye or an audio recorder is an ear. But, more modestly, ChatGPT may have some interesting similarities to human language production.
The most significant developments in this technology are so recent that the most useful reading material I’ve had to go to on the subject is peer-reviewed literature from the past year. Even there a lot of the research was done with GPT-2, which was a much less advanced model than we have available today. So it will be interesting to see what studies come out in the next year and beyond. The papers I want to focus on are 3 research papers from 2022 that present the results of experiments and 2 (just slightly older) perspective papers that offer some broad reflections and theoretical considerations.
In what follows, I’ll proceed in three parts: (1) philosophical background, (2) an overview of neural networks: biological and artificial, and (3) recent scientific literature.
Philosophical Background
Most of the philosophy I’d like to discuss is from the 20th century, in which there was considerable philosophical interest in language in what has been called the “linguistic turn”. But first something from the 18th century.
Something that stood out to me in all the research articles was the issue of interpretability. Artificial neural networks have been shown to have remarkable parallels to brain patterns in human brain production. That’s nice because the brain is so complex and little understood. The only problem is that ANNs themselves are also extremely complex and opaque to human comprehension. This challenges a notion going back to the 18th-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico: the Verum factum principle.
The phrase “verum factum” means “the true is the made,” which refers to the notion that truth is verified through creation or invention. In other words, we can only know with certainty that which we have created ourselves, because we understand its origins, structure, and purpose. Vico developed this principle as a critique of the Cartesian method of knowing, which, in Vico’s view, emphasized the abstract and ignored the concrete, humanistic dimensions of knowledge. By asserting that true knowledge comes from what humans create, Vico highlighted the role of human agency, creativity, and historical development in the creation of knowledge.
However, applying the verum factum principle to complex human creations like modern industrial economies, social organizations, big data, and artificial neural networks poses some interesting challenges. These creations certainly reflect human ingenuity and creativity, but they also possess a complexity that can make them difficult to fully comprehend, even for those directly involved in their creation. Artificial neural networks are inspired by our understanding of the human brain, but their function, especially in deep learning models, can be incredibly complex. It’s often said that these networks function as “black boxes,” as the pathway to a certain output given a certain input can be labyrinthine and largely inexplicable to humans, including their creators. So, while the verum factum principle encapsulates the role of human agency and creativity in the construction of knowledge, artificial neural networks illustrate that our creations can reach a level of complexity that challenges our ability to fully comprehend them.
Now turning to the 20th century I think four philosophers are especially relevant to the subject. These are Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Hubert Dreyfus. Of these four Hubert Dreyfus was the one who most directly commented on artificial intelligence. But Dreyfus was also using ideas from Heidegger in his analysis of AI.
Let’s start with Dreyfus and Heidegger. Dreyfus’s main arguments were outlined in his influential 1972 book, What Computers Can’t Do. The core of his critique lies in what he sees as AI’s misguided reliance on formal symbolic reasoning and the assumption that all knowledge can be explicitly encoded. Dreyfus argued that human intelligence and understanding aren’t primarily about manipulating symbolic representations, as early AI research assumed. Instead, he believed that much of human knowledge is tacit, implicit, and tied to our embodied experience of “being in the world”, an important Heideggerian concept. These are aspects that computers, at least during that time, couldn’t easily replicate.
Dreyfus drew heavily on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger to make his arguments. Heidegger’s existential phenomenology, as expressed in his 1927 book Being and Time describes human existence (“Dasein”) as being-in-the-world—a complex, pre-reflective involvement with our surroundings. This contrasts with the traditional view of humans as subjects who perceive and act upon separate objects. According to Heidegger, we don’t usually encounter things in the world by intellectually representing them to ourselves; instead, we deal with them more directly.
Dreyfus related this to AI by arguing that human expertise often works in a similar way. When we become skilled at something, we don’t typically follow explicit rules or representations—we just act. This aligns with Heidegger’s notion of ‘ready-to-hand’—the way we normally deal with tools or equipment, not by observing them as separate objects (‘present-at-hand’), but by using them directly and transparently in our activities.
Another philosopher relevant to this topic is Ludwig Wittgenstein. He was one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. He is considered to have had two major phases that were quite different from each other. His early work, primarily represented in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, proposed that language is a logical structure that represents the structure of reality. But in his later work, chiefly Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein advanced a very different view.
In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein introduces the concept of language as a form of social activity, what he called “language games.” He argues that language does not have a single, universal function (as he had previously believed) but is instead used in many different ways for many different purposes.
Language, Wittgenstein claims, should be seen as a myriad of language games embedded in what he called ‘forms of life’, which are shared human practices or cultural activities. Different language games have different rules, and they can vary widely from commands, to questions, to descriptions, to expressions of feelings, and more. These language games are not separate from our life but constitute our life.
Wittgenstein also introduced the idea of ‘family resemblances’ to discuss the way words and concepts gain their meanings not from having one thing in common, but from a series of overlapping similarities, just like members of a family might resemble each other.
He also challenged the idea that every word needs to have a corresponding object in the world. He argued that trying to find a definitive reference for each word leads to philosophical confusions and that words acquire meaning through their use in specific language games, not through a one-to-one correspondence with objects in the world. So, for Wittgenstein, the meaning of a word is not something that is attached to it, like an object to a label. Instead, the meaning of a word is its use within the language game. This was a notion similar to a theory of language called structuralism.
The leading figure of structuralism was the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. His ideas laid the groundwork for much of the development in linguistics in the 20th century and provided the basis for structuralism. In his course in general linguistics, compiled from notes taken by his students, Saussure proposed a radical shift in the understanding of language. He proposed that language should be studied synchronically (as a whole system at a particular point in time) rather than diachronically (as a historical or evolutionary development). According to Saussure, language is a system of signs, each sign being a combination of a concept (the ‘signified’) and a sound-image (the ‘signifier’). Importantly, he emphasized that the relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary – there is no inherent or natural reason why a particular sound-image should relate to a particular concept.
Regarding the creation of meaning, Saussure proposed that signs do not derive their meaning from a connection to a real object or idea in the world. Instead, the meaning of a sign comes from its place within the overall system of language and its differences from other signs; It’s within the structure of the language. That is, signs are defined not positively, by their content, but negatively, by their relations with other signs. For example, the word “cat” doesn’t mean what it does because of some inherent ‘cat-ness’ of the sound. Instead, it gains meaning because it’s different from “bat,” “cap,” “car,” etc. Moreover, it signifies a particular type of animal, different from a “dog” or a “rat”. Thus, a sign’s meaning is not about a direct link to a thing in the world but is about differential relations within the language system.
Saussure’s ideas about language and the generation of meaning can be interestingly compared to the techniques used in modern natural language processing (NLP) models, such as word2vec and to cosine similarity. For example, in word2vec, an algorithm developed by researchers at Google, words are understood in relation to other words.
Word2vec is a neural network model that learns to represent words as high-dimensional vectors (hence “word to vector”) based on their usage in large amounts of text data. Each word is assigned a position in a multi-dimensional space such that words used in similar contexts are positioned closer together. This spatial arrangement creates ‘semantic’ relationships: words with similar meanings are located near each other, and the differences between word vectors can capture meaningful relationships.
A measure of the similarity between two vectors is called cosine similarity. In the context of NLP, it’s often used to measure the semantic similarity between two words (or word vectors). If the word vectors are close in the multi-dimensional space (meaning the angle between them is small), their cosine similarity will be high, indicating that the words are used in similar contexts and likely have similar meanings. There are some interesting parallels between Saussure’s linguistics and AI language models. Both approaches stress that words do not have meaning in isolation but gain their meaning through their relations to other words within the system; language for Saussure and the trained model for word2vec.
Neural Networks: Biological and Artificial
Recall Hubert Dreyfus’s critique of formal symbolic reasoning in artificial intelligence and the assumption that all knowledge can be explicitly encoded. His critique is most relevant to traditional programming in which explicit program instructions are given. In machine learning, however, and in artificial neural networks program rules are developed in response to data. To whatever degree this is similar to the human mind, biology is at least the inspiration for artificial neural networks.
What is the structure of biological neural networks (BNNs)? In the brain connections between neurons are called synapses. Synapses are the tiny gaps at the junctions between neurons in the brain where communication occurs. They play a vital role in the transmission of information in the brain. Each neuron can be connected to many others through synapses, forming a complex network of communicating cells.
Neurons communicate across the synapse using chemicals called neurotransmitters. When an electrical signal (an action potential) reaches the end of a neuron (the presynaptic neuron), it triggers the release of neurotransmitters into the synapse. These chemicals cross the synapse and bind to receptors on the receiving neuron (the postsynaptic neuron), which can result in a new electrical signal in that neuron. This is how neurons interact with each other and transmit information around the brain.
Synapses form during development and continue to form throughout life as part of learning and memory processes. The creation of new synapses is called synaptogenesis. This happens when a neuron extends a structure called an axon toward another neuron. When the axon of one neuron comes into close enough proximity with the dendrite of another neuron, a synapse can be formed.
The strength of synapses in the brain can change, a phenomenon known as synaptic plasticity. This is thought to be the basis of learning and memory. When two neurons are activated together frequently, the synapse between them can become stronger, a concept known as long-term potentiation (LTP). This is often summarized by the phrase “neurons that fire together, wire together”.
On the other hand, if two neurons aren’t activated together for a while, or the activation is uncorrelated, the synapse between them can become weaker, a process known as long-term depression (LTD).
Multiple factors contribute to these changes in synaptic strength, including the amount of neurotransmitter released, the sensitivity of the postsynaptic neuron, and structural changes such as the growth or retraction of synaptic connections. By adjusting the strength of synaptic connections, the brain can adapt to new experiences, form new memories, and continually rewire itself. This is a dynamic and ongoing process that underlies the brain’s remarkable plasticity.
How then do biological neural networks compare to artificial neural networks? In an artificial neural network, each connection between artificial neurons (also called nodes or units) has an associated weight. These weights play a role somewhat analogous to the strength of synaptic connections in a biological brain. A weight in an ANN determines the influence or importance of an input to the artificial neuron. When the network is being trained, these weights are iteratively adjusted in response to the input the network receives and the error in the network’s output. The goal of the training is to minimize this error, usually defined by a loss function.
The process of adjusting weights in an ANN is a bit like the changes in synaptic strength observed in biological neurons through processes like long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression (LTD). In both cases, the changes are driven by the activity in the network (biological or artificial) and serve to improve the network’s performance – either in terms of survival and behavior for a biological organism, or in terms of prediction or classification accuracy for an ANN.
Of courses there are still multiple differences between biological neural networks and artificial neural networks. ANNs usually involve much simpler learning rules and lack many of the complex dynamics found in biological brains, such as the various types of neurons and synapses, detailed temporal dynamics, and biochemical processes. The biological synaptic plasticity is a much richer and more complex process than the adjustment of weights in an ANN. Also, in most ANNs, once training is complete, the weights remain static, while in biological brains, synaptic strength is continually adapting throughout an organism’s life. Biological and artificial neural networks share computational principles but they certainly don’t implement these computations in the same way. Brains and computers are simply very different physical things, right down to the materials that compose them.
Artificial neural networks have been in development for several decades. But it is in very recent years that we’ve seen some especially remarkable advances, to which we’ll turn now.
Recent Scientific Literature
I’d like to share 5 papers that I’ve found useful on this subject. Three are research papers with experimental data and two are perspective papers that offer some broad reflections and theoretical considerations.
The 3 research papers are:
“Brains and algorithms partially converge in natural language processing”, published in Communications Biology in 2022 by Caucheteux & King.
“Shared computational principles for language processing in humans and deep language models”, published in Nature Neuroscience in 2022 by Goldstein et al.
“Explaining neural activity in human listeners with deep learning via natural language processing of narrative text”, published in Scientific Reports in 2022 by Russo et al.
And the 2 perspective articles are:
“Direct Fit to Nature: An Evolutionary Perspective on Biological and Artificial Neural Networks”, published in Neuron in 2020 by Hasson et al.
“A deep learning framework for neuroscience”, published in Nature Neuroscience in 2019 by Richards et al.
In each of the three research papers human participants read or listened to certain passages while their brain signals for specific brain regions were measured. Deep learning models were trained on this data to predict the brain signals that would result from the text. Researchers looked for instances of high correlation between actual brain patterns and the brain patterns predicted by the model and mapped where in the brain these signals occurred at various points in time before and after word onset. In particular, they noted whether the brain regions activated corresponded to those regions that would be expected from neuroscience to activate in the various stages of language processing.
In the first article, “Brains and algorithms partially converge in natural language processing”, published in Communications Biology in 2022 by Caucheteux & King the researchers used deep learning models to predict brain responses to certain sentences. Then the actual brain responses of human subjects were used as training data for the models. They used a variety of models that they classified as visual, lexical, and compositional. Then they evaluated how well these different types of models matched brain responses in different brain regions. The brain responses in the human subjects were measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG).
Regarding the 3 different types of models:
Visual models are deep learning models that are primarily used for tasks involving images or videos. They are trained to recognize patterns in visual data, which can then be used to perform tasks such as image classification, object detection, image generation, and more. The most common types of visual deep learning models are convolutional neural networks (CNNs). CNNs are specifically designed to process pixel data and have their architecture inspired by the human visual cortex.
Lexical models are models that focus on the processing of words or “lexemes” in a language. They work with individual words or groups of words (n-grams), treating them as atomic units. Lexical models can learn word representations (often called “embeddings”) that capture the semantic meanings of words, and their relationships with each other. They are often used in natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as text classification, sentiment analysis, and named entity recognition. Examples of lexical models include traditional word2vec or GloVe models, which map words into a high-dimensional vector space.
Compositional models, also called “sequential” or “recurrent” models, handle sequences of data where the order of the data points is important, such as sentences, time-series data, etc. They are designed to process one part of the sequence at a time and maintain a kind of memory (in the form of hidden states) of what has been seen so far. This allows them to capture patterns over time and use this information to make predictions about future data points in the sequence. Examples include causal language transformers (CLTs) like GPT.
Interestingly enough, the accuracy of the different types of models was observed to vary with time from the word onset. And the moments of high correlation of each model type corresponded with the activation of certain brain regions.
In early visual responses – less than 150 ms, when subjects would first see a word – brain activations were in the primary visual cortex and correlated best with activations in visual models, convolutional neural networks (CNNs).
At around 200 ms these brain activations were conveyed to the posterior fusiform gyrus. At the same time lexical models like Word2Vec started to correlate better than CNNs. This tracks with the hypothesis that the fusiform gyrus is responsible for orthographic and morphemic computations.
Around 400 ms brain activations were present in a broad fronto-temporo-parietal network that peaked in the left temporal gyrus. At this point lexical models like Word2Vec also correlated with the entire language network. These word representations were then sustained for several seconds, suggesting a widespread distribution of meaning in the brain.
Around 500-600 ms there were complex recurrent dynamics dominated by both visual and lexical representations.
After 800 ms, brain activations were present in the prefrontal, parietal, and temporal lobes. At the same time compositional models like causal language transformers (CLTs) correlated better than lexical models. The team speculated that these late responses might be due to the complexity of the sentences used in this study, potentially delaying compositional computations.
The researchers concluded from their experiment that the results show that deep learning algorithms partially converge toward brain-like solutions.
In “Shared computational principles for language processing in humans and deep language models”, published in Nature Neuroscience in 2022 by Goldstein et al. the researchers compared the responses of human participants and autoregressive deep language models (DLMs) to the text of a 30-minute podcast.
The authors note that human language has traditionally been explained by psycholinguistic approaches using interpretable models that combine symbolic elements, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, with rule-based operations. This is similar to the kind of traditional programming that Hubert Dreyfus argued would not be viable for AI. In contrast, autoregressive Deep Language Models (DLMs) learn language from real-world textual examples, with minimal or no explicit prior knowledge about language structure. They do not parse words into parts of speech or apply explicit syntactic transformations. Instead, these models learn to encode a sequence of words into a numerical vector, termed a contextual embedding, from which the model decodes the next word. Autoregressive DLMs, such as GPT-2, have demonstrated effectiveness in capturing the structure of language. But the open question is whether the core computational principles of these models relate to how the human brain processes language. The authors present their experimental findings as evidence that human brains process incoming speech in a manner similar to an autoregressive DLM.
In the first experimental setup, participants proceeded word by word through a 30-minute transcribed podcast, providing a prediction of each upcoming word. Both the human participants and GPT-2 were able to predict words well above chance. And there was high overlap in the accuracy of the predictions of human subjects and GPT-2 for individual words, i.e. words that human subjects predicted well GPT-2 also predicted well. This experiment was determined to demonstrate that listeners can accurately predict upcoming words when explicitly instructed to do so, and that human predictions and autoregressive DLM predictions are matched in this context. Next the researchers wanted to determine if the human brain, like an autoregressive DLM, is continuously engaged in spontaneous next-word prediction without such explicit instruction. And whether neural signals actually contain information about the words being predicted.
In the next experimental setup, the researchers used electrocorticography (ECoG) to measure neural responses of human participants before and after word-onset. Subjects engaged in free listening, without being given any explicit instruction to predict upcoming words. The goal was to see if our brains engage in such prediction all the time as simply a natural part of language comprehension.
The results from human subjects in this experiment were also compared to models. The first model used was a static word embedding model, GloVe. The model was used to localize electrodes containing reliable responses to single words in the narrative. The words were aligned with neural signals and then the model would be trained to predict neural signals from word embeddings. A series of coefficients corresponding to features of the word embedding was learned using linear regression to predict the neural signal across words from the assigned embeddings. “The model was evaluated by computing the correlation between the reconstructed signal and the actual signal” for the word.
In the results of this experiment there was indeed found to be a neural signal before word onset. But what the model also enabled the researchers to do was ascertain some kind of semantic content from that signal, since the model had been trained to predict certain neural signals for given words. What was observed was that “the neural responses before word onset contained information about human predictions regarding the identity of the next word. Crucially, the encoding was high for both correct and incorrect predictions. This demonstrated that pre-word-onset neural activity contains information about what listeners actually predicted, irrespective of what they subsequently perceived.” Of course, sometimes the subject’s predictions were wrong. So what happened in those cases? “The neural responses after word onset contained information about the words that were actually perceived.” So “the encoding before word onset was aligned with the content of the predicted words” and “ the encoding after word onset was aligned with the content of the perceived words.” This all aligns with what we would expect under a predictive processing (PP) model of the brain.
The next level of analysis was to replace the static embedding model (GloVe) with a contextual embedding model (GPT-2) to determine if this would improve the ability to predict the neural signals to each word. It did; an indication that contextual embedding is a closer approximation to the computational principles underlying human language. And the improved correlation from contextual embedding was found to be localized to specific brain regions. “Encoding based on contextual embeddings resulted in statistically significant correlations” in electrodes that “were not significantly predicted by static embedding. The additional electrodes revealed by contextual embedding were mainly located in higher-order language areas with long processing timescales along the inferior frontal gyrus, temporal pole, posterior superior temporal gyrus, parietal lobe and angular gyrus.” The authors concluded from this that “the brain is coding for the semantic relationship among words contained in static embeddings while also being tuned to the unique contextual relationship between the specific word and the preceding words in the sequence.”
The authors submit that DLMs provide a new modeling framework that drastically departs from classical psycholinguistic models. They are not designed to learn a concise set of interpretable syntactic rules to be implemented in novel situations, nor do they rely on part of speech concepts or other linguistic terms. Instead, they learn from surface-level linguistic behavior to predict and generate the contextually appropriate linguistic outputs. And they propose that their experiments provide compelling behavioral and neural evidence for shared computational principles between the way the human brain and autoregressive DLMs process natural language.
In “Explaining neural activity in human listeners with deep learning via natural language processing of narrative text”, published in Scientific Reports in 2022 by Russo et al. human participants listened to a short story, both forward and backward. Their brain responses were measured by functional MRI. Text versions of the same story were tokenized and submitted to GPT-2. Both the brain signal data and GPT-2 outputs were fed into a general linear model to encode the fMRI signals.
The 2 outputs researchers looked at from GPT-2 were surprisal and saliency. Surprisal is a measure of the information content associated with an event, in terms of its unexpectedness or rarity. The more unlikely an event, the higher its surprisal. It is defined mathematically as the negative logarithm of the probability of the event. Saliency refers to the quality by which an object stands out relative to its neighbors. In a text it’s the importance or prominence of certain words, phrases, or topics, a measure of how much a particular text element stands out relative to others in the same context.
What they found in their results was that the surprisal from GPT-2 correlated with the neural signals in the superior and middle temporal gyri, in the anterior and posterior cingulate cortices, and in the left prefrontal cortex. Saliency from GPT-2 correlated with the neural signals for longer segments in the left superior and middle temporal gyri.
The authors proposed that their results corroborated the idea that word-level prediction is accurately indexed by the surprisal metric and that the neural activation observed from the saliency scores suggests the co-occurrence of a weighing mechanism operating on the context words. This was something previously hypothesized as necessary to language comprehension.
The involvement of areas in the middle and the superior temporal gyrus aligns with previous studies supporting that core aspects of language comprehension, such as maintaining intermediate representations active in working memory and predicting upcoming words, do not necessarily engage areas in the executive control network but are instead performed by language-selective brain areas that, in this case, are the ones relatively early in the processing hierarchy.
I found the following comment in the discussion section of the paper quite interesting: “In general, considering that the architecture of artificial neural networks was originally inspired by the same principles of biological neural networks, it might be not at all surprising that some specific dynamics observed in the former are somehow reflected in the functioning of the latter.” I think that’s an interesting point. The whole idea of artificial neural networks came from biological neural networks. We were basically trying to do something similar to what neurons do. We don’t know exhaustively how biological neural networks work but we do know that they work very well. When we are finally able to make artificial networks that work quite well it’s perhaps to be expected that they would have similar characteristics as biological neural networks.
The other two papers were perspective papers. These didn’t present the results of experiments but discussed what I thought were some interesting ideas relating to the whole interchange between language processing in the human brain and in deep learning models.
In “Direct Fit to Nature: An Evolutionary Perspective on Biological and Artificial Neural Networks”, published in Neuron in 2020 by Hasson et al. the authors covered several topics. One thing they addressed that I found interesting was a challenge to three basic assumptions of cognitive psychology. These assumptions are:
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The brain’s computational resources are limited and the underlying neural code must be optimized for particular functions. They attribute this to Noam Chomsky and Jerry Fodor.
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The brain’s inputs are ambiguous and too impoverished for learning without built-in knowledge. They attribute this to Noam Chomsky.
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Shallow, externally supervised and self-supervised methods are not sufficient for learning. They attribute this to Steven Pinker.
In response to the first assumption the authors argue that the brain’s computational resources are actually not scarce. “Each cubic millimeter of cortex contains hundreds of thousands of neurons with millions of adjustable synaptic weights, and BNNs utilize complex circuit motifs hierarchically organized across many poorly understood cortical areas. Thus, relative to BNNs, ANNs are simplistic and minuscule.” Artificial neural networks are indeed trained on huge amounts of data. GPT-4 is essentially trained on the whole internet. Human children don’t learn to talk by reading the whole internet; that’s true. But the human brain is also a lot more complex than even the most sophisticated artificial neural networks; so far at least. So if GPT-4 is able to perform so impressively with a structure that’s less sophisticated than the human brain we can expect that the human brain’s computational resources are hardly scarce.
In response to the second assumption the authors argue that the brain’s input is not impoverished. Noam Chomsky, arguably the most important linguist of the 20th century, argued for what he called the “poverty of the stimulus,” meaning that the linguistic input children receive is often incomplete, ungrammatical, or otherwise imperfect. But they still manage to learn their native language effectively. How? Chomsky proposed that there is a “Language Acquisition Device” (LAD) within the human brain. This hypothetical module is thought to be equipped with knowledge of a “Universal Grammar,” which encapsulates the structural rules common to all human languages. But Hasson et al. argue that there is no poverty of the stimulus because deep learning models can produce direct fit with reliable interpretations using dense and broad sampling for the parameter space. The model is casting a very wide net. They state: “One of our main insights is that dense sampling changes the nature of the problem and exposes the power of direct-fit interpolation-based learning… The unexpected power of ANNs to discover unintuitive structure in the world suggests that our attempts to intuitively quantify the statistical structure in the world may fall short. How confident are we that multimodal inputs are in fact not so rich?” By the way, I was sharing a draft of this with a friend who shared another recent paper with me by UC Berkeley professor Steven Piantadosi, titled “Modern language models refute Chomsky’s approach to language”. I’m not going to get into that now but just thought I’d mention it.
In response to the third assumption the authors argue that shallow self-supervision and external-supervision are sufficient for learning. The authors cite Pinker’s book The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language as an example of the view that they are challenging. Pinker’s views are very similar to Chomsky’s. Pinker argues that language learning is not just about imitation or conditioning. Instead, he believes that the human brain has an inherent structure for understanding language, which is why children are able to learn languages so rapidly and effortlessly, often making grammatical leaps that aren’t explicitly taught or present in their environment. But Hasson et al. argue that humans have a great deal of external supervision from our environment, both social and physical. They refer to the importance of embodiment to predictive processing, referring to the ideas of Andy Clark and Karl Friston, among others.
Another subject the authors address is the issue of interpretability. This goes back to the Verum factum principle from Vico. Scientific models, including those in neuroscience, are often evaluated based on two desirable features: (1) interpretability and (2) generalization. We want explanations to have good predictive power but we also want to be able to understand them. Not just verify that they work. If it’s an equation we like to be able to look at an equation and be able to intuit how it works. And this means that the equation can’t be too long or have too many parameters. However, interpretability and generalization are often in conflict. Models with good interpretability may have strong explanatory appeal but poor predictive power, and vice versa.
The authors suggest that the brain is an exceptionally over-parameterized modeling organ. Interpretability in the brain is intractable for the same reason interpretability of deep learning models is intractable. They work with a huge number of parameters. There’s quantification occurring but it’s not like a concise equation that you can look at in grasp intellectually. The authors propose that neural computation relies on brute-force direct fitting, which uses over-parameterized optimization algorithms to enhance predictive power, i.e. generalization, without explicitly modeling the underlying generative structure of the world.
One thing that’s really nice about this paper (and I highly recommend it by the way, it’s a delightful read) is its 3 “boxes” that touch on some key concepts. One box covers the biomimicry of biological neural networks by artificial neural networks. The authors state that artificial neural networks (ANNs) are learning models that draw inspiration from the biological neural networks (BNNs) present in living brains, but that ANNs are a highly abstracted version of BNNs. Some biological nervous systems include functional specialized system-level components like the hippocampus, striatum, thalamus, and hypothalamus, elements not included in contemporary ANNs. ANNs are also disembodied and do not closely interact with the environment in a closed-loop manner. While the authors concede that ANNs are indeed highly simplified models of BNNs, they propose that there exist some essential similarities: they both belong to the same group of over-parameterized, direct-fit models that depend on dense sampling for learning task-relevant structures in data. And, crucially, ANNs are currently the only models that achieve human-like behavioral performance in many domains and can offer unanticipated insights into both the strengths and limitations of the direct-fit approach. Like BNNs, ANNs are founded on a collection of connected nodes known as artificial neurons or units that loosely resemble neurons in a biological nervous system. Each connection, akin to synapses in BNNs, links one artificial neuron to another, and the strength of these connections can be adjusted through learning. The connections between artificial neurons have weights that are adjusted during the learning process based on supervised feedback or reward signals. The weight amplifies or reduces the strength of a connection. And much like BNNs, ANNs are sometimes organized into layers.
Another “box” addresses embodiment. This is something the philosopher Andy Clark has addressed a lot in his work. Not to mention, going further back, the philosopher Maruice Merleau-Ponty. At present, ANNs are disembodied and unable to actively sample or modify their world. The brain does not operate with strictly defined training and test regimes as found in machine learning. Objective functions in BNNs must satisfy certain body-imposed constraints to behave adaptively when interacting with the world. The authors suggest that adding a body to current ANNs, capable of actively sampling and interacting with the world, along with ways to directly interact with other networks, could increase the network’s learning capacity and reduce the gaps between BNNs and ANNs. Interestingly enough, they cite Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical Investigations” when addressing the way social others direct our learning processes.
One other topic in the paper that I found interesting was a discussion of “System 1” and “System 2”. This model was made most famous by Daniel Kahneman in his 2011 book Thinking Fast and Slow. The authors cite Jonathan St B. T. Evans’s 1984 paper “Heuristic and analytic processes in reasoning”. And there are earlier precedents for the general idea going back further in history. System 1 represents fast, automatic, and intuitive thinking, what Evans called heuristic processes. And System 2 represents slow, effortful, and deliberate thinking, what Evans called analytic processes. Hasson et al. propose that we can understand System 1 to be a kind of substrate from which System 2 can arise. System 2 is where things get really interesting. That’s where we find some of the most impressive capacities of the human mind. But they maintain that we have to start with System 1 and build from there. They state: “Although the human mind inspires us to touch the stars, it is grounded in the mindless billions of direct-fit parameters of System 1.” They see artificial neural networks as having the most relevance toward explaining System 1 processes. And the thing is we seem to be continually finding that System 1 includes more than we might have thought. “Every day, new ANN architectures are developed using direct-fit procedures to learn and perform more complex cognitive functions, such as driving, translating languages, learning calculus, or making a restaurant reservation–functions that were historically assumed to be under the jurisdiction of System 2.”
In “A deep learning framework for neuroscience”, published in Nature Neuroscience in 2019 by Richards et al. the authors focus on three key features of artificial neural network design – (1) objective functions, (2) learning rules, and (3) architectures – and address how these design components can impact neuroscience.
The authors observe that when the traditional framework for systems neuroscience was formulated, they could only collect data from a small selection of neurons. Under this framework, a scientist observes neural activity, formulates a theory of what individual neurons compute, and then constructs a circuit-level theory of how these neurons integrate their operations. However, the question arises as to whether this traditional framework can scale up to accommodate recordings from thousands of neurons and all of the behaviors that one might want to explain. It’s arguable that the classical approach hasn’t seen as much success when applied to large neural circuits that perform a variety of functions, such as the neocortex or hippocampus. These limitations of the classical framework suggest that new methodologies are necessary to capitalize on experimental advancements.
At their fundamental level, ANNs model neural computation using simplified units that loosely emulate the integration and activation properties of real neurons. The specific computations performed by ANNs are not designed but learned. When setting up ANNs, scientists don’t shape the specific computations performed by the network. Instead, they establish the three components mentioned previously: objective functions, learning rules, and architecture. Objective functions measure the network’s performance on a task, and learning involves finding synaptic weights that maximize or minimize this objective function. These are often referred to as ‘loss’ or ‘cost’ functions. Learning rules offer a guide for updating the synaptic weights. And architectures dictate the arrangement of units in the network and determine the flow of information, as well as the computations the network can or cannot learn.
Richards et al. make an observation about interpretability similar to that made by Hasson et al. The computations that emerge in large-scale ANNs trained on high-dimensional datasets can be hard to interpret. An ANN can be constructed with a few lines of code, and for each unit in an ANN, the equations determining their responses to stimuli or relationships to behavior can be specified. But after training, a network is characterized by millions of weights that collectively encode what the network has learned, and it is difficult to envision how such a system could be described with only a few parameters, let alone in words. They suggest that we think about this in the following way. Theories can have a compact explanation that can be expressed in relatively few words that can then be used to develop more complex, non-compact models. They give the theory of evolution by natural selection as a comparative example. The underlying principle is fairly simple and comprehensible, even if the actual mechanics that emerge from it are very complex. For systems neuroscience we can start with these three relatively simple and comprehensible principles: objective functions, learning rules, and architecture. Then even though the system that emerges from that is too complex to comprehend at least the underlying principles are comprehensible and give some degree of intuitive understanding.
Conclusion
Something that I find exciting about all this is that it’s an interesting interface between philosophy of mind, neuroscience, and programming. I think that some of the most interesting problems out there are philosophical problems. Even many scientific problems transition into philosophical problems eventually. But our philosophy needs periodic grounding in the world of empirical observations. What we might call armchair philosophy runs the danger of getting untethered from reality. In the philosophy of mind we can speculate about a lot of things that don’t work out very well in neuroscience. That’s not to say that philosophy of mind has to be entirely bounded by neuroscience. Just because human minds work in a certain way doesn’t mean that minds of any kind would have to be constrained in the same way. There could be many different ways for minds to work. But if we’re theorizing about ways other types of minds might work we don’t, at present, have ways to verify that they actually would work. With theories about human minds we can at least try to verify them. Even that’s kind of challenging though because the brain is so complex and difficult to observe directly at high resolution.
Still, there’s a lot about our brains that we do know that we can take into account in our theories of the mind. We know that our brains have neurons and that neurons make synaptic connections. And we know that those synaptic connections can strengthen or weaken. We can at least account for that in our theories. Artificial neural networks patterned after biological neural networks are useful tools to model our brains. We can’t go into every synaptic cleft in the brain to sample its flux of neurotransmitters. Or record the firing frequency of every neuron in the brain. That would be great but we just don’t have that capability. With artificial neural networks, as imperfect approximations as they are, we at least have recorded information for billions of parameters, even if their sheer quantity defies comprehension. And we can try out different configurations to see how well they work.
Another subtopic that’s interested me for a while is the possibility of what I call a general theory of mind. “General” in the sense of applying beyond just the special case of human minds, a theory of the human mind being a “special” theory of mind. What other kinds of minds might there be? What are all the different ways that a mind can work? AI might give us the ability to simulate and test more general and exotic possibilities and to extract the general principles they all hold in common.
I think the recent success of these large language models is quite exciting. Maybe a little bit frightening. But I’m mostly excited to see what we can learn.
With this episode I’d like to talk about some things I’ve been studying about prayer. This may be one of the most practical topics I’ve ever gotten into since it’s essentially about a practice, something that you do. We can talk about it and reflect on it, which is what I’ll be doing here. But prayer is ultimately a spiritual practice. Theology can certainly be theoretical and intellectual. And that’s something that I really like about it. But I always try to remember something that Evagrius Ponticus (345 – 399) said about theology: “A theologian is one who prays, and one who prays is a theologian.”
I try to live my life in imitation of Christ and one thing that stands out to me in the scriptures is that Jesus prayed. And I think this is very significant. In his book Jesus of Nazareth Pope Benedict XVI said:
“Again and again the Gospels note that Jesus withdrew ‘to the mountain’ to spend nights in prayer ‘alone’ with his Father. These short passages are fundamental for our understanding of Jesus; they lift the veil of mystery just a little; they give us a glimpse into Jesus’ filial existence, into the source from which his action and teaching and suffering sprang. This ‘praying’ of Jesus is the Son conversing with the Father; Jesus’ human consciousness and will, his human soul, is taken up into that exchange, and in this way human ‘praying’ is able to become a participation in this filial communion with the Father.” (7)
As is typical with Benedict, he packs a lot into very condensed passages. Three points stand out to me here about Jesus’ practice of prayer.
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It is fundamental for our understanding of him.
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It is the source from which his action and teaching and suffering sprang.
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Our prayer is a way of participating in the communion that Jesus has with the Father.
That prayer was something fundamental to Jesus’ behavior and identity was apparently something that his disciples noticed as well. On one occasion after he returned from prayer they asked him to instruct them.
“And it came to pass, that, as he was praying in a certain place, when he ceased, one of his disciples said unto him, Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples.” (John 11:1, KJV)
And we have many examples in the Gospels of Jesus teaching about prayer and how to pray, especially in Luke.
As I’ve reflected on prayer I keep sensing its great importance. It’s such a simple thing. And we even tend to dismiss it as insignificant. Like many things, the phrase “thoughts and prayers” is politicized and maybe that’s an apt indicator of our attitudes about prayer, that it’s something empty and ineffectual. And it’s certainly true that prayer can be empty and vain. Jesus even said as much (Matthew 6:5-8). But I actually believe that sincere prayer, far from being empty and ineffectual, is actually the most important thing that we can do. If we want to change the world, starting especially with changing ourselves, we must pray.
Prayer touches on the fundamental issues of who we are and what we exist for. Augustine of Hippo (354 – 430) said to God in his Confessions, “You have made us for Yourself.” Why do we exist? We exist for God. That’s not what most of us think. We may think we exist for any number of other things, or nothing at all. We could say, as Jesus said to Martha, that we “are worried and troubled about many things” (Luke 10:41, NKJV). Ultimately all of these things, all our desires, interests, projects, and concerns are imperfect reflections of the most fundamental and innate desire for our creator and sustainer. But we often don’t know that that’s what we’re looking for, or even that we’re looking for anything at all.
Each of us is, in many ways, the Samaritan woman at the well to whom Jesus said:
“If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.” (John 4:10, NKJV)
What an interesting hypothetical. You would be asking for something. You’re not asking for it now. But you would ask for it if you knew about it. It’s this fascinating situation where we’re looking for something without knowing what we are looking for or even that we are looking for anything at all.
I think this is an apt description of the human condition generally. There’s this kind of generalized discontent and incompleteness to our existence. Augustine called it restlessness.
“You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”
I think a scripturally appropriate term would be thirst. Jesus described the object of this thirst as “living water”:
“Whoever drinks of this water [meaning literal, physical water] will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.” (John 4:13-14, NKJV)
This living water is both our source and purpose. It’s the culmination of all our longing but we know, both from scripture and just from experience, that the challenges of finding it are significant. Paul said we seek in the hope that we might grope for and find the Unknown God, even “though He is not far from each one of us” (Acts 17:27, NKJV) Paul also acknowledged that prayer itself is difficult: “We do not know what we should pray for as we ought” (Romans 8:26, NKJV)
In my conversations with fellow Christians we’ve shared this experience that prayer can be difficult. We don’t feel like we’re doing it right or that we’re making that spiritual connection with God. That’s a common experience and has been from the beginning. But we have help. Paul said:
“Likewise the Spirit also helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.” (Romans 8:26, NKJV)
It seems appropriate and perfect to me that the Spirit would intercede for our nondescript, generalized restlessness for the Unknown God with unutterable groanings. Even if we don’t know what we’re looking for or that we’re looking for anything at all the Spirit can intercede and act on this most vague longing with groanings which cannot be uttered.
Something that I’ve found helpful in the practice of prayer is making use of the different forms of prayer from the Christian tradition. The Catechism of the Catholic Church identifies three major expressions of the life of prayer in the Christian tradition (2699, 2721):
Vocal Prayer
Meditation
Contemplative Prayer
I find that one or the other of these three expressions of prayer is often most suitable at certain times. I think that sometimes we find prayer difficult because we only know of one form. And even though that one form may be very suitable in many situations it might not be most suitable in others. I’ve found it helpful to weave these three forms together in my practice of prayer.
I tend to think of these three expressions of prayer as sitting on a spectrum of expressibility and expressive content. Vocal prayer is most characterized by expressible content in the sentences that we speak. Contemplative prayer mostly transcends anything that can be expressed in words. And meditation, centering mostly in the words scripture and the life of Christ, sits between vocal prayer and contemplative prayer in its degree of expressibility.
The first major expression of prayer in the Christian tradition is vocal prayer. There are a couple things that strike me about Jesus’s teachings about vocal prayer. And I think they’re related. The first is that in our petitions we must have faith. The second is that we should be relentless in our petitions. I think those two things are related. And they strike me because I don’t feel like I live in an age and culture where we really believe in miracles, especially not to a degree that we would pursue them relentlessly in our prayers. Part of that may be our secularism. And part of it may be a concern that relentlessness would be irreverently presumptuous. But Jesus seemed to have precious little concern about presumptuousness. Consider the following parable:
“Then He spoke a parable to them, that men always ought to pray and not lose heart, saying: There was in a certain city a judge who did not fear God nor regard man. Now there was a widow in that city; and she came to him, saying, Get justice for me from my adversary. And he would not for a while; but afterward he said within himself, Though I do not fear God nor regard man, yet because this widow troubles me I will avenge her, lest by her continual coming she weary me. Then the Lord said, Hear what the unjust judge said. And shall God not avenge His own elect who cry out day and night to Him, though He bears long with them? I tell you that He will avenge them speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will He really find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:1-8, NKJV)
Jesus was insistent that God is the most disposed to grant petitions for those who seek after them.
“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. Or what man is there among you who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!” (Matthew 7:7-12, NKJV)
I’m struck by the directness and complete lack of qualification in these teachings. But if you’re like me you have doubts that it can really be so straightforward. Why? Because we’ve all had the experience that Jesus’s disciples had, where we pursued a miracle that didn’t come:
“Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, Why could we not cast it [the demon] out? So Jesus said to them, Because of your unbelief; for assuredly, I say to you, if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, Move from here to there, and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you. However, this kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting.” (Matthew 17:19-21, NKJV)
We’ve all had this experience. We pray for something and we don’t get it. I’ve even considered this an important spiritual developmental step, moving from a more naive conception of God to one that’s more sophisticated, where we can appreciate the various reasons that our petitions in prayer might not be granted. But I’m coming around to question that. I wonder if we’re too quick in our sophistication to enable underdeveloped faith.
This is why I think prayer, far from being vain and ineffectual, is the most important thing we can do. We need, as individuals and as societies and nations, things that we cannot produce on our own. We need God to intervene. There are societies and sub-cultures where these things do happen, where people expect, pursue, and receive miracles. God knows how to give good gifts to his children.
The second major expression of prayer in Christian tradition is meditation. Meditation might not be something we popularly associate with Christianity but it’s definitely part of the tradition. It’s often facilitated by texts of scripture and devotional writings. Also visual arts like icons. Lectio divina is one venerable practice of reading scripture for the special purpose of focusing and meditating on it in prayer. I often use one of the Psalms for this purpose. Events from the life of Christ are also very powerful.
The Rosary is a classic example of a practice of prayer that is focused on events from the life of Christ. Each cycle of the Rosary goes through five “Mysteries” from the life of Christ.
The Joyful Mysteries are:
- The Annunciation
- The Visitation
- The Nativity
- The Presentation in the Temple
- The Finding in the Temple
The Sorrowful Mysteries are
- The Agony in the Garden
- The Scourging at the Pillar
- The Crowning with Thorns
- The Carrying of the Cross
- The Crucifixion and Death
The Glorious Mysteries are
- The Resurrection
- The Ascension
- The Descent of the Holy Spirit
- The Assumption
- The Coronation of Mary
The Luminous Mysteries are
- The Baptism of Christ in the Jordan
- The Wedding Feast at Cana
- Jesus’ Proclamation of the Coming of the Kingdom of God
- The Transfiguration
- The Institution of the Eucharist
We can read the accounts of these events in scripture and learn about their contents. But in meditative prayer we can go deeper into them to be moved and edified by them. As an example, concerning the mystery of the Carrying of the Cross, Bishop Robert Barron remarked that, “Carrying the cross must become the very structure of the Christian life.” This idea has had a profound impact on me as I’ve meditated on it.
Something I enjoy about scripture is that it’s very intellectually challenging and stimulating. And interdisciplinary. It involves topics of history, philosophy, and linguistics. I think that’s wonderful. But I think there’s sometimes a temptation to compete over who can be the most knowledgeable about the content of scripture. I don’t think that serves the purposes of scripture at all. In The Imitation of Christ Thomas à Kempis (1380 – 1471) warned: “If you wish to derive profit from your reading of Scripture, do it with humility, simplicity, and faith; at no time use it to gain a reputation for being one who is learned.” (Book I, Chapter V) Rather, Thomas said: “Let it then be our main concern to meditate on the life of Jesus Christ.” (Book I, Chapter I)
In addition to meditation of the life of Christ I cannot speak highly enough about the edifying influence of the Psalms. I’ve said at times, and I still think it’s true, that the fastest way to learn about the narrative arc of the Old Testament is to read 1 Samuel through 2 Kings. And of course those four books are books of holy scripture, so well worth reading. But I think now that the most direct path into the spiritual world of the Old Testament is in the Psalms. I admit that I didn’t always appreciate them and couldn’t get into them. Maybe I wasn’t ready for them. But I really appreciate them now. Sometimes if I find it difficult to get into prayer the Psalms are a great way to get started, to get into the right frame of mind.
To paraphrase Ecclesiastes (3:1), there is a Psalm for every season.
Psalms of joy:
“O how love I thy law! it is my meditation all the day.” (Psalm 119:97, KJV)
“How sweet are thy words unto my taste! yea, sweeter than honey to my mouth!” (Psalm 119: 103, KJV)
“Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.” (Psalm 119:103, KJV)
“Let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord. Praise ye the Lord.” (Psalm 150:6, KJV)
Psalms of grief and frustration:
“How long wilt thou forget me, O Lord? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” (Psalm 13:1, KJV)
“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1)
And Psalms of reflection:
“When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?” (Psalm 8:3-4, KJV)
“One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to enquire in his temple.” (Psalm 27:1, KJV)
In his book Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict XVI said: “The Psalms are words that the Holy Spirit has given to men; they are God’s Spirit become word.” (131) Speaking about the Psalms and the Lord’s Prayer he remarks that certain formulaic prayers like these can help us to get started in prayer and in approaching God.
“Our prayer can and should be a wholly personal prayer. But we also constantly need to make use of those prayers that express in words the encounter with God experienced both by the Church as a whole and by individual members of the Church… In the formulaic prayers that arose first from the faith of Israel and then from the faith of praying members of the Church, we get to know God and ourselves as well. They are a ‘school of prayer’ that transforms and opens up our life… Normally, thought precedes word; it seems to formulate the word. But praying the Psalms and liturgical prayer in general is exactly the other way around: The word, the voice, goes ahead of us, and our mind must adapt to it. For on our own we human beings do not ‘know how to pray as we ought’ (Rom 8:26) – we are too far removed from God, he is too mysterious and too great for us. And so God has come to our aid: He himself provides the words of our prayer and teaches us to pray. Through the prayers that come from him, he enables us to set out toward him; by praying together with the brothers and sisters he has given us, we gradually come to know him and draw closer to him.” (130-131)
The third major expression of prayer in the Christian tradition is contemplative prayer. This is the form of prayer that I think of as being the furthest on the spectrum away from expressibility and expressive content. In the Eastern Christian tradition it’s sometimes called “hesychasm”, derived from the Greek hesychia (ἡσυχία), meaning “stillness, rest, quiet, or silence”. Another descriptive term is “apophatic”, from the Greek apophēmi (ἀπόφημι), meaning “to deny”, which is characterized by negative content rather than positive content. I sometimes think of it as empty space into which the Spirit can freely enter.
Perhaps appropriately some of the greatest spiritual writers in this tradition are anonymous (or pseudonymous). One lived sometime in the 5th or 6th century, writing under the pseudonym Dionysius, whose major work was On The Divine Names. Another was an English writer living sometime in the 14th century, whose major work was The Cloud of Unknowing.
Contemplative prayer is the most unexpressible form of prayer, but it often still involves single words or phases, similar to a mantra in Indian religious traditions. In The Cloud of Unknowing the author instructs that we should use one word of just one syllable in which to enfold our intent:
“If you like, you can have this reaching out, wrapped up and enfolded in a single word. So as to have a better grasp of it, take just a little word, of one syllable rather than of two; for the shorter it is the better it is in agreement with this exercise of the spirit. Such a one is the word ‘God’ or the word ‘love.’ Choose which one you prefer, or any other according to your liking – the word of one syllable that you like the best. Fasten this word to your heart, so that whatever happens it will never go away. This word is to be your shield and your spear, whether you are riding in peace or in war. With this word you are to beat upon this cloud and this darkness about you. With this word you are to strike down every kind of thought under the cloud of forgetting.” (Chapter VII, James Walsh edition)
Other contemplatives haven’t necessarily restricted themselves to one word alone but have also used phrases. The most notable example, especially in Eastern Christianity, is the Jesus Prayer. The Jesus Prayer is this:
“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
The scriptural roots of this prayer are in the Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican in Luke 18:9-14.
“And the tax collector, standing afar off, would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner!’” (NKJV)
Paul, in his first letter to the Thassolonians, counseled to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17). The Jesus Prayer is traditionally thought to be a prayer that a person can eventually learn to pray continually at every moment. In the 19th century Russian text, The Way of a Pilgrim, the pilgrim learns to pray without ceasing by incorporating the Jesus Prayer into his very breath.
“Begin bringing the whole prayer of Jesus into and out of your heart in time with your breathing, as the Fathers taught. Thus, as you draw your breath in, say, or imagine yourself saying, ‘Lord Jesus Christ,’ and as you breathe again, ‘have mercy on me.’ Do this as often and as much as you can, and in a short space of time you will feel a slight and not unpleasant pain in your heart, followed by a warmth. Thus by God’s help you will get the joy of self-acting inward prayer of the heart.”
I have found the Jesus Prayer to be the most powerful prayer for my practice of contemplation.
The Cloud of Unknowing invites what I interpret to be an inversion in perspective and attitude toward the experience of unknowing. Usually we want to know things but when we approach God in his infinity we find ourselves unable to comprehend him because he exceeds our comprehension. But this very experience of unknowability is itself a form of knowledge. It is in this cloud of unknowing that we must dwell.
“This darkness and cloud is always between you and your God, no matter what you do, and it prevents you from seeing him clearly by the light of understanding in your reason, and from experiencing him in sweetness of love in your affection. So set yourself to rest in this darkness as long as you can, always crying out after him whom you love. For if you are to experience him or to see him at all, insofar as it is possible here, it must always be in this cloud and in this darkness. So if you labour at it with all your attention as I bid you, I trust, in his mercy, that you will reach this point.” (Chapter III)
In scripture the cloud is often where we find and hear the voice of God.
“While he was still speaking, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them; and suddenly a voice came out of the cloud.” (Matthew 17:5, NKJV)
“Now the glory of the Lord rested on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it six days. And on the seventh day He called to Moses out of the midst of the cloud. The sight of the glory of the Lord was like a consuming fire on the top of the mountain in the eyes of the children of Israel. So Moses went into the midst of the cloud and went up into the mountain.” (Exodus 24:16-18, NKJV)
The cloud is not an easy place to be. It requires practice and conditioning. As the author says, “So set yourself to rest in this darkness as long as you can”.
The author also counsels that such contemplation is the one act that it is not possible to pursue to excess.
“If you ask me the further question, how you are to apply discretion in this exercise, I answer and say, ‘none at all!’ In all your other activities you are to have discretion, in eating and drinking, in sleeping, and in protecting your body from the extremes of heat and cold, in the length of time you give to prayer or reading or to conversation with your fellow-Christians. In all these things you are to observe moderation, avoiding excess and defect. But in this exercise there is no question of moderation; I would prefer that you should never leave off as long as you live.” (Chapter 41)
Not only is excess of contemplation not a possibility or a problem. Unrestrained indulgence in contemplation also rightly orders the soul in regards to all other things, such that they are not taken to excess, but in proper measure.
“Now perhaps you will ask how you shall observe prudence in eating and sleeping and everything else. My answer to this is brief enough: ‘Understand it as best you can.’ Work at this exercise without ceasing and without moderation, and you will know where to begin and to end all your other activities with great discretion. I cannot believe that a soul who perseveres in this exercise night and day without moderation should ever make a mistake in any of his external activities.” (Chapter 42)
Why might this be? The Catechism says, “Contemplation is a gaze of faith, fixed on Jesus.” (2715) With a gaze fixed on Christ all other things become rightly ordered and proportioned. As Jesus said:
“But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.” (Matthew 6:33, KJV)
I think this coheres with what I said earlier about how I believe prayer is the most important thing we can do. Because prayer, especially prayer of contemplation focuses our gaze singly on Christ. Jesus said to Martha: “You are worried and troubled about many things.” (Luke 10:41, NKJV) That’s all of us. The Greek word merimnao (μεριμνάω), to be anxious, is a word I always pay close attention to in the New Testament when I see it. It occurs a number of times in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6: me merimnate (μὴ μεριμνᾶτε), do not worry. “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on… For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.” (Matthew 6:25; 32-33, NKJV) As Jesus said to Martha: “One thing is needed.” (Luke 10:42, NKJV) That one thing is the gaze of faith, fixed on Jesus in prayer.
I’ve titled this episode “A Brief History of Secular Thought”, which is kind of funny because it’s one of the longest episodes I’ve done. But it’s brief relative to the potential scope of the subject matter. For example, Charles Taylor’s book on the subject, A Secular Age, is 896 pages. Tyler Roberts’ Teaching Company course, Skeptics and Believers, is 18.5 hours in length. So by comparison the following will be a brief history of secular thought.
Why study secular thought? Well for one thing it’s just interesting. But it’s also important for both secular and religious people to be familiar with it in order to understand the history of the ideas that they hold and respond to. One of the thinkers discussed in what follows, Friedrich Nietzsche, would employ in his philosophy what he called a “genealogy” of ideas. This kind of genealogy explores the history of certain ideas in order to see how they have been dependent on events and cultural conditions of that history. Genealogy reveals how ideas are not absolute but rather contingent; they have a history and could have developed differently than they did. In what follows one of the aims is to situate and contextualize secular thought.
In Charles Taylor’s book A Secular Age he introduced a number of terms and concepts that he used to study the development of secular thought. One of these concepts is the “subtraction story”. James K.A. Smith, in his commentary on Taylor’s book, defined subtraction stories as: “Accounts that explain ‘the secular’ as merely the subtraction of religious belief, as if the secular is what’s left over after we subtract superstition.” (How (Not) To Be Secular) In a subtraction story secular thought is decontextualized and we lose sight of its contingency as a cultural construct. In Taylor’s words subtraction stories are:
“Stories of modernity in general, and secularity in particular, which explain them by human beings having lost, or sloughed off, or liberated themselves from certain earlier, confining horizons, or illusions, or limitations of knowledge. What emerges from this process—modernity or secularity—is to be understood in terms of underlying features of human nature which were there all along, but had been impeded by what is now set aside.” (A Secular Age, 21)
A subtraction story of the secular might be something of this form: Humans used to have all kinds of superstitious beliefs because we didn’t have the scientific knowledge to understand how things really work. But with the rise of modern science we don’t need those superstitions anymore. We used to use religion to help us cope with the hardships of life. But our increased scientific knowledge has brought about technology that has made us wealthier and healthier in ways that religion never could. Now we can cast religion aside and see things as they really are and always were.
As an alternative to this Taylor spends his book arguing that the secular is constructed. It’s a cultural construct shaped by a contingent history of development.
“Against this kind of story, I will steadily be arguing that Western modernity, including its secularity, is the fruit of new inventions, newly constructed self-understandings and related practices, and can’t be explained in terms of perennial features of human life.” (ibid. 21)
By looking at secular thought as a cultural construct I think we’re doing something much more interesting than just a simple deconstruction or takedown of it. Sort of in the way people say that atheism is just another religion, which always strikes me as a bit of an unintentional self-own; I don’t like to use “religion” as a pejorative because I think religion is a good thing. I don’t think that seeing secular thought as a construct rather than in terms of a subtraction story discredits it. Instead I think it gives a fuller and more accurate picture of it. If secular thought as we have it today has been shaped by the contingent events of history we can go back through history and see those decisive points where the ideas we take for granted today started to develop. We can certainly do the same with religious thought, which is basically historical theology, and that is also a valuable exercise.
In what follows I’d like to discuss some of the major figures who shaped the development of secular thought. Two important questions leading into that are: (1) where to start and (2) who to include? Christopher Hitchens edited a volume called The Portable Atheist with writings from many such key figures. And I think his list was pretty good. His first selection is from Lucretius (99 BC – 55 BC). That’s definitely a solid pick but I’m going to narrow my focus to modernity, starting with the Enlightenment. On who to include I’ve focused on: (1) people who are generally considered important in this kind of history, (2) people whose ideas are still in the air today, even if we don’t always name them, and (3) people who were highly influential and popular in their day, who were bestsellers. I think this last point is important because cultural construction of a worldview, or what Taylor calls a “social imaginary”, is about more than just who can make the most logical or academically respectable argument. It’s also about influence. Who were people talking about in parlors and taverns? Today, who are people discussing in book clubs and on social media? Those are the people who are major culture shapers, regardless of their credentials.
It will help to do a quick overview first to see where all of this is going. So here’s a brief summary of the trajectory. Our starting point will be in the eighteenth century with the Enlightenment. Any starting point is arbitrary and there were definitely developments that led into this period. For example, there were important ideas from people like Spinoza, Bacon, and Hobbes. So it’s worth mentioning them in passing. Starting in the eighteenth century Voltaire and Denis Diderot were two important intellectuals, or philosophes, with a secularizing influence in France. In the English-speaking world important Enlightenment figures included David Hume, Edward Gibbon, and Thomas Paine. Thomas Paine is especially interesting because he had transnational influence in America, Great Britain, and France. All these men were quite characteristic of the eighteenth century. They tended to embrace deism which, while still technically theist, was moving far from orthodox Christian theism.
In the nineteenth century important intellectual and cultural developments included Romanticism, higher Biblical criticism, Hegelianism, socialism, and evolution. All of these had secularizing influences. Percy Bysshe Shelley was a poet and essayist who went beyond deism and promoted atheism in the strongest sense, both explicitly and figuratively, in his writing. Many nineteenth century thinkers like Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche also embraced this strong form of atheism. Others like Thomas Carlyle represented and wrote for many in the nineteenth century who continued to hold on to some form of symbolic and experiential theism, even to Christianity if sufficiently reinterpreted. Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx each gave accounts for religious belief grounded in naturalistic explanations. Naturalism then gained considerable support with the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Other thinkers following Darwin often referred to his work in support of their own ideas. Two prominent examples of this were Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer. Spencer not only promoted and popularized Darwin’s theories but also integrated them into a more comprehensive and total philosophy of progress that dominated the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. Friedrich Nietzsche took some of the boldest and most irreverent positions on atheism and Christianity, declaring the death of God and criticizing Christian morality itself.
In the early twentieth century secular thought and intellectual life more generally was dominated by the ideas of Sigmund Freud. Like Feuerbach and Marx, Freud developed fully naturalistic theories for the origins of religious belief. Freud’s psychoanalytic thought would be foundational in the development of continental philosophy. Around the same time another line of thought was developing in analytic philosophy, led by Bertrand Russell. Russell was a prolific writer and influential both among his technical and academic colleagues as well in the wider public. Public opinion was also heavily influenced by novelists and journalists like Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken. Where scientists and philosophers undermined religious foundations literary figures like Twain and Mencken were able to make it look ridiculous, perhaps an even more significant accomplishment. In the later twentieth century some of the most influential secular thinkers were scientists like Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking.
At the start of the twenty-first century the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 brought new attention to the dangers of religious fundamentalism and sparked a strong response among a group of writers known as the New Atheists. These included Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett.
That’s the overview. Now let’s go through all that again in more detail.
Voltaire, Diderot, Hume, Gibbon, and Paine were all men of the Enlightenment. All were critical of religion. But none was an atheist either, at least not in his own self understanding. They were Deists and proponents of “natural religion”. This natural religion is theistic but in a deistic conception God is remote and doesn’t intervene in human affairs with miracles and revelations. A deistic God is very different from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They admired Jesus, or at least Jesus as they understood him. Jesus was an ancient teacher of natural religion but his teachings had been overlaid with superstitious doctrinal accretions that became Christianity, something quite different from the real Jesus of history. An evocative illustration of this idea is Thomas Jefferson’s editing of the Bible in which he kept Jesus’ ethical teachings but cut out the miracles that later followers ascribed to him.
The stage had been set for the Enlightenment by many events including the Protestant Reformation and the wars of religion, like the great Thirty Years War. Religion, in the eyes of many, was becoming more of a problem than an unquestioned way of life. Another cataclysmic event that rocked Europe was the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755. Europe reacted viscerally to the devastation of this earthquake and traditional religious answers started to be unsatisfying. Philosopher Susan Neiman in her book Evil In Modern Thought argued that the Lisbon Earthquake was a foundational event in modern thought upon which many of the great developments of the next century would build. It was the kind of event after which nothing could ever be the same again, like the Holocaust in the twentieth, but maybe even more so in Neiman’s view.
Well reasoned religious explanations were not lacking. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had developed an argument justifying God in light of the natural and human evils. Leibniz, one of the inventors of calculus and with a mind honed to think in terms of functions and optimizations, reasoned that the world that actually exists is the world that, out of all possible worlds, has the greatest amount of good over evil: the best of all possible worlds. Any other world that lacked some particular evil that we might want not to exist would, for various reasons unknown to us but known to God, have lower net good overall. And we’ve all probably read enough stories and seen enough movies to imagine how that might work, where something bad is later seen to have been somehow instrumental to the greater good in the long run. It’s a clever argument. But after Lisbon a lot of people weren’t convinced.
One man who was especially not convinced was Voltaire. Voltaire was a master of the pen and wildly popular. In Voltaire’s hand Leibniz became the foolish character Pangloss in the novel Candide. In the face of war, rape, murder, natural disasters, and other forms of suffering and injustice Pangloss always insists that such things happen for a reason, unlike the title character Candide who comes to see that the world often really is just cruel and arbitrary. For deists like Voltaire God is not expected to intervene in harsh realities of the world. God is more of a mathematician and physicist who sets things up with their initial conditions and then just lets the system evolve. If the system happens to have disasters like the Lisbon Earthquake, those aren’t part of any meaningful plan. They’re just meaningless outputs of the system.
Revelation had no place in natural theology. Instead the best way to understand God would be through the sciences. This was an age of massive scholarly studies. Denis Diderot launched his Encyclopédie, a great encyclopedia of all knowledge. Edward Gibbon produced his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And Hume produced his Treatise of Human Nature and later the more refined and digestible Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. The great thinkers of the Enlightenment were daring to know, to use the words of another Enlightenment thinker, Immanuel Kant. They were amassing knowledge in all fields.
Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall covered the history of Rome from 180 AD with Marcus Aurelius to the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453. Gibbon’s project was to identify the cause of Rome’s decline and fall. And he proposed as an explanation that Rome had fallen because of Christianity. This was actually an argument that many pagans had made at the time of the fall of the Western empire in the 400s AD, which prompted Augustine of Hippo to write his City of God as a response. But unlike Augustine’s pagan opponents who attributed Rome’s misfortunes to abandonment by their gods Gibbon’s explanation was naturalistic and quite characteristic of modern history. Christianity had led to the decline of the Roman Empire because it weakened the traditional Roman social order and values. Christianity interrupted or ended important Roman economic institutions like slavery and trade. Roman soldiers lost their martial virtues and became more preoccupied with religious matters. And preoccupation with religious matters diverted Rome’s citizens from other intellectual and cultural pursuits. As with the Roman historian Tacitus writing about the Germanic barbarians, we might see in Gibbons’ writings about the Romans a critique of the society of his own day. If Christianity caused the decline and fall of Rome how might it be holding us back in our day?
Where Gibbon concerned himself with history David Hume worked in the space of ideas. Hume is one of my favorite philosophers and I really recommend reading his work, especially his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. I think most of the problems of the philosophy of science that we’re still grappling with all go back to Hume, in particular his problem of induction. He was the kind of thinker who would pause over the things we take for granted and ask, “Now how do we really know that?” And then after leaving us all sufficiently perplexed he’d go play a game of backgammon and not worry about it for several hours. On religion Hume was maybe the closest to an atheist among this group of Enlightenment thinkers since he criticized even the idea the universe had been set in motion at all by an intelligent being. His most important work on the subject is his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Here, in the mouths of his fictional characters, Hume pokes fun at the notion of a deistic God of supernatural intelligence, proposing instead some much less attractive possibilities.
“This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance: it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity; and is the object of derision to his superiors: it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity; and ever since his death, has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force which it received from him.”
This is all delightfully sacrilegious and though Hume was naturally criticized by many people he also faced no real consequences and his wit and irreverence were no doubt celebrated by many other Enlightenment readers.
No treatment of the Enlightenment is complete in my opinion without touching on one of its most popular and towering figures across the Atlantic: the American pamphleteer Thomas Paine. His Common Sense is still read by school children today and was immensely influential among the American colonists. Just listen to these classic lines:
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand, and a race of men, perhaps as numerous as all Europe contains, are to receive their portion of freedom from the events of a few months.”
Paine was a hero not only to Americans but also to the French, having the distinction of being an influential pamphleteer in two great revolutions. Paine’s The Rights of Man was exceptionally popular among the French.
Relevant to our topic here, another of Paine’s great works was The Age of Reason. It’s something of a deist manifesto. It’s favorable to natural religion and a deistic understanding of God but very critical of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Some key passages:
“Every national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals. The Jews have their Moses; the Christians their Jesus Christ, their apostles and saints; and the Turks their Mahomet; as if the way to God was not open to every man alike… No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and, consequently, they are not obliged to believe it… When Moses told the children of Israel that he received the two tables of the commandments from the hand of God, they were not obliged to believe him, because they had no other authority for it than his telling them so; and I have no other authority for it than some historian telling me so, the commandments carrying no internal evidence of divinity with them. They contain some good moral precepts such as any man qualified to be a lawgiver or a legislator could produce himself, without having recourse to supernatural intervention.”
This is very direct and bold stuff. And it’s characteristic of the Enlightenment or Age of Reason as Paine called it.
As we move into the eighteenth century the spirit of age starts to look different. On the one hand there was a reaction to the heady rationalism of the Enlightenment, a response that came to be known as Romanticism. And in some ways this constituted a return to spirituality of a sort. But it was very different from that of orthodox Christianity. Something more pantheistic like Hegel’s Geist, a spirit or mind present in the events of history. But secularism also started to become more blatant and atheistic.
Percy Bysshe Shelly was an interesting combination of the Romantic poet and blatant atheist. He was kicked out of Oxford after writing a pamphlet called “The Necessity of Atheism”. No deism here anymore. Shelly, one of the greatest poets in history, said that “Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” (A Defense of Poetry) This is an important theme that I’d like to stress and return to in this episode. I think Shelly was right on the money. Philosophers are maybe more acknowledged. But we sometimes forget about the influence of the poets, artists, comedians, and other entertainers. They have a lot of influence on how we think. Probably more than the academics. I think Shelly is also a good example of an important trend in the development of secular thought, and that is the self-image of a secular person. For Shelly to be an atheist was to be among an elite group of people who were more reflective and intelligent than most others. Consider the following passage from his essay “A Refutation of Deism”:
“That the frequency of a belief in God (for it is not universal) should be any argument in its
favour, none to whom the innumerable mistakes of men are familiar, will assert. It is among
men of genius and science that Atheism alone is found, but among these alone is cherished an
hostility to those errors, with which the illiterate and vulgar are infected. How small is the proportion of those who really believe in God, to the thousands who are prevented by their occupations from ever bestowing a serious thought upon the subject.”
Shelly has plenty of arguments in the essay but I think this passage, while not one of the arguments, is actually more effective than any of them.
Not everyone was as radical and celebratory as Shelley. Another literary figure significant in the development of secular thought was the essayist Thomas Carlyle. Charles Taylor, in his book chapter on nineteenth-century trajectories, used Carlyle as a representative for much of the social imaginary of that century. Taylor characterized the nineteenth century as one of a “cross-pressure” between the unviability of religion on the one hand and the seemingly unbearable emptiness of the void it left behind. People could not believe but neither could they bear the implications of unbelief.
“Thus for many whatever in the traditional faith went beyond or contradicted the notion of impersonal order was no longer believable; but at the same time, their sense of the weaknesses, ugliness, or evils of their age forbade them to accept the more reductive, scientistic or Utilitarian modes of order.” (A Secular Age, 377-378)
And to explore this he chose to look at Carlyle:
“A good reason for looking at the advance of unbelief in these terms is the influence and impact of Carlyle… In the 1830s and 40s, he was immensely popular. When I speak here of a vector of the advance of unbelief, I mean that Carlyle’s solution to cross-pressures which he was responding to provided the bridge by which many members of the elite public could distance themselves from their ancestral faith.”
“In giving Carlyle such a central role, I am deviating from what is often seen as the standard story of the Victorians’ loss of faith. Somewhat oversimplifying, this is thought to have been caused by the impact of Darwinian evolution, which is held so directly to have refuted the Bible. This created an agonizing conflict for many people of devout religious upbringing, which was in the end resolved by many, often with a poignant sense of loss, by the abandonment of their faith. There is some truth in this story, especially about the agonizing, and sense of loss (which seems to have been felt by Darwin himself). But it leaves out something crucial: that evolutionary theory didn’t emerge in a world where almost everyone still took the Bible story simply and literally; that among other things, this world was already strongly marked by the ideas of impersonal order, not to speak of the dark abyss of time; and that an influential formulation had already been given to the displacement of Christianity by a cosmic vision of impersonal order, that of Carlyle.” (ibid)
Carlyle himself said, “This is not a Religious age,” (Signs of the Times) but he was hardly pleased with that fact:
“To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility; it was one huge, dead, im-measureable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. O the vast, Gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death.” (Sartor Resartus)
The machine was an important idea for Carlyle, one he saw as the biggest threat. He said in “Signs of the Times”:
“Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age.”
Carlyle bemoaned this fact but believed that most of his contemporaries viewed it with indifference.
“The singular conclusions at which Hume, setting out from their admitted premises, was arriving, brought this school into being; they let loose Instinct, as an undiscriminating ban-dog, to guard them against these conclusions; — they tugged lustily at the logical chain by which Hume was so coldly towing them and the world into bottomless abysses of Atheism and Fatalism. But the chain somehow snapped between them; and the issue has been that nobody now cares about either.” (Signs of the Times)
Nevertheless the influence and popularity of his writings would suggest that this was not entirely true and that he was giving voice to a general reaction that was anything but indifferent. Rather the toppling of traditional religion was a huge problem that needed to be solved. For Carlyle this looked something like an impersonal order. There was a need to “embody the divine Spirit of that Religion in a new Mythus, in a new vehicle and vesture, that our Souls, otherwise too like perishing, may live”. (Sartor Resartus) In Taylor’s view this kind of “not purely human spiritual force” had two important effects. One was to serve as a bridge by which people could “be both against Christianity and for it”. The other was to accustom people to start thinking in terms of impersonal order rather than personal order. Carlyle was not alone in this even if he is representative. Hegel would certainly be another important proponent of this notion, albeit in more complicated terms that were not so clearly impersonal.
The notion of impersonal general order is important because the nineteenth century gave rise to three major intellectual systems of impersonal order: Hegel’s Geist, Marx’s dialectical materialism, and Darwin’s evolution by natural selection. Secular thought in the nineteenth century moved away from deism but it did not jump straight to positivism; that idea from Auguste Comte would have to wait until the next century. Reality still had order and, significantly, direction. But it was impersonal.
I made an episode a couple years ago about how Hegel is much bigger and more interesting than the compressed picture we get through Marx. His Phenomenology of Geist is, in my interpretation, an epic-scale general study on how the mind comes to understand things. Nevertheless for present purposes of the history of secular thought it makes some sense to do violence to his work and view it through Marxism. The idea of Hegel’s that was most relevant to Marx was his theory of history which, far from being just one damned thing after another, was a rational progression. History and ideas develop together in a rational way such that, “What is real is rational, and what is rational is real.” Marx took this notion but then stood Hegel on his head so to speak. Whereas for Hegel the progress of history took place through ideas, for Marx history was emphatically material and especially economic. He took the notion of a dialectic – which would normally be something like a conversation, a dialogue, an exchange of ideas – and made it operate in economics. Later Marxists called this “dialectical materialism”.
For Marx economics was what really mattered. Everything else was “superstructure”. In Marx’s model society was composed of two major parts: base and superstructure. The base was all the modes of production and the superstructure was everything else like law, politics, art, philosophy, and religion. As he laid out in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859):
“In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely [the] relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness… The changes in the economic foundation lead, sooner or later, to the transformation of the whole, immense, superstructure. In studying such transformations, it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic, or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production.”
Note Marx’s comment that “one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself”. This is an extremely important idea and something we will also see in Nietzsche and Freud. Paul Ricoeur proposed that these three engaged in a “hermeneutic of suspicion”. This is a way of analyzing how the reasons that you think you have for believing something may not be your real reasons for it. For Marx if you are religious the reasons you have for being religious are not the reasons that you think they are. You are not religious for spiritual reasons but for economic reasons. The economic reasons for religion are, most importantly, the desperate conditions of poverty. Marx explained this in Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right:
“The criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism… Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.”
“The opium of the people” is probably Marx’s most famous statement about religion. And it’s a good symbol summarizing his thoughts on the subject. Why do people need such an opium? Because of the suffering produced by their economic conditions. Religion gives an illusory reprieve but it doesn’t resolve the underlying conditions, which are economic. Religion is a problem for Marx precisely because it masks the underlying conditions. It needs to be swept away so that people can see their economic problems clearly and then act on them
Marx critiqued the ideas of many of contemporaries, taking resources from their ideas where he found use for them and pointing out where he thought they did not go far enough. One such thinker was Ludwig Feuerbach. I also did an episode on Feuerbach and his fascinating book The Essence of Christianity. One of Marx’s significant works is his brief Theses on Feuerbach, with eleven theses on Feuerbach’s thought. The eleventh and most important of these theses is: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” Marx and Feuerbach were both atheists and so Marx essentially agreed with that aspect of Feuerbach’s work. But he criticized Feuerbach for extending his analysis of Christianity only to its ideas rather than to its underlying material causes and for neglecting to promote any kind of action or response to it.
Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity is fascinating for all the reasons Marx disagreed with it. When reading Feuerbach I get the sense that he was someone who really understood Christianity well and thought seriously about it, even while rejecting it. Topics he addresses in his book include: sacred immanence, providence, metaethics, spiritual existence, the elevation of anthropology to theology, religious process, God the Father as understanding, Trinity as relation and self-consciousness, Christ as mediator, the Son as Word, the Son as Love, and the Incarnation as manifestation of God in man. These are all great theological topics but Marx wanted nothing of all that since these are matters of ideas rather than material realities. But there was one idea from Feuerbach that stood out and would have the most significance in the development of secular thought and this was Feuerbach’s concept of projection. This is the idea that humans project their own attributes onto God, basically creating God in their own image. He wrote:
“Man cannot get beyond his true nature. He may indeed by means of the imagination conceive individuals of another so-called higher kind, but he can never get loose from his species, his nature; the conditions of being, the positive final predicates which he gives to these other individuals, are always determinations or qualities drawn from his own nature—qualities in which he in truth only images and projects himself.”
We take the human attributes that we most admire and project them onto this being that we call God. Feuerbach finds this problematic and calls for people to stop doing it and instead to re-internalize the qualities that we project onto God and find them in ourselves. For one thing projection diminishes our self-regard: “To enrich God, man must become poor; that God may be all, man must be nothing.” And Feuerbach also thinks that our projected regard for God is completely misplaced: “All those dispositions which ought to be devoted to life, to man— all the best powers of humanity, are lavished on the being who wants nothing.”
There are two important ideas here in Feuerbach. The first is a secular account of the origin of God. And this is the process of projection, creating God in our image. The second is more of an ethical stance, that we ought not to be distracted by concern for supernatural matters in Heaven from the important issues of material and social realities. We should be thinking more about making the world a better place rather than thinking about God.
All this set the stage and prepared the intellectual environment for the most important of the three major intellectual systems of impersonal order: Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin’s work is principally scientific but that’s not the main aspect to look at for present purposes. For the subject of the development of secular thought the main issue is the intellectual implications of evolution by natural selection. What sorts of secondary ideas developed from the scientific work? Darwin himself was non-religious and his own scientific work did contribute to that. He wrote in a letter to Asa Gray:
“With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.— I am bewildered.– I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I [should] wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe & especially the nature of man, & to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.— Let each man hope & believe what he can.”
Part of Darwin’s development of the theory included the study of Thomas Malthus, an economist who had observed that while population increases geometrically, food production increases only arithmetically (or at least it did at that time). The dismal conclusion from this is that there would always be unavoidable periodic famine and population reduction through starvation. With limited resources populations are necessarily limited. Some members of the population will survive and others will perish. And this brings up an important question: is the question of who will survive and who will perish random or are there factors that make the survival of some individuals more likely than others? And Darwin determined that it would not be random; that certain traits would be comparatively advantageous to survival. Thus natural selection depends on two important facts: (1) populations being limited and (2) diversity of traits within a species.
The most careful expositors of Darwinian theory are diligent to remember that the process of natural selection is completely non-directional. Species are not evolving toward anything, to become stronger, faster, or more intelligent. Those things may happen but it’s not because of any teleology. There’s no right or wrong direction for evolution to go. And humans are no more evolved than bacteria. That’s when we’re being careful. But we’re often not. And it’s been very common in the wake of Darwin’s Origin of Species to think of evolution in terms of progress. And this was the mindset that dominated the intellectual environment of the nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Two of the most important expositors of Darwin and evolution were Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer. Thomas Huxley was a biologist who was a very public debater on behalf of Darwin’s theory. He came to be known as “Darwin’s Bulldog”. His debating opponents included prominent religious figures, like bishops and archbishops. One of his most famous debates was with Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in 1860. In the course of the debate Wilberforce asked whether it was through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey to which Huxley responded that he would not be ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor, but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used his great gifts to obscure the truth.
Herbert Spencer was a philosopher, scientist, and social reformer and one of the most famous intellectuals of the nineteenth century. Spencer took the science of Darwinism into new areas of social theory and politics. It was Herbert Spencer who first used the phrase “survival of the fittest”. This idea came to be understood not only as a description of natural processes but as a prescription for how things ought to be. Spencer had a comprehensive, “synthetic” philosophy that incorporated science and sociology into one great system. Characteristic of this synthesis were progress and perfection. He saw things progressing toward “the perfect man in the perfect society”. In his book Social Statics he advocated for laissez-faire policies and a kind of Larmarkian evolutionary idea that only by placing humans in strenuous laissez-faire conditions would they be able to adapt to those conditions and eventually reduce the need for government:
The philosophy of progress was extremely compelling and fashionable in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It seemed that man truly had the means to bend nature and direct his own destiny. One manifestation of this was a view known as “Social Darwinism”, though it should be noted that neither Darwin nor Spencer called themselves social Darwinists. Social Darwinism was the idea that humanity could be improved through free competition and survival of the fittest. In particular it rejected the idea that charity and assistance to the impoverished are virtuous. Under social Darwinism such charity is actually harmful because it preserves habits and traits that prevent humanity from progressing. Instead the survival and growth of inferior persons and populations should not be enabled. They should be allowed to die out and diminish according to the natural course of things. Social Darwinism and Spencer’s writings were especially popular in the United States. This was also the age of large-scale colonization, which expanded the ideas of survival of the fittest to nations and races. Eugenics also naturally followed from all this as another project for the improvement of humanity.
In late nineteenth century and early twentieth century social Darwinism, imperialism, and eugenics were all intellectually respectable and reputable ideas. Eugenics especially was considered consummately scientific and progressive. Because of certain contingent historical circumstances and events these ideas happened to be associated with secular thought. Richard Hofstadter commented in his book Social Darwinism in American Thought about the unusual secular character of this kind of conservatism in America:
“Social Darwinism was certainly one of the leading strains in American conservative thought for more than a generation. But it lacked many of the signal characteristics of conservatism as it is usually found. A conservatism that appealed more to the secularist than the pious mentality, it was a conservatism almost without religion.” (Hofstadter, 7)
This association wasn’t absolute but there was a pattern. Things changed dramatically following World War II and these ideas quickly fell out of favor. Secular thought persisted and continued to develop, shedding its former associations with social Darwinism, imperialism, and eugenics. So the association of these ideas with secular thought was certainly nonessential. It was contingent and ultimately dispensable.
We can see an example of this older association in the 1914 textbook Civic Biology, written by George William Hunter. This was a widely used biology textbook in the early twentieth century and was the one famously used by John Scopes to teach evolution, for which he was prosecuted in the 1925 Scopes trial. Civic Biology divided humans up into five races and taught that “it is not unfair to ask if the health and vigor of the future generations of men and women on the earth might not be improved by applying to them the laws of selection.” It included the following passages:
“Parasitism and its Cost to Society. – Hundreds of families such as those described above exist today, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to society of such families is very severe. Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites.”
“The Remedy. – If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with some success in this country.” (Civic Biology, 263)
I don’t share these troubling passages to propose that evolution and secularism are of necessity linked to these kinds of views. Quite the opposite actually. They were associated at the time but these sorts of views have fallen out of favor even as secular thought persists, demonstrating that they are most certainly not inseparable. The Scopes trial was a watershed event in the development of public opinion toward evolution. That effect persisted even as the other troubling views in the text of Civic Biology were abandoned.
Another atheistic perspective in the later part of the nineteenth century was that of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s contributions to the development of secular thought take a few forms. Most famously he proclaimed that “God is dead”. But in the context of his writing this proclamation was more cautionary than celebratory. Nietzsche was absolutely an atheist. But he didn’t expect that the death of God was unproblematic. The “God is dead” line comes from the following passage in The Gay Science:
“Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: ‘I seek God! I seek God!’—As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?—Thus they yelled and laughed
“The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. ‘Whither is God?’ he cried; ‘I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.’”
“’How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us—for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.’”
“Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. ‘I have come too early,’ he said then; ‘my time is not yet.’”
You can get a sense here of Nietzsche’s wonderful writing style, which is both entertaining and provocative. The first thing I’d like to point out with this passage is the character of the crowd. They already didn’t believe in God. You can imagine this is how Nietzsche sees Europe. By saying “God is dead” Nietzsche wasn’t saying anything new. The people of Europe already no longer believed in God. The madman wasn’t announcing the fact that God was dead. What he was trying to get across to the people was that they had not yet comprehended what that meant. That the earth had been unchained from its sun. And I think that’s an interesting way to think about a certain stage along the development of secular thought. There’s the propositional assent to atheism. But that doesn’t necessarily include a full comprehension of what that means existentially. And Nietzsche is often considered one of the early precursors to twentieth century existentialism.
What else do we get from Nietzsche? He also has a very interesting critique of Christian morality. In his book On the Genealogy of Morality he characterizes Jewish and Christian morality as “slave morality”. In an older form of morality before Judaism and Christianity, among the aristocrats, the most important value distinctions were “good” and “bad”. Strength, power, and excellence were good. Weakness and failure were bad. In this aristocratic understanding of value, people who were weak and failures were not evil, they were just not the kinds of people you would want to be. You would want to be strong and successful. But eventually the weak were able to create a morality that reversed things. In a perversion of healthy values domination and strength came to be understood not just as bad but evil. And a person should feel guilty for them. It was better to be meek and humble. And here we see how Christian morality would figure into Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals. Christianity corrupted value by making excellence, what was actually good, seem evil. Furthermore Christianity esteemed attributes of human failure. As with Feuerbach we might say that Nietzsche got Christianity pretty much right. David Bentley Hart remarked that Nietzsche “had the good manners to despise Christianity, in large part, for what it actually was… on account of its enfeebling solicitude for the weak, the outcast, the infirm, and the diseased.” (Atheist Delusions, 6)
Along with Marx and Freud, Paul Ricoeur saw in Nietzsche a certain hermeneutic of suspicion and included him among the three great “masters of suspicion”. Nietzsche challenged conventional accounts of morality through his process of “genealogy”. Michel Foucault would later apply this kind of “genealogy” to ideas in the twentieth century. One of the effects of such a genealogy is to expose, similarly to other hermeneutics of suspicion, that the reasons you think you have for thinking a certain way are not the real reasons. A genealogy contextualizes our ideas in the process of history and exposes how they are contingent and might have been otherwise. And so they are not as self-evident and products of pure reasoning as we might have supposed.
The third of Ricoeur’s masters of suspicion was Sigmund Freud. And with Freud we move into the twentieth century. Freud’s hermeneutic of suspicion occurs in psychoanalysis in which a patient (or any person) has behaviors, fears, desires, or other impulses for reasons hidden to that person. They are hidden in the unconscious mind and need to be retrieved by the psychoanalyst to be properly treated. So again, the reasons you think you have for your ideas are not the real reasons for them. Freud’s psychology addressed the unconscious roots of many tendencies and impulses, including religious impulses. Freud addressed religion in his books: Totem and Taboo, Moses and Monotheism, and The Future of an Illusion.
In Totem and Taboo Freud theorized about the origins of religion in its most primitive social setting, in what he called the “primal horde”. Freud understood his own work as scientific and he based his theories on work of the anthropologists of his day, particularly studies indigenous Australians. He saw his own work as continuous with Darwin. A totem for Freud was a symbolic object or animal that is revered by a group. He understood the totem to be representative of the group’s primal father figure.
“Psychoanalysis has revealed to us that the totem animal is really a substitute for the father, and this really explains the contradiction that it is usually forbidden to kill the totem animal, that the killing of it results in a holiday and that the animal is killed and yet mourned. The ambivalent emotional attitude which to-day still marks the father complex in our children and so often continues into adult life also extended to the father substitute of the totem animal. But if we associate the translation of the totem as given by psychoanalysis, with the totem feast and the Darwinian hypothesis about the primal state of human society, a deeper understanding becomes possible and a hypothesis is offered which may seem fantastic but which has the advantage of establishing an unexpected unity among a series of hitherto separated phenomena.”
One thing to point out here, important to all of Freud’s works, is the Oedipus complex. The Oedipus Complex is a complex of emotions associated with a boy’s sexual desire for his mother and resentment toward his father. Oedipus, in Greek mythology and tragedy, killed his own father and married his mother. Hence the name. This is the “ambivalent emotional attitude which to-day still marks the father complex… extended to the father substitute of the totem animal.” Freud then asserted the following origin story of such a totem that would have taken place, perhaps in multiple occasions and places, among a primordial horde ruled over by an authoritarian father father figure:
“There is only a violent, jealous father who keeps all the females for himself and drives away the growing sons… One day the expelled brothers joined forces, slew and ate the father, and thus put an end to the father horde. Together they dared and accomplished what would have remained impossible for them singly… Of course these cannibalistic savages ate their victim. This violent primal father had surely been the envied and feared model for each of the brothers. Now they accomplished their identification with him by devouring him and each acquired a part of his strength. The totem feast, which is perhaps mankind’s first celebration, would be the repetition and commemoration of this memorable, criminal act with which so many things began, social organization, moral restrictions and religion.”
The sons killed and ate their father and took the females, their mothers; acts of murder, cannibalism, and incest. But after this act of patricide they felt intense guilt which worked itself out in the forms of rituals and taboos. Religion for Freud is itself a neurosis and he sees religious rituals as the same in essence as nervous tics and other compulsive habits associated with neurotic disorders. And in Freud’s psychology these are generally associated with some kind of repressed guilt or trauma. He sees religion as basically a large, group manifestation of the same thing. This primordial horde would have developed the trappings of religion as a way to deal with their simultaneous triumph and guilt:
“In order to find these results acceptable, quite aside from our supposition, we need only assume that the group of brothers banded together were dominated by the same contradictory feelings towards the father which we can demonstrate as the content of ambivalence of the father complex in all our children and in neurotics. They hated the father who stood so powerfully in the way of their sexual demands and their desire for power, but they also loved and admired him. After they had satisfied their hate by his removal and had carried out their wish for identification with him, the suppressed tender impulses had to assert themselves. This took place in the form of remorse, a sense of guilt was formed which coincided here with the remorse generally felt. The dead now became stronger than the living had been, even as we observe it to-day in the destinies of men. What the fathers’ presence had formerly prevented they themselves now prohibited in the psychic situation of ‘subsequent obedience’, which we know so well from psychoanalysis. They undid their deed by declaring that the killing of the father substitute, the totem, was not allowed, and renounced the fruits of their deed by denying themselves the liberated women. Thus they created the two fundamental taboos of totemism out of the sense of guilt of the son, and for this very reason these had to correspond with the two repressed wishes of the Oedipus complex. Whoever disobeyed became guilty of the two only crimes which troubled primitive society.”
Thus murder and incest became taboo and the primal father figure a totem, an object of worship.
Freud follows a similar path in Moses and Monotheism but this time with reference specifically to Israelite religion. Freud asserted that Moses was actually an Egyptian, originally a devotee of the Egyptian monotheistic religious experiment of Akhenaten. Moses led a revolt and liberated a band of fellow rebels whom he led out of Egypt. Moses was their political and religious leader but his religious rule was so demanding that the group revolted and killed him. So here we have another father figure as in Totem and Taboo and another instance of the Oedipus complex. The people felt remorse for what they had done and developed a system of belief in which Moses was the founder of their religion.
For us today Freud’s supposedly “historical” accounts seem rather fanciful. I don’t think anyone believes them even if Freud did. But what remains relevant are not the details but the overall interpretation of religion as neurosis and an instance of some kind of Oedipus complex. Today we might refer instead to something like religious scrupulosity. We still understand people to have motivations for religious practice and ritual that are rooted in psychologically unhealthy sources.
In The Future of an Illusion Freud looks forward to how religion might develop into the future as humanity becomes more advanced and, as he sees it, outgrows its need for religion. As in his subsequent book, Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud recognized that the aggregation of human beings, with all our destructive impulses, into the close quarters of a society requires repression of those impulses, which is also a source of frustration or discontent. Frustrating but necessary. For premodern, primitive humanity religion serves an important function, helping us deal with the discontent and guilt of social life by providing the illusion of a strong and loving protector and father figure. The father figure in The Future of an Illusion is much more exclusively positive than in his other two books on religion. The father is an object of love. We crave the comfort and security that a father could provide in childhood. The illusion of religion is that our wish for this father figure is actually true. Although Freud understands religion to have played an important role in humanity’s pre-modern immaturity he thinks that it is time to grow out of it.
“Our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect.”
I think this is an idea that persists in secular thought. We don’t necessarily disparage our ancestors for their religious beliefs. Of course they needed them and didn’t know any better. But in our scientific and technological age we ought to move beyond religion.
Two important intellectual trends in the twentieth century were in continental philosophy and analytic philosophy. Freud’s influence has continued more in continental philosophy than in his own field of psychology. Prominent Freudians include Jacque Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Judith Butler. One of the founders of analytic philosophy was Bertrand Russell. Where Freud worked in the unobservable phenomena of the mind and relied on the narrative accounts of dreams and culture the analytic school valued empiricism and precision. One early form of this was Russell’s logical atomism, which aimed to break concepts down into their most basic components for the purposes of analysis.
Bertrand Russell was one of the most important and prolific philosophers of the early twentieth century and he wrote on a number of subjects, including religion. Through logical atomism he sought to eliminate ambiguity and the potential for obfuscation. Naturally when it came to religion Russell found its scriptures, doctrines, and rituals nonsensical. Later analytic philosophers like A.J. Ayer in the school of logical positivism would similarly call them “meaningless”. Like Freud, Russell believed that religion was something humanity had outgrown:
“We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world—its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is, and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence, and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men.”
This passage is from the conclusion of Russell’s essay Why I Am Not a Christian. In the same text he argued against the merit of Jesus as a moral exemplar. To us today some of the most compelling arguments from this essay are likely the moral ones. For example, many have advanced a similar argument as the following:
“You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step towards the diminution of war, every step towards better treatment of the coloured races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organised Churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organised in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world… There are a great many ways in which at the present moment the Church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering. And of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still of progress and of improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. ‘What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy.’”
There are of course arguments against Russell’s point here but it certainly carries force. It also resonates with some of the most prominent religious-secular conflicts of the twenty-first century in which progressive secular values and traditional Christian values really are just contradictory, as with issues of abortion, sexuality, and gender.
One of Russell’s most famous illustrations is his teapot analogy. This comes from his article “Is There a God?” In this article Russell makes the case that the philosophic burden of proof rests on religious people who are making empirically unfalsifiable claims. He writes:
“Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.”
This analogy has been highly influential and the basic idea has taken on other forms. For example a common version today is the Flying Spaghetti Monster, sometimes seen as a car decal. The Flying Spaghetti Monster originated from a satirical open letter in 2005 demanding that science classrooms give equal time to the Flying Spaghetti Monster alongside intelligent design and evolution. Russell’s Teapot and the Flying Spaghetti Monster play an important role in the development of secular thought, which is to make religious belief seem ridiculous.
Making things look ridiculous has a celebrated history and there are a couple American examples worth mentioning from this time period in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century: Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken.
The novelist Mark Twain was especially well known for his wit, satire, and irreverent sense of humor. He had a number of memorable one-liners. For example: “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”
The most important example of a critique of religion in his fiction is in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn where Huck is deciding whether or not to turn in his traveling companion Jim, who is also a runaway slave. What’s important to the story is that Huck thinks that he’s supposed to turn in a runaway slave and that it’s what God wants him to do. (He wasn’t aware that Deuteronomy 23:15 says exactly the opposite). In fact Huck thinks that he’ll go to Hell if he doesn’t do it. So in his mind all the weight of religious authority is pushing him to betray his friend. But in an act of heroic defiance he refuses to do so and says, “All right then, I’ll go to hell”.
Twain also wrote essays criticizing religion. In his essay “Fables of Man” he invited readers to think how they would feel if anyone other than God created the world in the way that it is. He used the example the fly, if anyone other than God were to create a pest like the fly:
“Let us try to think the unthinkable: let us try to imagine a Man of a sort willing to invent the fly; that is to say, a man destitute of feeling; a man willing to wantonly torture and harass and persecute myriads of creatures who had never done him any harm and could not if they wanted to, and–the majority of them–poor dumb things not even aware of his existence. In a word, let us try to imagine a man with so singular and so lumbering a code of morals as this: that it is fair and right to send afflictions upon the just–upon the unoffending as well as upon the offending, without discrimination.”
Twain’s problem here with the state of nature is quite similar to Darwin’s problem with the Ichneumonidæ feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars. In Europe and Elsewhere he pointed out many instances in which the Bible has been the cause of evil and how humans have only progressed morally in cases where they have rejected it. He says:
“The Christian Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same; but the medical practice changes… The stock in the store was made up of about equal portions of baleful and debilitating poisons, and healing and comforting medicines; but the practice of the time confined the physician to the use of the former; by consequence, he could only damage his patient, and that is what he did.”
Twain admits that there is much in the Bible that is good. But people seem to know the difference between the good and the bad independently of the Bible. In fact, people are able to discern the difference between the good and the bad that is in the Bible. And happily, it has been by and large only the bad parts, so Twain believed, that people rejected as they have progressed morally:
“Is it not well worthy of note that of all the multitude of texts through which man has driven his annihilating pen he has never once made the mistake of obliterating a good and useful one? It does certainly seem to suggest that if man continues in the direction of enlightenment, his religious practice may, in the end, attain some semblance of human decency.”
Twain accused the churches of following rather than leading moral progress, usually after some period of opposing it. But then have the audacity to take credit for it:
“In all the ages the Roman Church has owned slaves, bought and sold slaves, authorized and encouraged her children to trade in them. Long after some Christian peoples had freed their slaves the Church still held on to hers… So unassailable was her position that in all the centuries she had no word to say against human slavery. Yet now at last, in our immediate day, we hear a Pope saying slave trading is wrong, and we see him sending an expedition to Africa to stop it. The texts remain: it is the practice that has changed. Why? Because the world has corrected the Bible. The Church never corrects it; and also never fails to drop in at the tail of the procession–and take the credit of the correction. As she will presently do in this instance.”
I include Twain in this history of secular thought precisely because he was not a philosopher or an academic but, like Shelley, an unacknowledged legislator who shaped the character of a nation through literature. Another man I’d include in this class is H.L. Mencken, a wildly popular journalist, essayist, and critic. Mencken had an acerbic wit that would be pitiful to fall victim to. Like Twain, he was also a master of turns of phrase. One of my favorites is: “Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.” Another classic, this one on the subject of religion is: “Puritanism – The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” (A Mencken Chrestomathy, 624)
In his essay “Memorial Service” Mencken paid mocking memorial to the numerous gods of ages past who are no longer worshiped:
“Where is the graveyard of dead gods? What lingering mourner waters their mounds? There was a time when Jupiter was the king of the gods, and any man who doubted his puissance was ipso facto a barbarian and an ignoramus. But where in all the world is there a man who worships Jupiter today? And who of Huitzilopochtli? In one year – and it is no more than five hundred years ago – 50,000 youths and maidens were slain in sacrifice to him. Today, if he is remembered at all, it is only by some vagrant savage in the depths of the Mexican forest.”
Mencken then gave a long list of two columns with many other such deceased gods and concluded:
“Ask the rector to lend you any good book on comparative religion: you will find them all listed. They were gods of the highest dignity – gods of civilized peoples – worshipped and believed in by millions. All were omnipotent, omniscient and immortal. And all are dead.”
Richard Dawkins would later make a similar point to Mencken that, “We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.” (The God Delusion)
One event of particular importance where Mencken played a role was the Scopes Trial of 1925. As mentioned earlier, John Scopes was prosecuted for teaching evolution in school. It was arguably the trial of the century, a total media spectacle, and very public. In a sense there were two courts: the actual legal court and, more significantly, the court of public opinion. In the actual court of law Scopes was convicted for violating the law. But in the court of public opinion creationism suffered a disastrous defeat. And Mencken, writing at the time for the Baltimore Sun, played no small role in that. He delighted in lampooning the southern Christian fundamentalists of this Tennessee town. He famously quipped: “Heave an egg out of a Pullman window, and you will hit a fundamentalist anywhere in the United States.” He was especially merciless in his accounts of the prosecuting attorney William Jennings Bryan.
The Scopes trial reinforced an important perceived division between religion and science. One was legitimized at the expense of the other. And many of the scientists who were most well-known to the public reinforced this idea. In the later twentieth century two important publications that brought the latest developments of physics and cosmology to household libraries and television screens were Carl Sagan’s 1980 television series Cosmos and Stephen Hawking’s 1988 book A Brief History of Time. Sagan and Hawking were both scientists at the top of their fields but they were also public figures and household names. The combination of their legitimate expertise and communications skills meant that their opinions carried weight, not just in their scientific fields but in many subjects, including their views on religion.
Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time was a major bestseller, especially for a science book. When I was a kid a number of my friends and I had that book on our shelves. Hawking was a major role model. Religion didn’t feature heavily in that book other than the comment, “What need for a creator?” In the 2011 television series Curiosity he expressed quite genially that “We are each free to believe what we want” but also acknowledged, “It is my view that the simplest explanation is there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate.” Like Freud, he thought that belief in God made sense for premodern peoples but that it was something we can now move beyond: “Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe. But now science offers a more convincing explanation.” Hawking suffered from a slow-progressing form of motor neurone disease and death was a constant prospect for him. Remaking on this he said in a 2011 interview with The Guardian: “I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I’m not afraid of death, but I’m in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first… I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.” Although he was upfront and open about his atheism it was not a major topic for Hawking.
It was more of a topic for Sagan. Sagan was especially interested in critical thinking and the harms that follow from believing things without justification. Not just religion but all sorts of popular pseudoscience. This was the topic of his book The Demon-Haunted World, in which he assembled what he called a “baloney detection kit”. In that book Sagan adapted Russell’s teapot with his own story of a dragon in the garage. Someone tries to convince you that there’s a dragon in the garage but when you go to look at it you don’t see it. So they say it’s an invisible dragon. So you might spread flour on the floor to see its footprints. But the dragon floats in the air. What about an infrared camera to see the invisible fire? But the fire is heatless. Every proposal has some reason for why it will not work. Sagan concludes: “Now what’s the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there’s no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true.”
Sagan was also invited to deliver the prestigious Gifford lectures in 1985 in Glasgow. The lectures were later published as The Varieties of Scientific Experience. The Gifford lectures are annual lectures on the topic of science and religion and this is Sagan’s most comprehensive treatment of the subject. Sagan’s lectures were very respectful but also pulled no punches. While reviewing a number of arguments for the existence of God he said the following on arguments from religious experiences:
“People have religious experiences. No question about it. They have them worldwide, and there are some interesting similarities in the religious experiences that are had worldwide. They are powerful, emotionally extremely convincing, and they often lead to people reforming their lives and doing good works, although the opposite also happens. Now, what about this? Well, I do not mean in any way to object to or deride religious experiences. But the question is, can any such experience provide other than anecdotal evidence of the existence of God or gods?… Large numbers of people can have experiences that can be profound and moving and still not correspond to anything like an exact sense of external reality… Every culture has things of this sort. That doesn’t mean that they all exist; it doesn’t mean that any of them exist.”
On the argument from design he made the following remark, quite similar to Hume’s:
“Why in any case is it necessary for God to intervene in human history, in human affairs, as almost every religion assumes happens? That God or the gods come down and tell humans, ‘No, don’t do that, do this, don’t forget this, don’t pray in this way, don’t worship anybody else, mutilate children as follow.’ Why is there such a long list of things that God tells people to do? Why didn’t God do it right in the first place? You start out the universe, you can do anything. You can see all the future consequences of your present action. You want a certain desired end. Why don’t you arrange it in the beginning? The intervention of God in human affairs speaks of incompetence.”
Although Hawking and Sagan were prominent faces of atheism at the end of the twentieth century neither made atheism a primary focus of their public engagement. This would not be the case for the new public faces of irreligion at the start of the twenty-first century. One of the most significant events in the development of secular thought in recent times was the catastrophic terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 perpetrated by Islamist extremists. The religious motivations for this attack provoked a strong secular response that came to be known as New Atheism. Four members of this movement were known as the “The Four Horsemen”: Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett. With the possible exception of Dennett the atheism of The Four Horsemen was front and center to their public engagement.
Sam Harris began writing The End of Faith shortly after the September 11th attacks. His other major book on the topic of religion was Letter to a Christian Nation. The September 11th attacks were an occasion to point out the violence that religious fundamentalism can provoke and is just one example in a long list of historical cases of such religiously inspired violence and atrocities. Harris made particular note of the complicity of religious moderates in all this. Far from excusing moderates or recommending a conversion from fundamentalism to more moderate forms of religion Harris argued that religious moderates, by taking certain texts and beliefs selectively or metaphorically, grant legitimacy to those texts and beliefs and enable those who take them literally and to extremist ends. Harris also criticized religion generally as fundamentally irrational and lacking in evidence. Science is a much more solid basis for our understanding of reality and even for moral decision making, as he argued in The Moral Landscape.
Biologist Richard Dawkins was already a popular writer on the topic of evolutionary biology prior to the New Atheist movement, having written books like The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, and The Ancestor’s Tale. As a writer on evolutionary biology his books naturally addressed creationism and intelligent design ideas, especially in books like The Blind Watchmaker and Climbing Mount Improbable. But he really became a major face for New Atheism with the 2006 publication of The God Delusion. The God Delusion was a major bestseller and attracted widespread response and discussion. In it Dawkins explained why, in his view, there is almost certainly no God. He included arguments from his field in evolutionary biology but also discussed religious violence and intolerance.
Christopher Hitchens was a prolific journalist and essayist, a staunch free-speech advocate, and opponent of religion. Hitchens called himself not only an atheist but an “antitheist”. He not only did not believe in God but thought that it would be a horrible thing if God actually did exist. He compared a universe with God to a cosmic North Korea. His major book on the topic and contribution to the New Atheist movement was God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Hitchens said that religion was “the main source of hatred in the world”. In the book he criticized Judaism, Christianity, and Islam but also Eastern religions like Buddhism. As with Mencken, to be on the receiving end of Hitchens’s attacks was brutal. Some of his targets were predictable, like Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger. More surprising was his excoriating criticism of Mother Teresa.
Daniel Dennett was also numbered among the Four Horsemen but of the four he was probably the least like the others. Dennett is one world’s most prominent philosophers in the philosophy of mind. He’s certainly an atheist but it’s not as front and center to his work. In his book-length contribution to the New Atheist movement, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, he even called for world religions to be taught in school. Dennett is perhaps best known for his philosophical work on qualia: individual instances of subjective, conscious experience. In Consciousness Explained he develops a number of arguments to demonstrate how the way our minds work must be quite different from the way it seems to us. Dennett’s philosophy of mind, given its subject, naturally impinges on religious ideas of the soul. In Breaking the Spell Dennett proposed that religion should be thought of as a natural phenomenon and studied by scientists just as any other natural phenomenon.
Dennett and Dawkins have made frequent reference to each other’s work. Dennett has made philosophical use of Dawkins’s concept of memes, as developed in The Selfish Gene and Dawkins has praised Dennett’s 1995 book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, in particular his metaphor of skyhooks and cranes. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea is perhaps the most interesting and detailed study on the philosophical implications of Darwin’s work. Dennett refers to the concept of natural selection as a kind of “universal acid” that eats through everything it touches. He uses the metaphor of a skyhook for any kind of apparent intelligent design that seems to be suspended from the heavens, but that in fact is held up by a crane or series of cranes, and anchored securely to the ground. The core of Darwin’s dangerous idea, according to Dennett, is the algorithm; an automatic process that requires no intelligent direction. Dennett then shows instances where Darwinian algorithms dissolve apparent skyhooks in biology, mind, meaning, mathematics, and morality.
I remember that New Atheism was in full bloom when I was in my twenties. It also coincided with the rise of social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube, which enabled its diffusion. It seems to have tapered off somewhat since then for whatever reason. All of the Four Horsemen get a mention in this survey because, being quite recent, their influence on the development of secular thought still persists. My guess is that in a similar survey fifty years from now Dennett will be the only one discussed even though he was probably the least prominent of the New Atheists in its heyday. But I’d say his ideas are the most uniquely interesting and instrumentally useful in the service of secular thought.
So what do we make of all this? In going through this brief history I haven’t stopped to challenge any of these thinkers and their ideas. I’ve tried to present their ideas fairly and doing that properly means making it apparent why these ideas have been appealing and persuasive. That’s challenging because I don’t find their ideas personally persuasive. But I do find them interesting and important.
This is admittedly something of an exercise in genealogy, in the style of Nietzsche and Foucault, to show how secular ideas are not absolute but contingent, how they have been dependent on historical events and trends, and how things could have been otherwise. For example, secular thought today is usually aligned with progressive ideals of antiracism, protection of people with disabilities, and the interests of sexual minorities. But before World War II and the Nuremberg Trials the most secular and scientifically-educated people in society were moving in quite a different direction. I think Charles Taylor is correct that secular thought as we have it today is not merely what is left over when we chip away religion. Secular thought is a construct that has been created over time by people and events.
In a certain sense something being a social construct doesn’t really matter. Technology is a construct or a collection of very many constructs. But our devices still work. The scientific principles underlying our technologies are also constructs. And they still work. So does it matter? I think it does. Thomas Kuhn, with his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions did some excellent work situating and contextualizing scientific developments, showing how they also come about in very circuitous paths with many discarded theories that were once the best theories available. It’s good to know about all that when we think about the future of science and technology. It will likely go in some very unpredicted directions.
Still, with religion and secular thought there are some big either-or questions. Does God exist or not? Was Jesus resurrected or not? At the end of the day between Christians and atheists someone is right and someone is wrong. A genealogy of secular thought doesn’t resolve such questions. But one thing it can do is reveal how certain perspectives can seem more or less compelling because of contingent historical developments. In other words, if certain religious positions seem more problematic and certain secular positions seem stronger than they otherwise would, that’s useful to understand. It helps us to think what is usually unthought. Charles Taylor borrows the term “unthought” from Foucault to refer to all the presuppositions underlying our understanding of religion and secularization that we aren’t even aware that we hold. By bringing the unthought into our conscious thought we should be able to think about things more comprehensively and reflectively.
With this in mind consider two issues that are seemingly problematic for religion: science and religion and the problem of evil.
In Western modernity Judaism and Christianity have been thought to be in conflict with the sciences. And the sciences are so manifestly successful that religion would be at a clear disadvantage. At best, religion could hold to some kind of “God of the gaps” whose domain progressively shrinks as science explains away more and more religious ideas. Natural phenomena like earthquakes and lightning no longer need divine explanations. And our creation myths don’t stand up to geological and fossil evidence. But is this apparent conflict essential or accidental? It’s quite fascinating and often surprising to read premodern Jewish and Christian texts. The authors of the Talmud and the Early Church Fathers were not at all unfamiliar with the internal tensions of the sacred texts or of passages that they could not take literally. They were quite aware of them and wrote extensively about them. Philo of Alexandria (Jewish) and Origen of Alexandria (Christian) are two of the most famous expositors of allegorical interpretation in antiquity. Additionally, in modernity where we make a sharp distinction between the natural and the supernatural, with God operating as something separate from nature, in the Middle Ages educated Christians like Thomas Aquinas understood that distinction to be much less absolute. In their understanding the supernatural always already infuses the natural world, as has been written about by Fergus Kerr (After Aquinas, 2002) and Tyler Roberts (Skeptics and Believers, 2009). Both the premodern comfort with allegorical interpretation and the metaphysical understanding of the natural being infused with the supernatural would make the relationship between science and religion look quite different than the relationship that developed between the two in modernity. David Bentley Hart has even suggested that: “In the ancient or mediaeval worlds, the idea of the evolution of species would not necessarily have posed a very great intellectual challenge for the educated classes, at least not on religious grounds… It would not have been drastically difficult for philosophers or theologians to come to see such evolution as the natural unfolding of the rational principles of creation into forms primordially enfolded within the indwelling rational order of things.” (The Experience God, 62) It was by no means inevitable or necessary that the developments of geology and evolutionary biology would come into conflict with religious beliefs. It just happened to work out that way given the particular intellectual and religious milieux of the time. That’s useful to think about, both for secular and religious people. As Christians we would do well to familiarize ourselves with early thinkers in our tradition to find perspectives that are surprisingly much more unproblematically accommodating to modern science.
The problem of evil is an even more interesting one I think. And if Susan Neiman is correct this is the most salient issue in modernity and for the whole human condition really. How are we to come to terms with God if his creation has so much evil and suffering? The Lisbon Earthquake and the Holocaust are the two major examples of disruptive disasters in modernity. With the problem of evil I actually don’t think there’s ever been any historical period where such disasters would be religiously unproblematic. Disasters of a certain scale and degree always induce religious disruption and crisis. But what’s interesting is that in the case of Judaism especially, and in Christianity by extension, response to this kind of disruption is actually part of the religion. One of the most important events in the Bible is the conquest of Jerusalem and the captivity of the Judeans by the Neo-Babylonian Empire. This dramatically transformed the Judeans as a people. Judaism took another dramatic turn again after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans, leading to what would become Rabbinic Judaism. And the Holocaust itself induced major reflection and changes in Judaism, as in the work of people like Richard Rubenstein, Emil Fackenheim, Elie Weisel, Irving Greenberg, and Eugene Borowitz. The Hebrew Bible also contains responses and laments to the problems of evil. Most obvious is the Book of Job. Much of the Bible’s Wisdom literature as found in Job, the Psalms, and Ecclesiastes, is testament to the troubled yet creative religious response to suffering. It doesn’t seem like there’s any expectation from God in scripture that we are to be unmoved and untroubled by the evil present in his creation.
Both secular thought and the religions of Judaism and Christianity are part of history and Western heritage. It’s valuable to be familiar with all of it. The history of all these traditions could have taken different paths. But regardless, the traditions as we have them make up who we are and how we think.
A reflection on the idea that “The world comes from reason, and this reason is a Person.” (Joseph Ratzinger). The intelligibility of the world and the personal nature of the Logos.
I think that there are certain ideas – like in mathematics and logic – that are necessarily true in a way that is separate from space, time, and material things. Such ideas must exist in a way that is very different from material things. We could suppose that these ideas are products of our minds; and there does seem to be something mental about them. But these ideas also seem to have real effects in the material world. All matter in the universe behaves in consistently mathematical ways that don’t depend on our minds. Still, I think we’re right to understand these ideas as mental. They just have to be features of a very different kind of mind, a mind that is eternal and that has effects on all the matter in the universe.
The statutes and judgments given to Israel were a mark of their special wisdom and understanding: “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.” (Deuteronomy 4:6) Such wisdom and understanding are valuable to us not only for understanding the way things are but also for knowing how to live. The laws and statutes given by God are worth continual study and bring great reward: “O how I love thy law! It is my meditation all the day.” (Psalm 119:97)
The doctrine of the Trinity is very important in Christianity. But people who are not Trinitarians, even non-Trinitarians who believe in the Bible and in Jesus, might wonder, what’s the reason for believing in the Trinity? Is the idea of the Trinity motivated from Biblical texts or was it something that came out of Greek philosophy or Greek culture in early Christianity? How did Christians come to understand things in this way? And why has this understanding persisted in Christian history?
Entropy is an important property in science but it can be somewhat challenging. It is commonly understood as "disorder", which is fine as an analogy but there are better ways to think about it. As with many concepts, especially complex ones, better understanding comes with repeated use and application. Here we look at how to use and quantify entropy in applications with steam and chemical reactions.
Could anything truly exist in such a fashion that it could never be either perceived or thought of, even if only in principle? How would such a reality be distinct from absolute nothingness? A look into the philosophical issues of being and knowing with John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, Joseph Ratzinger, and David Bentley Hart.
A brief introduction to classical theism. Classical theism is a systematic understanding of God shared among many Christian, Jewish, Pagan, Muslim, and Hindu thinkers throughout history. It is primarily philosophical rather than scriptural in origin, but it also opens up an intellectual space for understanding theism as a plausible and reasonable way to see reality. And so it makes for a useful point of entry into the world of scripture and religious experience.
Rick and Todd discuss the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Rapture" in which Captain Sisko, Emissary to the Bajoran Prophets, receives a series of dramatic visions. We discuss the interpretive frameworks of spiritual and secular worldviews, the high costs of prophecy, the reliability or trustworthiness of powerful entities, the interaction of spiritual experiences and the brain, and the importance of the visions in the Deep Space Nine narrative arc.
Evolutionary biology benefits from a non-reductionist focus on real biological systems at the macroscopic level of their natural and historical contexts. This high-level approach makes sense since selection pressures operate at the level of phenotypes, the observed physical traits of organisms. Still, it is understood that these traits are inherited in the form of molecular gene sequences, the purview of molecular biology. The approach of molecular biology is more reductionist, focusing at the level of precise molecular structures. Molecular biology thereby benefits from a rigorous standard of evidence-based inference by isolating variables in controlled experiments. But it necessarily sets aside much of the complexity of nature. A combination of these two, in the form of evolutionary biochemistry, targets a functional synthesis of evolutionary biology and molecular biology, using techniques such as ancestral protein reconstruction to physically ‘resurrect’ ancestral proteins with precise molecular structures and to observe their resulting expressed traits experimentally.
When Jesus taught that we must eat his flesh and drink his blood many of his disciples walked with him no more. Many of his teachings and actions were strange and unsettling. In a word, uncanny. Rudolf Otto similarly described the Holy as a numinous mysterium tremendum et fascinans. Something radically other. Flannery O'Connor evoked dramatic responses to the uncanny in her fiction through narratives of shocking violence. As much as it unsettles and disturbs, the uncanny also has remarkable power to provoke new ways of thinking and conversion.
Jared and Todd talk about ontological pluralism: What exists? How do we categorize what exists? Are those categories intrinsic or man-made? A related idea is perspectival realism. We discuss the ideas of William Wimsatt and Scott Page, among others. Is reality monistic, dualist, pluralistic? Is the question even meaningful? And what (if any) practical implications would there be?
I love the Apostles’ Creed. If you ask me for a one-paragraph statement of what I believe, most fundamentally, this is it. Not just what I believe about religion, but what I believe most fundamentally about everything; about life, existence, and all of reality.
Rick and Todd discuss first contacts in Star Trek. The first contact of Vulcans coming to Earth and first contacts of Federation humans with other species in the galaxy. We discuss the Prime Directive and other Federation policies. We discuss contacts with the Malcorians, the Prophets of the Wormhole, and Species 10-C. What different reactions do species have at contact? What kinds of challenges might arise from differences in language and ways of perceiving reality?
Noether's theorem is an important theorem that relates invariance of space-time transformations to the laws of conservation: space-translation invariance to the conservation of linear momentum, space-rotation invariance to the conservation of angular momentum, and time-translation invariance to the conservation of energy. The models of physics are point-of-view invariant: physical models cannot depend on any particular position in space or moment in time.
Christianity has many unknowns, which makes possible many differing beliefs. This can be discouraging. There are limits in the extent of our reasoning, something Immanuel Kant explored in his theory of antinomies. And there are limits in the answers resolvable in scripture, in response to which Pseudo-Dionysius admonished that theology must remain within the bounds of revelation. But the unknowns need not stop us from knowing God. Key is to persist in way of holiness and nurture a life with the Holy Spirit.
"There went out a sower to sow." In his parable of the sower Jesus gives various active and passive roles: sower, seed, good soil, soil among thorns, stony ground, and waysides. This meditation on Mark 4 considers the seed as the word and the Word Christ, our receptivity to Christ, how he can enter, germinate, grow, and transform us into new creatures.
Rick and Todd talk about the series Star Trek: Picard. The continuing story of the Picard character and the introduction of new crew members Raffi, Rios, Agnes, Elnor, and Soji.
An infinite series is a sum of infinitely many numbers or terms, related in a given way and listed in a given order. They can be used to calculate the values of irrational numbers, like pi, out to trillions of decimal places. Or to calculate values of trigonometric and exponential functions. And of greatest interest, they can be used to see non-obvious relations between different areas of mathematics like integers, fractions, irrational numbers, complex numbers, geometry, trigonometric functions, and exponential functions.
An introduction to eight of the Early Church Fathers: Clement, Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen of Alexandria. Important witnesses to the Christian faith in its earliest days who everyone should know about.
Mike and Todd discuss Mormon, the man who compiled and narrated the Book of Mormon. Who was Mormon and what clues about his life and character are hidden in the text? We consider the Book of Mormon text with the hermeneutic of Mormon's biography as an important Nephite leader, even ruler, who had responsibility for the righteousness and security of his people, in light of the ultimate corruption and destruction of his people. How might that have influenced the stories from Nephite history that he chose to tell and in what ways did he frame the record “that ye may learn to be more wise than we have been”?
On having a personal "collection" of beautiful things. And making beautiful things. The Transcendentals: beauty, truth, and goodness. The theology of icons, physical objects that direct us toward higher things. The way beautiful things seize us and stop us in our tracks. On attending to beauty in life's vocations in marriage and family.
Rick and Todd talk about the Ferengi and their development in the Star Trek canon, especially in Deep Space Nine. We go through all 285 Rules of Acquisition (OK not really, but we talk about them). We talk about Ferengi characters like Quark, Rom, Nog, Grand Nagus Zek ("Inconceivable") and female Ferengi characters Pel and Ishka, who fight the misogyny of Ferengi society.
A special Christmas episode with piano and vocals from yours truly and my wife, featuring music from my favorite Christmas film, "Scrooge" (1970), starring Albert Finney, Alec Guinness, and Kenneth More. Music by Leslie Bricusse.
The primacy of Logos entails that all things are intellectually structured, that the order of reality is rationally intelligible. All things come to pass in accordance with the Logos (Heraclitus) and all things were made through the Logos (John 1:3). This episode looks at Logos through the thought of Benedict XVI, who calls Logos the intellectual structure of being. The implications are significant to our general understanding of reality. Even more significant is the identification of the Logos with the person Jesus Christ.
Rick and Todd talk about the Star Trek character Q. We review episodes in which Q has made an appearance and discuss his significance to the development of the characters and of humanity. As a method of interpretation we look at Q as a kind of mythological ‘Trickster’ archetype, common to many world mythologies and great works of literature; a character who causes mischief but also shakes things up in significant and even necessary ways.
The Neoplatonists were a group of philosophers active in the 3rd and 4th centuries A.D. Their most important "big idea" of significance to the history of philosophy and theology was that all things ultimately originate from a single source, called "The One". This idea had important affinities with Christian monotheism. Neoplatonists believe in “The One”, a single source underlying all things. Jews and Christians, and later Muslims, believe in one God, who is the source of all things and sustains all things. There is significant theoretical overlap. This episode covers an argument developed by Edward Feser that uses ideas from the Neoplatonists to argue for “The One”.
Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Plagueis The Wise? I thought not. It’s not a story the Jedi would tell you. Jeff and Todd turn to the dark side to study the Force in all its aspects. Who are Plagueis and Palpatine? What are the sources of their power? The dark side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural. We look at the Sith's use of biotechnology throughout the saga to extend the reach of their power.
Jared, Jack, and Todd discuss the study of personality, in particular comparing two prominent models: the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator and the Big Five Personality Traits. While Myers–Briggs is more widely used, notably in the workplace, the Big Five is preferred in academia. Why is that? We discuss factor analysis, the nature of models, and the consistency and stability of personality. Would you rather see yourself as a thinking person or a disagreeable person? Should we think of certain personality traits as better or worse than others or are all personality traits equally valuable?
Rick and Todd discuss lessons of leadership from the great leaders of the Star Trek canon. What were the different leadership styles of Kirk, Picard, Sisko, Janeway, and others? What worked? What didn't? We also discuss some of the other captains of the canon, including some who offer excellent lessons of how not to lead.
What is the Christian doctrine of Hell? How many people will be in Hell? Will they be there forever? Is it possible to repent once in Hell? Do you have to be Christian to be saved from Hell? Does it matter if you die as an infant before being baptized? Does it matter if you never hear the Gospel? Does it matter if your exposure to the Gospel is only cursory? Do you have to have a detailed understanding of the metaphysical nature of God? This episode surveys scripture and the history of Christian tradition on the subject.
I'll be releasing an episode soon with the title “Considering Hell and Confronting Sin”. Since it will be quite long I decided to make a short preview and summary version.
This episode in the philosophy of structure series looks at the way structure inheres in material substances. Starting with Aristotle's concept of hylomorphism (matter + form) we look at contemporary studies of this perspective in the thought of Kathrin Koslicki and Edward Feser. Most basic to this perspective is the idea of structures as the sorts of entities which make available positions or "slots" for other objects to occupy.
Rick and Todd get together to talk about humanoid origins in the Star Trek universe. We discuss two episodes. In "The Chase" the crew of the Enterprise discovers the traces of an ancient ancestor common, via panspermia, to humanoid species across the galaxy. In "Distant Origin" the crew of Voyager encounters a Voth scientist who has discovered that the Voth originated from Earth and are humanoid descendants of hadrosaurs.
Jeff and Todd discuss Count Dooku and his apprentice Qui-Gon Jinn. Two complicated and interesting characters. Both great Jedi who pushed the boundaries of the Jedi way. But one stayed in the light. The other crossed into the dark.
A life with the Holy Spirit is wonderful, exciting, challenging, and meaningful. One of my core beliefs is that there’s much more to reality and the possibilities of our existence than we can possibly imagine. Just a tremendous “more”. Greater in scope, finer in detail, richer in complexity and beauty. And this is something I can see most fully through the illumination of the Holy Spirit. It’s like something I never could have imagined possible before experiencing it. A taste of the overwhelming joy that comes from the power of the Holy Spirit goes a long way to shift a person’s perspective on what kind of life is possible. It changes everything.
In scripture Christ is called "the image of the invisible God". As such Christ is supremely important to our access to and understanding of God. As God made his goodness pass over Moses and declared his graciousness and compassion, Christ shows us the Father in his words and in his works. Three important philosopher-theologians: Origen of Alexandria, Augustine of Hippo, and Thomas Aquinas developed theories to explain the process of coming to see and know God in a form of "intellectual vision".
The Gospel of Mark starts off at a frenetic pace, matching the boundless and exuberant energy of John and Jesus as they announce the gospel message: "The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.” Jesus called disciples to "Follow" and they did, immediately. This is a gospel, good news, whose power and import we can still sense today.
Jared and Todd discuss the theory of constructed emotion and the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett. In contrast to a location-based understanding, in which discrete emotion categories consistently and specifically correspond to distinct brain regions, constructionism proposes that such emotion categories are constructed of more general brain networks not specific to those categories. We discuss degeneracy, the difference between affect and emotion, different forms of dualism, affinities to the philosophies of Kant and Wittgenstein, and the ways concepts and words have meaning.
Rachel and Todd talk about Flannery O'Connor. We discuss the unusual way that O'Connor developed Christian themes in her stories making use of violence and the grotesque. We look closely at four of her stories in particular, at her Southern regional style and humor as well as common themes like intergenerational conflict, urban and rural culture clashes, and racial tension as well as religious themes like depravity, redemption, grace, revelation, and the Holy Spirit.
Rick and Todd talk about Star Trek: an overview of the series, timeline continuity, development of the Klingons, the philosophy of Star Trek, genetic engineering, diversity, the Prime Directive and non-intervention, the secular values of Star Trek, the religious beliefs of other species and their productive tension with the secular Federation.
Jakob and Todd talk about set theory, its historical origins, Georg Cantor, trigonometric series, cardinalities of number systems, the continuum hypothesis, cardinalities of infinite sets, set theory as a foundation for mathematics, Cantor's paradox, Russell's paradox, axiomatization, the Zermelo–Fraenkel axiomatic system, the axiom of choice, and the understanding of mathematical objects as "sets with structure".
Jared and Todd talk about the study of judgment and decision making, the work of Kahneman and Tversky, System 1 and System 2, heuristics and biases, naturalistic decision making, prospect theory and value functions, loss aversion, anchoring, and nudge theory.
Judith Butler's Gender Trouble is a key text in the history of feminism and gender studies. This episode explores the significant points of Butler's system of ideas, in particular the concept of gender performativity.
Slavoj Žižek is a uniquely entertaining and engaging philosopher with an animated oratorical style. But this can often make it difficult to follow his train of thought and pick out key ideas from it. This episode gives an overview of his most important book, The Sublime Object of Ideology, which presents many of the ideas persisting in all his work. In particular, this overview focuses on Žižek’s theory of the Sublime. Žižek's ideas bring him into close contact with the German philosophers Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel.
Part 3 in this series on the philosophy of structure looks at examples and general principles of structure in chemistry. Subjects covered include quantum mechanics, the Schrödinger equation, wave functions, orbitals, molecules, functional groups, and the multiple levels of structure in proteins. General principles discussed include the nature of functions, the embedding of lower-level structures into higher-level structures, and the repeated use of a limited number of lower-level structures in the formation of higher-level structures.
Jeff and Todd talk about the Jedi Way. What is the Jedi Code and what does it allow and prohibit? Is the Jedi Code a desirable way to live? How could the Jedi code be improved? What is the Force? What is the difference between the light side and the dark? What is the difference between passion and compassion? Love versus attachment and possession. How the Jedi see death and immortality versus the Sith.
Jakob and Todd discuss the philosophy of statistics. Frequentist and Bayesian approaches. Fisher, Neyman, and Pearson and statistical methods for evaluating hypotheses. Deborah Mayo and statistical inference as severe testing. Proper and improper uses of p-values. The pitfalls of data dredging and p-hacking. Conditions under which prior probabilities make Bayesian approaches particularly useful. The utility of Bayesian concepts like priors, posteriors, updating, and loss functions in machine learning. Bayes' Theorem versus Bayesianism as a statistical philosophy. An algorithmic ‘method of methods’ for when to apply various statistical tools as an AI-complete problem. Important test cases in statistics like the Higgs Boson observation, the Eddington experiment for General Relativity, and the causal link between smoking and cancer. The problem of induction. Inferring the direction of causation for correlated variables. Karl Popper, falsification, and the impossibility of confirmation. What counts as evidence. Randomness as a limitation on knowledge and as a feature of reality itself. The ontological status and nature of a probability distribution, of classical values and as a quantum property.
Mike and Todd discuss the Book of Mormon. The place of the Book of Mormon as a text that holds its own among the sacred texts of the great world religions. Some classic and recent work in Book of Mormon scholarship and devotional readings. Grant Hardy and his study of the major Book of Mormon narrators - Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni - and their narrative interests and approaches. The inexhaustibility of the Book of Mormon as a source of inspiration and insight, from multiple and even competing perspectives; for example, its availability to both theologically conservative and liberal readings. The Book of Mormon as epic tragedy and a voice of warning of the mistakes of past societies that have led to collapse; in many ways a book about what not to do. Why the Book of Mormon is so important to us personally and why we continue to read it again and again.
This is the second episode in a series on philosophy of structure and focuses on the nature of structure in music in particular. Topics covered include the physics of sound, the wave equation, overtones, Fourier transforms, physiology of the inner ear, intervals, chords, group theory, modular arithmetic, transformations, invariance, musical forms, a Borgesian musical Library of Babel (Library of Vienna), musical phenomenology, serialism, and artificial neural networks. The overall objective of the series is to find patterns in structures across multiple fields, like music, to understand a general structure of structure.
Jared and Todd discuss the stories and worldbuilding of J.R.R. Tolkien as found in The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and others. We discuss the Tolkien cosmogony and pantheon, Eru Ilúvatar, the Music of the Ainur, the Valar and the Maiar, the importance of myth for Tolkien, and the possibility of Tolkien's world as viable myth for the modern age. We discuss the books and films and their cultural impact, the importance of song, the desire for power (even for ostensibly good purposes), the surrender of control to fate or grace, Christ figures, creation and sub-creation, industry and nature, the scars of war, our Baggins and Took natures, hope in hopelessness, infinite resignation and faith, hastiness, and the gift of death.
This is the first in a series of episodes exploring a philosophy of structure. To introduce the concept and to start thinking about structure I make use of ideas from thermodynamics, phase spaces, information theory, The Three-Body Problem, the Hebrew Bible, the Book of Mormon, Daniel Dennett, and Jorge Luis Borges. Drawing from a variety of sources the objective is to find patterns in structures across multiple fields, to understand a general structure of structure.
In two competing accounts the origin of human rights has been framed as a product of Christian moral teachings or as a process of rejecting and overcoming oppressive religious superstitions. Where do human rights come from? The Christian origins are significant but a more complete account should also address additional historical factors that helped to activate and further shape our conception of human rights in modern times.
Models are critical tools that enable us to think about, qualify, and quantify features of many processes. And as with any kind of tool, different kinds of models are better suited to different circumstances. Here we look at two kinds of models for understanding transport phenomena: causal and emergent models. In a causal process there is some kind of distinct, sequential, goal-oriented event with an observable beginning and end. In an emergent process there are uniform, parallel, independent events with no beginning or end but in which observable patterns eventually emerge.
This is the last in a three-part series on the Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew 7 Jesus taught: "Judge not", "Ask, and it will be given to you", "Whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them", "Narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life", "You will know them by their fruits", "Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven". As Jesus teaches about the narrow gate and difficult way consider what it means to live according to "The Way" as a disciple of Christ.
Pete and Todd talk about dumb movies. What is it about a good dumb movie that makes it fun to watch? We talk about comedy, romantic comedy, action, and horror. What kinds of movies are borderline, dumb but also kind of smart? And on a more "serious" note, what can we learn about life and the need to take a break, relax, and have fun?
The Book of Mormon is a challenging book. To the faithful it is the word of God. To some it's a work of deception. For those who have read it as faithful believers but then come to doubt its truth and divinity, how do you go back to the Book of Mormon for a fresh perspective? At the very least the Book of Mormon is a rich source of ideas that can shape one's identity and thought. Studying it in that way might provide a middle path to a second look.
It's an exciting time in the Star Wars universe. Jeff and Todd start things off talking about all the new shows just announced. Then we talk about fan service, material in a work of fiction or in a fictional series which is intentionally added to please the audience. What are the merits of fan service? Possible pitfalls? We look at examples throughout the films and shows, where it's worked well and some instances where, maybe less so.
Mike, Jared, and Todd discuss prediction. What skills and practices make people "superforecasters"? How do prediction betting markets like PredictIt work? Brier scores and how to quantify the accuracy of probabilistic predictions. What are the limitations of prediction, for people and for algorithms? How might the practices of probabilistic predicting also encourage intellectual honesty and improve social discourse?
In this second part in a series on the Sermon on the Mount we go through Matthew 6. The Sermon on the Mount is especially instructive on "The Way" disciples of Jesus Christ are to follow. In Matthew 6 Jesus taught about charitable deeds and fasting with sincerity rather than hypocrisy, about simple, humble prayer, the kingdom of God, forgiveness of debts, devotion to God rather than to riches, and trust in God's providence rather than preoccupation with worldly cares.
Isaiah has a reputation for being very difficult to understand. I’d like to suggest that Isaiah isn't actually intrinsically difficult to understand, as long as we read him in historical and prophetic context. Putting Isaiah in context includes understanding the events that he was responding to and prophesying about. These include the imperial activities of Assyria, the superpower of the region. As prophet to Judah’s kings, Isaiah remarked on the intrigues and ventures of Assyria and neighboring kingdoms. At the same time Isaiah was prophesying against his own people in Judah for their sins, especially their pride and oppression of the poor. These two prongs of prophecy, of the threat of surrounding nations and of the sins of Judah, converged as Isaiah warned that the LORD would bring the might of enemy nations to bear on the LORD’s people, to be smitten and scattered, while he also promised eventual gathering and reconciliation.
Pete and Todd discuss truth, with an outline of Three Truths About Truth: (1) We aren’t as good at perceiving and remembering facts as we think we are. (2) A lot of our systems are based on a much more limited or squishier version of truth than we often assume. (3) The things we assume and think of as true are often not accepted as true by our neighbors or fellow citizens.
What are the attributes by which people can know followers of Jesus Christ? For this the New Testament is our primary source and grounding for guidance. The Sermon on the Mount especially is a key text that teaches how we are to live in order to be the "light of the world". Here we look at Matthew 5, the first of the sermon's 3 chapters, where Jesus teaches the fulfillment of the Law, that we are not to become angry or lustful, that we should not resist evil but rather love our enemies and give to all that ask, turning none away, having good will toward all indiscriminately, as the rain falls on both the just and unjust.
Mike and Todd discuss the work of Jack Miles and the different experiences and perspectives on God found in the Bible. Approached as a biography, the Bible crafts a fascinating and dynamic story of God's developing character and God's developing relationship with humanity. God is at times creator, destroyer, liberator, lawgiver, conqueror, executioner, wife, Holy One, recluse, puzzle, and Ancient of Days. And then, for Christians, the development and new birth of God as human being, co-sufferer, and teacher of nonviolence and universal love.
Jakob and Todd discuss category theory, an important field in modern mathematics that focuses on the relations (morphisms) between mathematical objects. We discuss the importance of abstraction and the development in the history of mathematics beyond solving particular problems to studying the general nature of mathematical structures as such, the kinds of problems that can and can't be solved, their properties, etc. We also consider the significance of a relation-centered approach to other fields, how things like languages, theories, and beliefs can be analyzed by the relations between their constituent elements.
Jeff and Todd discuss Padmé and her call for the vote of no confidence that launched Palpatine's rise to the chancellorship and to absolute power. We look at her actions from different ethical perspectives - deontological, teleological, virtue - and at her complicated role in the narrative as both hero and pawn, as well as her dominant presence and importance in the arc of the whole saga.
Jared and Todd talk about values, where values come from, how we decide which values to embrace, and how we're motivated to change. We also discuss models for how individuals and societies can have conflicting values and how they harmonize them, with varying degrees of success.
Stokes' Theorem in its general form is a remarkable theorem with many applications in calculus, starting with the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. The pattern in each case is that the integral of a function over a region is equal to the integral of a related function over the boundary of the region. We can use information about the boundary of a region to get information about the entire region, which is both useful and mathematically elegant.
In his letter to the Philippians Paul said: "Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others." (Philippians 2:3-4)
Jack and Todd discuss education: the state of gifted education, how education can be structured in a way for students with various needs to get the kind of education they need, how to assess achievement for a broader range of skills, the ends and purposes of education.
Should we understand quantum systems to have definite properties? In quantum interpretations values are usually taken to be the eigenvalues directly revealed in experiments and quantum systems generally have no definite eigenvalues. However, Sunny Auyang argues that this does not mean that they don't have definite properties. The conclusion that they don't arises from a restricted sense of what counts as a property. The conceptual structure of quantum mechanics is much richer and an expanded notion of properties facilitates an understanding of quantum properties that are more descriptive and structurally sophisticated.
In religion some things are literal, some things are metaphorical, and some things are both. I share a little diagram I've found helpful for organizing my thoughts around different combinations of the literal and metaphorical in religion.
Trevor talks with Todd about why he believes in God, his personal relationship with God, its challenges, spiritual experiences, the importance of myth and narrative, and religious community.
Taylor and Todd discuss Carl Jung, the collective unconscious, intergenerational trauma, race, sexual identity, and gender consciousness. We discuss how these can enable us in the Jungian process of 'individuation', self-understanding, and healing.
In Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead the preacher John Ames finds theological inspiration from the atheistic critic Ludwig Feuerbach. Feuerbach is one of Christianity's most interesting critics and arguably a critic of the caliber Christianity deserves. Though his intentions were to undermine Christianity he managed to produce some rich insights that Christians can adopt into their theology.
Alex and Todd sit down again to talk about religion. Alex asks Todd about his faith and his deep interest in religious issues. Why take religion, God, and scripture seriously?
Schopenhauer was one of the most influential modern philosophers to develop a philosophy of music. He thought of music as the most direct access to fundamental reality, which he called Will. Roger Scruton, in a reworked Schopenhauerian theory saw music as inducing a response of "overreaching intentionality" in which we acquire a first-person perspective on a state of mind that is not our own.
Jakob and Todd discuss leisure as a source of culture, drawing primarily on the thought of Josef Pieper and Bertrand Russell. How activities beyond work for the purposes of sustenance and material wealth can be good for their own sakes and even constitute higher goods; how a full life of genuine wealth implies an inbreaking of grace "overflowing into superfluities".
How can entities be picked out as individual and distinct entities? Sunny Auyang presents a Kantian model of spacetime as an absolute and indispensable structural scheme we project onto the world to organize it and to pick out individual elements, or events in it. Using fiber bundles she packs together a complex structure of individuating qualitative features that she links to individual points in spacetime.
We talk about George Lucas, his background and influences. Flash Gordon, Akira Kurosawa, Horse Opera and Spaghetti Westerns. The sequel trilogy: overall coherence, the Star Wars tradition of seeing contradictions "from a certain point of view". The sequel trilogy characters: Rey, Rose, and Vice Admiral Holdo.
It's undeniable that living in a secular age brings significant challenges to belief in God and to religious practice. And it's understandable. Still, there are reasons to give it a second look, or maybe a new first look with a fresh perspective.
One of the great things about Mesoamerican history is that we know so much about it. Names of places like Tikal, Calakmul, and Copán might inspire images of stone temples with a mysterious, long-lost history. This may have been true one hundred years ago. But today we know a great deal about their history because we can read their writing. We know the names of their rulers. We know important things that they did. In fact, they put a lot of effort into making sure their histories were preserved for posterity. Thanks to these records we have some very exciting and interesting history.
Mike and Todd discuss Adam S. Miller's "Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology", possibly the most rigorous, speculative, and systematic attempt at a professional take on Mormon philosophy ever, that never directly mentions Mormonism. We read between the lines and look at the revolutionary ideas of the Mormon moment in world religious history that are arguably still not fully realized in the ongoing Restoration.
Sunny Y. Auyang gives a useful model for thinking about the way states and state spaces of objective reality are represented in ways accessible to us and how transformations between a plurality of representations imply not relativism but common states and state spaces that they represent.
In a blast from the past Pete and Todd talk about the songs that shaped their younger years: “Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely”, “Estoy Aquí”, "Mambo No. 5 (A Little Bit of...)", “Dragostea Din Tei”, "...Baby One More Time"
In a blast from the past Pete and Todd talk about the songs that shaped their younger years: “We Built This City”, "It's Gonna Be Me", “Never Gonna Give You Up”, "All Star", “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World”
The story of God in scripture is one of active and dynamic involvement in history. It is also one of continuous change and progression, both in the relationship between God and humanity and in our understanding of God.
Hegel is much more than a precursor to Marx. His philosophy has a lot to offer in many subjects, not least in theology and the philosophy of religion.
Can religious people and people who have left a religion talk about it together? Alex and Todd sit down for a frank conversation about religion. Todd is a Christian and practicing Latter-day Saint. Alex has left the LDS (Mormon) church. We talk about the difficult and often uncomfortable challenges of bridging this divide.
This episode covers Aristotle’s philosophy of the soul as both matter and form, a model of the soul as a braided four-dimensional structure, ways to infer the four-dimensional structure from three dimensions, and to account for variation observed in three dimensions using design notions of tolerance and perceptual coding, why the concept of the soul need not be eliminated in modernity even if it comes to seem less mysterious in the process of investigation, and the ongoing intellectual conversation on the soul carried on from classical times through medieval and modern Christian thought.
Jared and Todd discuss meaning. Is there a current crisis of meaning? What is the source of meaning and why might it be lost? How can it be recovered?
What is the nature of the soul? In Part I we look at this question through the thought experiment of the Transporter Problem. What is it that would have to be preserved in a transportation process in order to say that the person stepping out on the other side is the same person? What are the implications for the nature of personal identity and the makeup of the human person, or soul?
Part 2 of our discussion. Jeff and Todd talk Star Wars, the great cultural mythology of the modern age. We talk about our own histories with Star Wars, each of the trilogies, other films in the Star Wars universe, Clone Wars, the Mandalorian. Also the cinematic genius of George Lucas, Joseph Campbell and the monomyth. This was our introductory “overview”, even though we couldn’t help going deep into a couple of topics.
Part 1 of our discussion. Jeff and Todd talk Star Wars, the great cultural mythology of the modern age. We talk about our own histories with Star Wars, each of the trilogies, other films in the Star Wars universe, Clone Wars, the Mandalorian. Also the cinematic genius of George Lucas, Joseph Campbell and the monomyth. This was our introductory "overview", even though we couldn't help going deep into a couple of topics.
In this episode we discuss the two creation stories in Genesis, the Documentary Hypothesis and the P and J sources, differences in their vocabulary and portrayals of God, comparisons with the Babylonian Enuma Elish, creative wordplay, and possible ways to think about all this from a religious perspective.
A look at matter and spirit, the corporeal and incorporeal using the thought device of a spectrum of materiality and ways of dividing it up, and pulling ideas from the thought of Daniel Dennett, Elizabeth Grosz, Baruch Spinoza, and David Bentley Hart.
Jared and Todd discuss aesthetics, aesthetics experiences, personality and sensitivity to aesthetic experiences, judgment, Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, Immanuel Kant, the subjective universal, aesthetic objectivity, Schopenhauer and Platonism, how beauty will save the world, Hamilton, community from shared aesthetic experiences, and modern art.
In this episode we investigate historical responses to the question “Why did Moses not enter the promised land?” We look at the Biblical texts and commentaries from Rabbis Nachmanides, Rashi, Maimonides, Chananel, and Abarbanel.
For this first solo episode on the podcast I look into the question of the nature of divine law. I draw on research by Christine Hayes in her book "What's Divine About Divine Law?" which looks at answers given in the traditions of the Hebrew Bible, Greek philosophy, and the convergence of the two. We get into the Biblical texts, philosophers like Plato, Cicero, and Philo of Alexandria, as well as the ideas of some modern thinkers like Richard Rorty and James K.A. Smith.
Alex and Todd discuss films, grudges, food, eggs, missions, growing up LDS, private online communities, alcohol and drugs, criminal justice, social discourse, the response to George Floyd's killing, judgment, charitable interpretation, and unconditional love.
Todd and Mike discuss the Book of Mormon, classical theism, the Nicene Creed, voluntary secular societies, hierarchical organizations, inevitability in infinite time, disruptive innovation, ambiguity, and religious perspectives.
Todd, Jack, and Jared discuss relationships, values, Lord of the Rings, science fiction and fantasy, Mormon cultural influence, aesthetics, the nature of disagreements, Effective Altruism, Neoreaction, and personality cults
Jared and Todd discuss motivation, value, the is-ought problem, social constructs, pragmatism, dialectics, cognitive dissonance, partial pictures of reality, Cartesian skepticism, and poverty.
Todd and Jack discuss missionary work, language study, faith changes, institutions, secular alternatives to religious institutions, communism, political parties, online communities, effective altruism, vocations and their purposes, and free time.