C. S. Lewis, from That Hideous Strength:
“And so,” said Straik, “the lessons you learned at your mother’s knee return. God will have power to give eternal reward and eternal punishment.”
“God?” said Mark. “How does He come into it? I don’t believe in God.”
“But, my friend,” said Filostrato, “does it follow that because there was no God in the past that there will be no God also in the future?”
“Don’t you see,” said Straik, “that we are offering you the unspeakable glory of being present at the creation of God Almighty? Here, in this house, you shall meet the first sketch of the real God. It is a man — or a being made by man — who will finally ascend the throne of the universe. And rule forever.”
Wes and I looking out over the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (2005). It’s one of those places that doesn’t look real in photographs — but doesn’t look real when you’re there either.
Currently listening: Duke Ellington, Never No Lament: The Blanton-Webster Band. These discs have great healing powers, I’m telling you. 🎵
Currently reading: A Sand County Almanac and Other Writings On Ecology And Conservation by Aldo Leopold. Re: Leopold’s “land ethic” and his emphasis on the “biotic community,” I think: I just don’t know how to convince people who care only about money to care even a little bit about anything else. 📚
So how do we understand an intelligence radically different from our own? The same way we understand this phenomenon in dogs: ethology. Ethologists, who study animal behavior, have confronted this problem for decades. They begin with behavior, guided by the core principle that similar behaviors can arise from very different minds.
Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen argued that understanding behavior requires asking four core questions: What mechanisms produce it? How does it develop? What purpose does it serve? How does it compare across species? Those questions translate well to AI. What computations produce an agent’s behavior? How have changes in its training shaped that behavior over time? What is the behavior designed to accomplish? And how does it compare with that of other forms of intelligence?
In the end, I do not think Christianity will go the same way as Europe’s pre-Christian religions. Even if you don’t believe it is sustained by divine promises and by God’s grace, Christianity is conceptually resilient to a high degree, and its Scriptures ensure it can hardly slip from memory in the same way as an oral tradition. Furthermore, Christianity will remain strong for as long as there is no convincing alternative, and the current resurgence of interest in it is partly down to the failure of secularism and humanism to establish themselves as alternatives with sufficient cultural, emotional and psychological heft. Our concern should not be directed, therefore, at Christianity’s survival; rather, we should be concerned about the quality of any Christianity that survives in the context of the collapse of the institutional churches, which have traditionally guided believers.
A brilliant concise survey of this vital territory.
If you’re in the Chicago area, there will be performances this weekend at Wheaton College of The Cook-Off, a small comic opera composed by my friend and former colleague Shawn Okpebholo. It’ll be wonderful music in a lovely space.
When I posted this I felt a great weight lifting.
Everybody is talking about Elizabeth Dias’s long report in the NYT on Anthropic and religious scholars, and rightly so. It’s brilliant. Elizabeth (like her Times colleague Ruth Graham) was my student back in the day, so of course I would like to take credit for the excellence of her work … but I can’t. I think she just had one class from me. But still: liberal-arts education FTW!