What Gods Do We Believe in Now? NT Wright and Gary Morson at Northwestern

welcome to the Veritas forum engaging University students and faculty in discussions about life's hardest questions and the relevance of Jesus Christ to all of life age of deep religious disagreement and so as we delve into real questions that require honest answers what better topic to talked about tonight then what gods do we believe in now leading our discussion off will be written world renowned author and theologian and New Testament scholar professor NT Wright he is currently the new professor at Saint Mary's College at the University at the st. Andrew st. Andrews that if you'd like to know more about him there's a full bio in your program and commenting and responding to Professor Wright's words tonight is someone who needs no introduction to this crowd professor Gary Morrison who's professor of the Slavic languages and literature in addition to being a notable scholar he is consistently the most popular professor in the humanities so let's join me in welcoming our speakers tonight [Applause] [Applause] thank you very much and let me say thank you for the welcome here to Northwestern and thank you especially to all the team that very TAS who have worked extremely hard to make this evening happen it's always a delight to be among friends new friends old friends and even for a Brit like me to come over and try to tell you about your own culture which might seem extremely presumptuous and I hope you'll forgive me from that for that I am reminded of a wonderful moment that happened some years ago in the House of Lords in London when Lord Hailsham who was Lord Chancellor came out of his office wearing his rather grand robes as Lord Chancellor and in the corridor the far end of the corridor he saw a friend whose attention he wanted to attract but in between him and them there was a party of American tourists who are being shown around the buildings this happens from time to time the name of the friend in question was Neil Martin who was a member of parliament Hailsham ignored the tourists and raised his hand and shouted Neil well you say tomato I say tomato or vice versa and the tourists of course all obeyed we do have this interesting transatlantic thing you know you recently held an election to choose the most powerful person in the world many of us in Britain watched that with much more excitement than we watch our own election results which are fairly ho-hum because after all it will mean much more to us though there's an odd thing about that that only Americans vote in your elections how does that happen when really we feel dis disenfranchised by them since it actually will affect us too but so it may be appropriate that we should offer I should offer somebody like me should offer occasional reflections on our larger culture including yours and the issues we face today even though of course we do things very differently culturally and politically and theologically my topic tonight concerns that larger perspective seen through the lens of the question what gods do we believe in now and I want to mix things up a bit by addressing a polarization which looms large in your culture especially in a university context one of the most misleading aspects of the so-called culture wars is the sense that to be conservative probably means to be religious while to be radical would mean to be secular but that religious secular divide is itself deeply problematic and I want to suggest this evening that both halves of it need looking at in quite a new way first I need to set the scene in terms of the history of ideas are ideas by the way forgive me if I sip coffee I flew in yesterday and my body is telling me it's 2 o'clock in the morning so I just need something to help me make sure I'm staying on track all of us in the Western world are for better or worse children of the Enlightenment and the main idea of the Enlightenment if I could horribly overgeneralize was rooted in one particular ancient philosophy this was the philosophy called epicureanism Epicurus lived in the 3rd century BC his ideas were boosted in the 1st century BC by the poet Lucretia and you could sum it all up like this the gods if they exist are a long way away they don't bother about us so relax and enjoy your life that in fact was used almost unchanged as a slogan for the new atheist movement represented by Richard Dawkins who recently hired some advertising space on London buses to put out the message there's probably no God now stop worrying and enjoy your life fascinating now there are three things to note about ancient and modern Epicureanism and how it's affected the way we think now first epicurus and lucretius were reacting strongly not against ancient Judaism not against Christianity which hadn't been invented yet they were reacting against certain types of ancient paganism which frightened people by suggesting that there were gods all over the place and that they were out to get you and that if they didn't make life miserable for you here they probably would hereafter you then get the same reaction interestingly in the 15th century AD when the medieval church had borrowed a lot of those ancient pagan ideas about unpredictable divine anger to frighten people into believing or behaving and the rediscovery of Lucretius in 1417 and thus of epicureanism came to many as welcomed good news and bringing it a bit closer to home for you at least when Thomas Jefferson declared in the 18th century that he was an epicurean he and his Enlightenment colleagues were consciously reacting against a kind of Christian teaching that threatened people with an angry god both here and Hereafter now you might ask what's that got to do with the challenges that we face in today's university culture simply this my second point that epicureanism wasn't the foundation of modern science but it was part of the foundation of what we might call modern scientism for Epicurus the entire world human beings was composed to what he called atoms not exactly what we mean by that word but not much different either and these atoms he claims behaved the way they did entirely under their own impulses including the unpredictable behavior he called the swerve which caused atoms to combine in new ways leading to evolution this is not mid 19th century this is 3rd century BC leading therefore to new forms of life so Epicurus by splitting off our world from any possibility of divine intervention or encounter he gave to the world a kind of autonomy and independence this independence is the ancestor of the Enlightenment claim to scientific autonomy it's also of course the root of modern political autonomy the cousin of scientific autonomy the parallel development of those two in the Western world ought to give us food for thought just as in Epicureanism you get rid of divine interference and let the natural world evolve in its own way so you get rid of the Divine Right of Kings and let democracy develop in its own way that belief has driven our Western assumption that when countries elsewhere in the world get rid of their tyrants or dictators they will naturally want to become western-style democracies and when that doesn't happen as it hasn't we have no other narrative to help us understand what's going on in fact letting systems do their own thing as Marx saw clearly might well mean that like some elements in the natural world they boil over into revolution an epicurean vision of politics would need to allow for the equivalent of volcanoes so given our my first two introductory points first epicureanism ancient and modern has reacted against a perception of an angry and threatening God at second it results in detaching divinity from the world of space time and matter allowing the world the natural world's the political order to develop and evolve under their own steam and this brings him into third introductory point that this confluence of ideas has given birth to what we loosely call secularism secularism is a complex phenomenon in itself but it's become a dominant motif in Western culture and in America and American universities in particular despite or perhaps because of the continuing and often strident religiosity of some parts of your culture by the way totally different from mine there is no equivalent to the UK to modern North American fundamentalism only in tiny pockets here and there but despite or perhaps because of that there has been increasing pressure in America to banish talk of a God from public life and to conduct everything from scientific research to politics even to marriage on the assumption that the world is and means what it is and means without reference to anything beyond its visible and in principle scientifically measurable itself now I put tonight's question into this triple context because it seems to me vital if we are to understand where we've come from and not accept the sacred secular divide or the religious non-religious divide a simply part of some unalterable and given cultural landscape it is no such thing ironically it is itself partly comprehensible as one more cultural evolution in the complex history of the Western world but it is solidified itself remarkably politically as well as scientifically through the remarkable claim made by your forefathers in the late 18th century who really did believe and it says so on your dollar bills that they were seeing the birth of Novus Ordo seclorum a new order of the ages that's a quote from the and poet Virgil in the time of Augustus 2,000 years earlier this was to be the new golden age and that claim hiding powerfully just under the surface of so many cultural assumptions particularly but not exclusively here in America means that any attempt to challenge the perceived rule of secularism is seen as ipso facto a challenge to the great modern order that has brought us so many obvious blessings not least in the medical sphere I am sometimes accused of being anti enlightenment and my stock answer is that actually though I do have several problems with post enlightenment modernism I have no wish to be operated on by either a pre-modern or indeed a postmodern dentist thank you very much figure all this leads me to the second and central section of this lecture in which I want to suggest that the assumed standoff between what we call religion and what we call the secular world and the cultures which have grown up around this standoff are radically misconceived and that there are other ways of looking at the whole thing which would be more accurate in description more helpful in enabling us to find our way forward and indeed more Christian in their conformity to the interesting and often forgotten message about Jesus himself so to the second section of my lecture what happened to the gods one of the things you learn early on in science is that nature abhors a vacuum you can create a vacuum you can sustain it given the right technology but atmospheric pressure always threatens to break back in and sometimes it will cause an explosion something similar is true with philosophies and worldviews they are poor a vacuum you can push God or the gods away upstairs out of sight I can elderly embarrassing relative you go and live upstairs there but history shows again and again that other cords quietly or sometimes noisily sneaked in to take their place and these other gods are not strangers the ancient world view them quite well just to name three most obvious there is Mars the God of War there is mammoth the god of money and there is Aphrodite the goddess of erotic love one of the fascinating things about modern Western ideas has been the work of the Masters of suspicion Nietzsche Marx Freud claiming to reveal the motives that lie beneath the outwardly smooth and comprehensible surface of the Western world it was all about power declared Nietzsche now everything comes down to money said Marx ah it's all about sex said Freud and in each case these were seen as forces or drives that were there whether we liked it or not we might imagine we are free to choose but in fact we are the blind servants of these impulses take them in reverse order it's hard now actually to imagine the world of the 1950s when I was a child there was more or less no pornography the great majority of married couples stayed married when I was at school I knew precisely one other but one boy who came from a broken home no doubt a great deal of what was seen as illicit sexual activity went on below the radar but a broadly judeo-christian moral stance was assumed in society which meant importantly for the story I'm telling that most people felt under at least some pressure to resist impulses which left to themselves would have moved in a very different direction but when Freud became popular filtering down into mainstream culture in novels and plays people can't began to speak of the erotic impulse often called the life force precisely in the way that they might centuries before have spoken of a divine command one should not resist one could not resist it would be hypocritical and wrong I don't think people any longer speak reverently about the life force in that way it's just assumed the late Christopher Hitchens another high priest of contemporary atheism said that there were two things you should never pass up an opportunity to do one this to appear on television and the other was to have sex the goddess Aphrodite even if unnamed is believed in and served by millions second man you in America hardly need me to tell you about the place of Mammon of the worship of money in our society but Britain or at least London has prided itself on being the financial capital of the world and the major financial scandals and banking crises that have shaken our system over the last decade have done nothing to damage our faith in this ancient sin yet very modern God we still assume that though something has gone horribly wrong the only thing to do is to shore up this Idol and get it going again despite the gross inequities in our own Western world the country is still suffering from unpayable debt the rising tide of poverty in all sorts of unexpected places or so on perhaps it wouldn't be straining the point to say that many students now still hope rightly or wrongly that a degree will be a passport to a good job and hopefully a good salary and one feels that's justification enough as long as it gets me into some money that'll be all right but you can recognize the worship of Mammon precisely at the point when somebody asks you to do a job for which you will be paid considerably less than you are a present what would you say would it feel odd the same is true of course in relation to Mars the God of War and the whole world of power force ultimately of arms and violence our Western culture has simply assumed that the answer to the world's problem is to go and drop bombs on someone I said 11 years ago I've said ever since that unleashing our modernist military machine on the putative sources of terror in the Middle East was just gonna make everything much much worse and I've seen nothing in the last decade to make me think I was wrong but our english-speaking culture which was brought up as I was brought up on the great tales of success in true world wars you know I grew up with those little comics that you buy as a kid all about heroes going off and doing the business and coming back either wounded or damaged but they were the heroes and they'd that's that's the myth that I was brought up with but that's culture has pushed itself now into the business into the position of being the world's policeman and however many body bags are brought back home we still assume that that's how the world ought to work and experiments like Desmond Tutu's Commission for truth and reconciliation in southern Africa are admired but not imitated now in each of these cases then Aphrodite and Mammon and Mars these ancient and well-known gods have not gone away they've not been banished upstairs they are present and powerful and all them also for being unnamed and so unrecognized so in what sense are they divine the ancients would have had no trouble in answering that first those who worship gods become like them their characters are formed as they imitate the object of worship and imbibe its inner essence that's a scary thought but second worshiping gods demands sacrifices and those sacrifices are often human you hardly need me to spell out the point how many million children born or indeed unborn have been sacrificed on the altar of Aphrodite denied a secure upbringing because the demands of eros have kept one or both parents on the move or how many million lives have been blighted by money whether by not having it or worse by having too much of it and if you think you can't have too much that just shows how deeply Mammon worship has soaked into us and how many people how many lives are being torn apart as we speak by the incessant demands of a power of violence and war now please note I'm not saying that sex is evil I'm not saying that money is bad in itself I'm not even saying that there is never a place for force in defending the weak against violent evil or unjust tyranny I am neither a killjoy a Marxist nor a pacifist my point is that our society having claimed to have got rid of God upstairs so that we could simply live our lives the way we want to corporately and individually has fallen back into the clutches the forces and energies which are bigger than ourselves more powerful than the sum total of people who give them Allegiance forces we might as well recognize as gods those are just the big and obvious ones there are other ancient gods still alive and active the gods of blood and soil of racial and territorial identities and claims most of us are embarrassed to think that that stuff still goes on but they rear their heads even in our avowedly secular world and behind them all is a force which we invoke still at every turn a force assumed by the media in particular a force called progress again and again we hear it on our radios and I hear it when I come over to your country now that we live in the modern world says the commentator or the chat show host and that comes as the backup to some argument usually a secularist argument now that we live in the 21st century people say as though a change in the calendar meant an automatic updating or upgrading of moral systems and assumptions you only have to think for a minute to see how ridiculous this is but people still say it and worse they think it and worse they assume it a further moment's thought shows how this integrates with the three major divinities Western Pro ress means that we now have the technology to send our unarmed dry unmanned drones to kill people in Pakistan what would we think if another power managed to do the equivalent to us medical progress enables us to have more sex with more people with less risk up to a point so if risk was the only thing stopping us what's the problem and electronic financial systems enable us to gamble with zillions of dollars of someone else's money so why not and so our brave secularist world lurches to and fro in obedience to impulses which an earlier age would have recognized as divine but with which we with our late modern Epicureanism have not named as such conserve not challenged now you may say what's all this got to do with religion many in Western culture of course still think of religion as saying prayers going to church reading the Bible perhaps not least living in hope of going to heaven however vaguely that is expressed this is a thoroughly modern definition of religion it wouldn't have been recognized by anyone in the ancient world or indeed by many today outside the Western world from ancient times through to the present religion this had to do with the wider assumed dimensions of ordinary culture being marriage or music politics or city life wine or war it's precisely part of our dilemma that we have pulled what we call religion and what we call politics apart nobody dreamt of doing that before the 18th century oh there were reasons Wars of Religion wouldn't it be good if we didn't have to do that stuff okay and so that drove the rush to epicureanism in fact it was unstable philosophy epicurean it wasn't epicureanism was in the ancient world it was better suited to the small number of idle rich who could afford to settle down in comfort there's been exactly the same in our own world it is a philosophy for the elite or those who aspire to them to be the elite which is of course precisely what the West has done ever since the 18th century and perhaps the convulsions that we've gone through the disasters that have come from worshipping Mars and Mammon and Aphrodite are the signs that the theological vacuum caused by pulling God in the world apart is at last imploding but do we know what to do under such circumstances have we got a roadmap to say if that happens this is where you should go next and this brings me to my third and final section I want to suggest that we do in fact live in a much more thoroughly integrated world than our culture has recognized and that there are modes of knowing and being within that world which we can explore and which challenged the unhelpful polarizations of secularism so my third part believing and knowing in an integrated world in many parts of the university world today people assume that real intellectual work takes place in the objective world of the hard sciences and that the more you move in the direction of the so-called arts especially things like metaphysics or theology the more you're simply talking nonsense about nothing again that's a function of those epicurean assumptions not of the hard sciences themselves have been many periods and cultures in history that are developed very sophisticated scientific work without assuming that you had to split that off from other kinds of knowing other aspects of culture nevertheless many of today's leading scientists have been brought up on the split world viewpoint some of even with unintended irony made it an article of faith that one should not allow articles of faith into the classroom or the laboratory some Christians have gone along for the ride ten or twelve years ago I was invited to speak at a think tank in Washington about Christian ecological work working towards reduction of global warming and rescuing the planet from all the stuff that we've been doing to it I was told afterwards that halfway through my talk I had lost many of the Christians in the room because I had talked about scientific evidence for global warming and the very mention of science apparently to my horror sent a message that I was colluding with Darwinian atheism or something like it that would be to make the mistake I mentioned before of confusing science with scientism of placing the proper and wise investigation of the natural world within the worldview of epicureanism which is itself unproved and indeed unprovable so what's the alternative here perhaps to your surprise the Christian worldview has a great deal to offer especially when you track it back to its beginnings in the world of ancient Israel then of Jesus himself and the writings of the first two or three Christian centuries the category which emerges again and again in the scriptures and the great teachers of the faith is wisdom Sophia in Greek hokhmah in Hebrew wisdom wisdom is a strange evocative figure sometimes personified as a lady inviting people to a feast teaching people how to navigate through this wonderful but dangerous world wisdom in the scriptures is what was possessed by the master builder who constructed the beautiful tabernacle it's what Joseph was seen to possess when he advised Pharaoh how to cope with upcoming ecological and economic disaster it's what Daniel had when he was able uniquely to read the writing that appeared on Bell Chaz's wall we in our culture have often split apart skills like architecture and engineering on the one hand skills of philosophy or political insight on the other the figure of whiz holds them together wisdom according to scripture is what you need to be genuinely fully human and genuine full rounded humanity is what our culture with its pretense at religion and its variety of unnamed but powerful gods has been remarkably short of there are three steps to biblical wisdom they're all summarized in a much repeated shorthand which probably sounds forbidding to us again and again in the scriptures we hear the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom now our problem with that is that we've all forgotten who the Lord is and if you go out on the street and say to somebody do you or don't you believe in God and then you talk about which God it is they believe in or don't believe in again and again still people will talk about the old bully in the sky that's the one we don't believe in or if we do believe in him we're a bit frightened we mistake God for a distant faceless bureaucrat and so we've forgotten that when the scripture talks about the fear of the Lord it doesn't mean a cringing nervous slavish state but the reverence and awe properly due to the creator and sustainer of all things in other words just as the concept of faith changes in accordance with its subject if what you believe in is a being like an amorphous and characterless gas that faith will be a very different thing from the sort of faith you have if what you believe in is the father of Jesus Christ so the word fear changes too depending on whether the God you imagine is a celestial bully or the God of faithful love my point is this in the biblical traditions the human subject is imagined not as the lonely isolated individual who can work things out for himself in those traditions it usually was a he but rather is someone who is located in relation to three other coordinates let me mention the three briefly first the knowing subject is made in the Age of the creator part of the meaning of that evocative phrase is that the subject is called to reflect the creator's wisdom and his care into the world and so then to reflect the praises of creation back to the Creator that is the human vocation second the knowing that goes with wisdom in the biblical sense would see the object of study whatever it is you're trying to know not as an isolated entity that could be manipulated or exploited but as part of a much larger world full of interlocking connections and mutual relationships but third the knower never knows in isolation all serious academic study takes place in the context of a community of Noah's true wisdom is both bold and humble it will never be afraid to say what it thinks it has seen but it will always covet other angles of vision so where is this taking us it's taken us to the point where we can see an integrated mode of knowing quite different from the pure objectivism dreamed of in scientism on the one hand and the supposedly pure subjectivism which the epicurean scientist accuses his or her neighbor in the arts faculties of especially in theology and similar subjects no all knowledge suggests biblical wisdom involves human beings in a much more complex series of relationships than simply that of the detached observer obtaining a supposed view from nowhere please note the scientist studies that which can be repeated the historian studies that which cannot be repeated but in many other respects the sequence of knowing is the same from observation to hypothesis to further testing and all suffused with a wonder at the rich complexity of life which is a different sort of life to ours and other disciplines will do the same the whole process requires humility and patience it requires an unwillingness to grab at the material or to foist one's own ideas or personality on it ultimately the different modes of knowing suggested by wisdom boil down to what we might call love love is a mode of knowing or right but love transcends the objective subjective distinction which has been so inscribed in much Western thinking in love the main thing is to admire and respect and celebrate and take delight in the object of that love to let it be itself to want it to be gloriously and wonderfully itself not to snatch it or control it or squash it into another shape that's not love that's lust is love then the pursuit of objectivity of course not precisely at the same moment that love is celebrating the radical otherness of the beloved whether it be a star 20 million miles away 20 million light-years away or a human being 20 millimeters away love is entering into a relationship with the beloved a relationship which is again defined by the nature of the beloved but in which admiration is mixed with curiosity a desire to discover more respect with a longing for intimacy a desire to know and so far as it is possible to be known what we've seen in the last 200 years of Western epistemology has been the splitting of love it is of course possible to divide up different types of knowledge so that they appear almost entirely different or incompatible and that enables the kind of knowledge we might acquire the high Sciences to go steaming ahead unencumbered producing please note not only penicillin which was of course discovered by accident are also gas chambers which were made deliberately it makes great strides but not always in the right direction we have a thousand machines for making war but none for making peace we have computers and iPhone apps that will make millions of dollars out of a tiny change in exchange rates that none that will rescue the poorest countries in the world from their plight we know how to make internet pornography but not how to repair marriages the very objectivity or neutrality of scientific knowledge is commonly conceived has played into the hands of the gods we secretly worship the chief rabbi of the United Kingdom Jonathan Sacks one of our great commentators in the UK says it like this science takes things to bits to see how they work religion puts them together to see what they mean and they need each other we have run the risk for too long of taking our whole world apart to see how it works in order that we may make it work to our short-term advantage perhaps it's time to allow other perspectives to come into the frame and for the Christian of course the central claim is that in Jesus the Jewish Messiah wisdom become human become a person Jesus went about bringing precisely that reintegration for which the world had longed taking upon himself the disintegration and selfish hatred of the world and rising again to launch the project of an integrated new creation modern science in so far as I understand its origins began with people who were in themselves quite devout believing all this exploring the natural world with respect and delight as the mysterious creation of a wise creator but the Epicureans split world at the ican't embraced not least because of the political and social advantage that view is supposed to bring encouraged a split world of knowledge a two-track culture in which each side became increasingly opaque or even repellent to the other and in your country at least this has got itself hooked up with the so-called culture Wars greatly to the detriment of all parties I believe it's time to work for a fresh integration and I suggest you that the figure of wisdom incarnate Jesus himself is the place to begin if we are to discover what that might mean not only for ourselves but for the wider world that knows only too well what a divided existence is like the great claim made made by the early Christians was not so much that in and through Jesus they had a secret knowledge some people tried to go that route but Paul dismissed it and said that was just the root of pride their great claim was that in Jesus they had discovered a larger reality within which their own partial knowledge would make sense and that larger reality was what they called agape love the love of the Creator God for them and the love which they then found in themselves for the creator for his world and particularly for one another and all others around authentic Christian faith then is not to be played off against scientific knowledge rightly understood faith and knowledge are both offshoots of a larger reality whose name is love Jesus himself has of course been studied historically from every possible angle some of despaired of ever understanding him some of even questioned whether he ever existed though no serious historian makes that mistake as a historian I can say with confidence not only that he really did live in 1st century Palestine that he really did tell his surprised contemporaries that the one true God was now taking charge of the world in a whole new way and that he went to his death believing that that was how God's powerful love would overcome the power of evil and launch new creation and again as a historian I have to say that without Jesus resurrection I cannot explain why Jesus disciples would have taken that claim seriously for one minute after his violent death of course all this poses challenges for us at the level of worldview as it did for Jesus own contemporaries they knew just as well as we did do that dead people stayed dead but Jesus first followers not only believed that he really was alive again but that he had as it were gone through death and out the other side leading the way into a new mode of being in which the power of love would defeat the love of power in which creation and beauty would win out over death and decay and in which God himself would become present to and with people of every shape and type offering healing and reconciliation a new start a new life a new way of life sometimes as in science as in history the great leap forward to a fresh hypothesis I hope some of you will have the joy of that in your academic and professional lives the great leap forward to a fresh hypothesis happens when you put a new element in the middle of the picture and discover that all the jumbled pieces come together in a new and coherent way around it that's what it's like when you put Jesus as wisdom incarnate into the middle of the picture because it's Jesus it doesn't happen all at once he wants us to grow up and take responsibility to think it through to be learners disciples not just mute followers but because it's Jesus he offers and provides the strength and courage which enable us to believe to learn and to join in his project of healing and hope and love thank you very much [Applause] [Applause] that was a really moving and powerful talk those of you who know my classes will know that one thing I will own too believing and there isn't much since I concealed my beliefs is a belief in the difference of points of view and the value of hearing points of view other than the ones you're familiar with I'd like to quote John Stuart Mill's comment that he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that and that it's important to hear a point of view you don't agree with from someone who actually is willing to defend it not let's say finding out what the other side thinks by reading what your side says it thinks which i think is something like letting the prosecutor present the defense's case at a trial and so in an environment where at least on the faculty I never hear a point of view like professor rights I was absolutely delighted to hear it he represented I will point out though that as for the people of the UK being disenfranchised really what happened 200 years ago was really the reverse he realized we wanted a vote in the parliament and you said we we couldn't happen yes we would have been very happy to take the representation if being paid less is a sign that you are not in the control of Mammon I will just point out that I am paid absolutely nothing here and so therefore Mammon has absolutely no power over this talk whatsoever about a decade ago a group of northwestern students arranged a debate between me and a popular professor who began his course with the statement quote science has proven there is no such thing as the soul unquote he also assured students that science had proven the doctrine of determinism though a humanist I started out to be a scientist and precisely because of my profound respect for science I have always been irritated when people claim the authority of science from mere belief in this I quite agreement professor right so I asked this professor at the debate to show me the experiment that had proven there is no such thing as the soul I was puzzled I explained by how any experiment could determine the presence or absence of a non material object I then challenged him to show me the experiment proving determinism since determinism does not mean that some things are determined but rather that everything is how could one possibly apply such a test to the universe as a whole where would one stand to do it what would be the control he replied with the smugness so common to people who apply skepticism only to others that there are many reasons to think determinism correct which is true I replied that he had not claimed however that there were reasons supporting determinism but that science had proven it it hasn't and it couldn't anyone who really cares about science would want to prevent specious claims made in its name be ready to expose pseudoscience or convict scientists who go beyond their evidence as this one did all these errors are forms of what dr. Wright calls scientism he finds them a threat to wisdom and I agree but they are also threatened science itself my colleagues in the humanities have long laughed at creationists and I yield to no one in my admiration of Darwin but then why of humanists and social science scientists for the better part of a century adopted the doctrine called social constructivism they insist according to this doctrine that everything about us comes from culture and nothing from nature to denied us we are told makes one a fascist a sexist and worst of all get ready an essentialist but how could it be that we are the only product of evolution that owes no debt to our evolutionary heritage social constructivism with its many professional professorial adherents is merely I think atheist creationism the fact that it laughs at religious fundamentalists while being no better makes it even more repellent so I hardly really professor Wright's critique of scientism he is right to to point out that people often bundle ideas I think this did you leave the side of things actually talk it was in your draft anyway people often bundle ideas as if they necessarily went together when they do not as he points out this is done on the culture wars by both sides how does it happen that people who are pro-life are also pro-gun by the same token why are people who are pro-choice opposed to poor people having the right to choose not to send their children to a failing public school we always see the absurd linking of beliefs on the other side but rarely on Rome ambrose bierce defines stubborn as the obstinate persistence in a belief that I do not hold professor Wright's argument about what God's we believed and reminded me of a point repeated by that most interesting of all literary detectives GK Chesterton's Father Brown the trouble with atheists Father Brown explains is not that they believe in nothing but that they will believe in anything if you think of what atheists have believed in in the last century not just Scientology and Freudianism which muddle the brain but also Nazism and communism which killed people by the tens of millions we see that the common argument about the harm of religious belief is unpersuasive however impressive with the Czar's ruling in the name of Christianity there are total executions in the century before the Russian Revolution numbered in the hundreds which was about as many as the average for every day between 1917 and the death of Stalin in 1953 the complete total of executions in the entire history of the Spanish Inquisition in Spain Portugal and the new world for over 300 years approximately equal Soviet murders in the name of atheism for an average two months the danger I think lies not in religion but in a fanatical belief in anything whether religious or ideological it lies in the conviction that all the good people are on one side and anyone else is evil which is what American political campaigns are beginning to sound like of course it's all the fault of the other side but while I am largely sympathetic to Professor Wright's arguments I still question some places where his moral sensibility understandably but nevertheless leads him into fuzzy reasoning back by rhetorical ploys he writes quote our Western culture has assumed that the answer to the world's problem is to go and drop bombs on someone unquote now seriously is there anyone any one significant person who party Western or non-western who make such a claim President Clinton bond serves massacring Bosnians but he never claimed it was a general solution to quote the world's problem unquote and as for the world's problem does the world have only one problem present right can speak for the UK but is it really true that American churches have prided themselves on being detached from politics in the world that does not seem to apply to Martin Luther King in the tradition he found it nor to Ralph reads Faith and Freedom Coalition nor to any Unitarian Church or reformed synagogue I have ever heard of in order to the Catholic Bishops offensive right observes quote we have a thousand machines for making war but none for making peace unquote how grand that sounds but peace is the absence of war and the last half century has seen a lot fewer people die in wars than the half century before that there have been no significant Europe wars in Europe since 1945 prosperous countries seem less likely to make war and machines make people prosperous I am not sure what Professor Wright means by machines here the word sounds so terrible but maybe they included ones used for agriculture such a principal cause of war and since a principal cause of war in human history has been competition for scarce food isn't our amazing agriculture until very recently isn't our amazing agricultural productivity a force for peace when I was growing up there was still famines in Asia and Africa taking millions of lives I remember my grandmother used to say eat people in India are starving but now the only place there are famines is where politics is the cause as in North Korea the machines enable sufficient food and contribute to peace as I watched the dispute between the New Atheists and their Christian opponents I see good and bad arguments on both sides if I incline Ward a professor right side today it is because he has the courage to speak in an American secular university unlikely to supply an Amen choir [Applause] in this in this section we'll have an opportunity to talk more I wonder mr. Anthony he'd like to respond well thank you yes which struck me in 2002 strikes me still when I remember it was our then Prime Minister Tony Blair who was a very close buddy of your president and that was part of the reason why I did what he did I think speaking about evil in the world as though it was a thing which we had just discovered you know that the mythology and I listened to his speeches and read them and this seemed to be coming out not just him one or two arbiter dicta but again and again and that that are nice Western utopia had just been interrupted by this odd thing called evil and that we were going to deal with it and we knew how to deal with it and we were going to go and do it and that consisted in making war in Iraq which struck me at the time was bizarre since they weren't the cause of 9/11 etc etc and that Tony Blair she said in a great grandiose messianic speech at a party conference that we were going to go deal with this evil and then we have discovered he said that there is evil in other places in the world as well so when we've dealt with that we will go and deal with it there as well I mean okay I shouldn't perhaps make too much fun of what was really a very silly and / grandiose bit of a bit of politics but that actually the the awful thing is an awful lot of people in our country my country including a lot of the newspapers went along for the ride with that and actually we were supporting him in the war and so on and I thought then and think now that you could actually summarize his view as being we have discovered that there is evil out there so let's go and what was the phrase drain the swamp of the mosquitoes or whatever and the way that you do that is by going and bombing them or whatever and hardly surprisingly that hasn't that hasn't worked so I mean I agree it was an over simple thing the business of weather weather machines create prosperity and therefore create peace again I suspect as obviously you only had a few minutes to reply and that's perhaps over simple but that there is there is something to be argued there that it might be that sometimes when one country gets prosperous others get jealous and it doesn't always work that prosperity simply means peace going on and on and on well absolutely absolutely the churches and politics I may have said that wrong what I had in mind was the rhetoric of the detachment of church and state and the all your debates about In God We Trust and about banning prayer in public places and public schools and that sort of thing and it is often contrasted when I come to America people say of course you have an established church in the UK and we don't because we for us churches say totally different now I would say that my observation is of America is that the phenomena to which you drew attention actually goes all the way down and that it may be a sort of legal fiction that you separated but but i think i think that legal fiction goes back to Thomas Jefferson and the Enlightenment and precisely the epicureanism which said let's get rid of religion from the public sphere and and I think the trouble is that when you do that it sort of breaks back in and then you get precisely the religious or quasi religious rhetoric which which you have in your elections I should say I America seems to be a much more Christian country and in certain ways than the you and the fact that we have an established church in a sense is neither here nor there there's I think it it is it is much more complex than I made out and you were you were right to call me on that um I suppose it's just one one more one more point I was very interested in what you said about social constructivism and I suspect that if we laid out what we both believe about that we'd be fairly close to the same page I want to allow for a fair amount of social construction and I want to allow allow for a fair amount of a critique of an over essentialism which you find in modernity and you find it in questions of human identity you are a such and such a this a that which is a sort of essentialist thing which i think does need to be there shades of grey in there which are to do with social placing and so on so I I don't think that's a complete either/or but that's that's not really our topic tonight and I was interested to hear what she said about it that's probably enough to start to start off did you have anything else you wanted to add the first time I said well I would just add that your idea about there being a wall of progress but you mentioned that I never got to talk about is indeed another dangerous Western myth namely that you can judge ideas by the calendar is the later the better if I could just you know that was 1920s both Nazis and communists appealed to people who believed in democracy by saying you believe in the tired old system of the past as indeed it appeared to be and instead of arguing why democracy was bad they embarrassed people for believing in old-fashioned ideas that's the danger when you judge things by how by the calendar or whether they're forward-looking or backward looking progressive or not because you stop looking at the merit of the idea and you look at its place by the calendar there is no guarantee that later is better or worse if you won't evaluate an idea look at the idea yeah let me just say amen to that I mean one of them what one one of your politicians I think one varying quite a famous name recently said something about making sure we stay ahead of history or some something what was the phrase something like that which seemed to me to fall into exactly that trap that we know where history is going and we have to be more progressive we have to be ahead of the curve or whatever and well I'm grateful for your examples of communism and Nazism and that just makes the point extremely well well I know you know in in the 20s I mean and early 30s most intellectuals in Europe and America were sympathetic even with fascism or communism it was fairly rare to find one who wasn't and they were on the defensive and part of the reason was that's just the new idea they have a new idea this is democracy Harlen that messy parliamentary democracy you know markets where nobody controls what's going on this is just old-fashioned and we are overcome it by the intelligence of smart people who know what to do you know that was the appeal an immense appeal and was extremely dangerous and the people most likely to fall for arguing by the calendar rather than by the idea of people who supposedly are hearing two ideas that has intellectuals they were the ones most likely to fall for the idea I just wanted to get on the table you made a very provocative claim about wisdom is incarnate in the person of Jesus and I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how Jesus or wisdom incarnate would differ from these ideas of gods like Mars or yeah I mean it's it is it is extremely interesting when you look at the story of the Gospels and line up the figure who emerges there against the cultures of the time and the cultures since that Jesus is nonviolent I'm not saying that to be a Christian you have to be a pacifist I think I made that clear but the Jesus himself in claiming to be establishing the kingdom of God does not do so by force of arms indeed there's a critical moment in John's Gospel chapter 18 where Jesus talked with Pontius Pilate it's one of the great scenes in all early all first century literature actually that confrontation between the kingdom of God in the kingdom of Caesar and Jesus says my kingdom is not from this world people sometimes misquote that the King James Version says my kingdom is not of this world so people imagined a platonic Kingdom as of a spiritual thing but the the Greek is in my kingdom is not act to Kozma truth in other words my kingdom isn't the sort that grows in this world and then he says because if it was that sort my servants would be fighting to stop me from being handed over but in fact it's of a different sort so it's it's a kingdom in which Mars is dethroned we're not going to do it like that anymore and so the ultimate thing is Jesus goes to his death you know which and why would you do that in order to establish a kingdom that's upside down and inside out logic and yet that's the way that's the way it works in terms of in terms of Mammon then obviously Jesus says a great deal about money and the dangers of money and about the plight of the poor and Jesus is actually constantly picking up that old testament thread which is reversing the normal assumption that rich people must somehow be better because if they weren't better how come they got so rich etcetera Jesus completely pulls out the rug from any such thing and though Jesus has a lot less about sex than he does about money it's clear that again he has this belief that all sorts of desires bubble up from within and instead of doing what we often do today which is to say I have these desires therefore that must be Who I am that's the essentialist thing again therefore I just have to do this otherwise I'll be a hypocrite and Jesus says no absolutely not that's the stuff that comes from inside which makes you unclean and he constantly hints that God has a cure for that and that God has a means of transforming the human heart and so at each point and you could go through a bunch of other ancient gods and goddesses as well at each point Jesus is actually offering a way and modeling away which is just radically opposed to the gods that cultures usually go for when you you know I think a lot of people today just have a vague idea of Jesus as someone who floated around doing mean things and then went off and died and it was all bit messy and then there was a happy ending and we're not quite sure how that works yeah I'm caricaturing that but not by too much I think that in fact once you set him in that kind of cultural theological context what he's doing is just massive and breathtaking in its implications to follow up on that last point you met you said in your senior talk something about how gee we can't explain why Jesus's disciples would have taken his claims seriously after his death the resurrection hadn't happened I wonder if you'd like to stay a little bit more about that difficult you say a bit more I mean I wrote a book of about 750 pages in on slack question just scale it down to a micro tweet yeah a tweet I I know our Prime Minister tweets but I haven't gone into there in the first century there were roughly ten or a dozen other messianic movements for which we have historical evidence I say in the first century I'm going back into the first century BC and actually on a bit of the second century AD within a hundred years either side of Jesus but tenner doesn't messianic movements we can track what happened to them historically and again and again they ended with the violent death of the founder we know plenty about first century Judaism to know what sort of options would be available to the followers of such a person when something like that would happen either you give up the river is supposing you get away with your own life lucky you because you probably didn't you either give up the revolution or you find yourself a new Messiah quite possibly from the same family we have evidence of little dynasties running through where somebody gets killed okay well his brother will do he's the new leader whatever it is Jesus had a brother called James who was well known in the early church who was great teacher in the early church who was known as the brother of the Messiah the the brother of the Lord author of the Christ nobody ever said that James was the Messiah they should have done that was the natural granted that culture that was what they should have done no Jesus was the Messiah but he'd been executed he hadn't done what the Messiah was supposed to do the answer again and again and again was no actually it's because he was raised from the dead and when you study the evidence around that what you come back to the whole time is not just people seeing somebody that they took to be Jesus but also evidence of an empty tomb and those interpret one another an empty tomb without visions means somebody's robbed the grave that in the ancient world visions without an empty to mean in some kind of strange apparition they knew about that in the ancient world just as we do know sometimes after somebody you love has died maybe you don't know they've died but then they sometimes appear to people this is well documented today as well as it was in the ancient world so one without the other wouldn't have made the impact the two together they said he's been raised from the dead and they went and lived as if he'd been raised from the dead and found that it worked transformative yes I was interested in when you mentioned that you mean the difficulties of believing in Jesus believing in peace and yet not you're not being a pacifist it's hasn't it always been the problem of Christian theology since if you take Jesus literally turn the other cheek no violence whatsoever as Leo Tolstoy did right you you rapidly get invaded by a foreign power and everybody gets his throat cut right if you don't take it literally you become like - like those people I mean isn't that the central problem for a Christian right there wouldn't be a problem with this if they weren't the contradiction but it's a problem because there's a contradiction right that thank you that puts it very clearly and sharply when I say I'm not a pacifist I do not believe for one split second that the kingdom of God is advanced by the pursuit of war the reason I'm not a pacifist is more or less the same reason that I have a lock on my front door because I have a wife and sometimes I have children grandchildren staying with us and I am responsible for protecting them and it seems to me that some kind of police work is necessary granted the way the world is precisely to protect the vulnerable and the weak now the trouble is that that very quickly gets escalated into we think somebody 20,000 miles away is about to do something nasty to us so let's go and take them out before that happens or words that exaggerating but not by too much actually sometimes they are yeah sometimes they are but I mean I mean the Germans were not were very far from America sorry the Germans in world I know I know and we are mightily glad just to reverse what you said about George the third 20 minutes ago we are mightily glad that you Americans came to our rescue in the mid-1940s and that was fine when when Winston when Winston Churchill heard the news of Pearl Harbor he knew that the war was basically won and it was from then on just a matter of logistics to make sure that they cost sorted out so I mean yet the world has put the world is full of strange things but so there is then a question about defense versus offense and so on and whether offense can be part of defense and then you get into all sorts of ramifications of Just War theory I think all I'm saying is that Jesus inauguration of God's kingdom and the early Christian believed that that had radically happened through his resurrection as well as what happened up to them did not launch a program of we are now going to go and take over the world by VC you get it at the beginning of the book of Acts the disciples say to Jesus Lord are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel and it looks as though they're thinking Israel ought to be top nation you are about to Commission us to meet our plowshares back into sorts and to go and you know give the Gentiles what they have deserved and Jesus says actually you'll be my witnesses from Judea to Jerusalem Jerusalem to Samaria and to the ends of the earth and we see them in the book of Acts going unarmed into extremely dangerous places announcing that Jesus in is in fact the true Lord of the world of the Caesar isn't by implication and sometimes they get killed and sometimes strange things happen and so on that's what it looks like when the kingdom of God happens when you then have the question of a Christian society then you get into the question of the now and the not yet and that's that's the critical thing and it's part of the not yet that says we still have to have locks on our front doors we still have to have a police force we still have to be prepared to do the necessary minimum of restraint to prevent the weak and the vulnerable from being take you know anarchy is always worse than tyranny it seems to me I don't like tyranny I don't want tyranny but anarchy is even worse because in anarchy anarchy is inherently unstable and the bullies and the bad guys quickly become the new tyrants and then even worse off than they were before yes dr. Johnson said that any government did better than no government yeah and I would have thought that if we were in the 19th century but after the century of Hitler Stalin and Mao I've begun to think that a dr. John well may have been wrong I I wonder about that and not just because I am a bit of a Johnson fan when when we went into Iraq ten years ago and basically effectively removed Saddam Hussein then the word I was getting back from people in the military and so on were actually a lot of people in Iraq didn't like him at all but the chaos that results from removing a figurehead you unleash a Pandora's box of all kinds of stuff and in that that's that's what I mean by when Anarchy becomes chaos because then everyone grabs what they want for themselves and then it's always the poor and the weak who suffer jump in here this is an excellent discussion but I have one question I want to make sure that I get to ask you professor Morrison you wrote I'm a 163 Tolstoy in conclusion I was particularly struck by this one where you wrote that each person is a natural egoist who sees the world as if it were a novel in which he or she were the hero in but morality begins when a person can see the world as if he or she is a minor character in someone else's novel I'm interested who would you cast as the hero or the hero of the novel for the minor characters do you mean a particular novel no because I was Orange yes I've been in particular novel well I you know I was this is a book about Anna Karenina you're quoting and I Casas the hero of that novel dolly who is the ordinary mother and housewife who no one pays any attention to she's not a romantic figure at all but if not for efforts like hers which are unrecognized and unrewarded the world would not be able to continue it's also the thought that George Eliot puts at the end of Middlemarch where she said it is the acts of ordinary people that no one notices which are incalculably diffusive and that that's the fault but can I can I can I sharpen up the question because it was going slightly further than that least I heard it going slightly further than that and I like that image I confess I haven't read your book but the the idea that instead of thinking of our lives as a novel in which we are the hero or heroine supposing I'm a minor character of the story in which my life plays a part who is then the hero but you imagine this was an appeal for empathy that is instead of thinking of everybody else in the relation to you you think of what you are in relation to somebody else you take their point you looking at you you know it's a sort of it but I meant by where natural legalist is something like I've never heard somebody say something like yes you only see things from my point of view why don't you see it from your own culture but we need to do that yeah you know that's sort of what I meant by the coal therefore for empathy seeing it from the other point of view make yourself the minor character in somebody else's novel yeah and if you start practicing that you will see the diversity of points of view and instead of looking at somebody you disagree with as well obviously evil or stupid you will see that they look at you that way and they maybe have as much reason it's good practice it's good advice in a marriage well this has been an excellent opportunity to look at different points of view our final question for this segment it's going to come from Michael who is a member of the secular student alliance Michael if you could step forward to the microphone and me make your question get your questions thank you both for for being here tonight so I recall you mentioning professor professor Wright that you mentioned the kind of taking the figure of Jesus this wisdom and Carnot figure placing it at the center of all the various disciplines we have history sociology psychology chemistry physics biology mathematics etcetera we put him at the center then suddenly pull with mind everything starts to make sense and no longer do we worship this Mammon God figure so no longer are we all greedy no longer do we worship Aphrodite so no longer are we all sexual heinous no longer do we worship Mars no longer are we all warriors fighting for you know just say fighting however I suppose this couldn't you I suppose you could argue that this is all about an ongoing process however I don't really see that happening I suppose this could come down to the notion of Christianity has never been tried and found wanting it's just never been tried but we have perpetual and felicitous being it standing in the Colosseum coming out of their breasts for having just given birth and opting instead of recanting their beliefs to take care of their children opting to die for their faith at the end they themselves perceiving their deaths to be important but their deaths in relation to those around them in relation to what we would think of as morality being or as a pointless we then have Constantine at the Battle of the Milvian bridge having his soldiers paint crosses on their shields when they go to kill their opposition we have Charlemagne fighting in the name of Christianity we have Olaf crow bone holding the families of of Icelanders captive and threatening to kill them if the Icelanders do not convert to Christianity we have John soft sword eating himself to death even though he is Christian we have Oliver Cromwell burning men women and children alive and Drogheda we have Charles the second leading a merry group of court wits in in central hedonism and defecating off of balconies on to other people even though they are Christian we have large armies of regulars marching all across the world in the name of spreading Christianity I suppose the question is the the complaints you bring up of these gods that we worship in the absence of the Jesus figure the ideas of money power and sex these all seem to be cropping up quite a great deal in worldviews that do at least claim to have Jesus at their centre would you then suggest that where these are cropping up Jesus is only a nominal figurehead but not it not actually being pursued or something has to be tweaked in the in the approach thank you let me first say what a pleasure it is as myself a newborn scoffs to see somebody having the courage to stand up here in a kilt that self deserves a round of applause and I admire your litany of Christian folly which is much deeper and richer than many that I have heard but the the litany of Christian folly is all true and goes with in my view the fact that the prayer Jesus taught us to pray includes the phrase forgive us our trespasses that doesn't excuse the fact that I'm going to perform some trespass tomorrow it acknowledges ab initio the fact that Jesus followers will not get it all right all the time I think one of the things that we've learnt rather painfully in our generation is that along with the list of Christian follies and wickedness and and sheer madness and you managed not to mention burning of witches or crusade so let me just put them on the table in case anyone here forget them but they normally go with that list as well then along with that right from the beginning you have the extraordinary facts about Christian medical work the Christian educational work right from the second century onwards you have Christians who when there's a plague in the town and all the doctors run away to the hills to hide the Christians stay and nurse people including people who aren't their kith and kin and sometimes the Christians catch the plague and die and sometimes they don't and when people come back after the plague and say what were you guys about nobody's ever done this stuff before they say well it's actually because of Jesus this is the kind of this is the sort of people we are my experience as a bishop was that real Christianity was not actually what happened when I or others like me were making speeches in the House of Lords was not what happened when one was taking part in great processions and big public events and but actually it's what happens when a group of quite poor local Christians see that the local town is going to wreck and ruin and even the banks of shut and they take over the banks and they establish a credit union and a literacy training center and a place for homeless people to come and Day Center etc and people say what are you doing this for and they say well this is actually the sort of stuff we do that this is what it means to be a follower of Jesus in other words people very ordinary people without any song and dance back to your what was the lady called them in the book Oh dolly dolly the ordinary people who are doing the extraordinary things and there's a recent book by John Ortberg called who is this man write that down or look it up on Google or Amazon or whatever goes right through Christian history detailing the remarkable transformations that have in fact happened to this world and because we are children of the Enlightenment and because the litany to which you gave one of the most eloquent expressions I've ever heard is part of our post enlightenment culture we have forgotten that there is a huge amount to be said on the other side not that Christianity stands or Falls by a sort of list of well we've got seventy percent right and only 30 percent wrong no but because Jesus the Living Jesus has made and continues to make an enormous difference but again precisely because it's Jesus it doesn't happen with a big razzmatazz and everyone look at me and isn't this wonderful it happens with the ordinary people on the street getting on with the real business of the kingdom of God and that isn't to say that Christians haven't got to beat their breasts and say we've made terrible mistakes that happens I've made terrible mistakes we all make terrible mistakes some of those mistakes are shameful and shocking and Christians have actually bent over backwards to repent of them and to say we really got it horribly wrong you mentioned 17th century things I I know places in England that are stills literally scarred you can see buildings that are scarred by what happened in the Civil War and so on but the message and power of Jesus is actually so much stronger precisely because it's local or scale but spreading and I forget your word but it diffuses and one one small thing that one person does gives somebody else the courage to have you know to get on do it as well so that isn't an answer in terms of let's trade goods and Bad's down through history it's just a way of saying I think we do need to remember the actual impact I'm an ancient historian by training originally and I know a certain amount about what the ancient Roman world was like and to see the transformation that happens I mean one of the ways that Christianity spread was that the Christians did not expose female babies you know in the Roman world you had one daughter that's quite enough would have sons from now on thank you and if any more daughters are born we'll just leave them out for the Wolves and that was the regular pattern in reagent Roman society the Jews didn't do that and the Christians didn't do it so there were far more Christian women around the non Christian women so a lot of pagan men married Christian women and the children were brought up as Christians as one of the ways in which pre Constantine the the faith spread I've said enough sorry but it was a very very good question I'm grateful for it I'd like to close out this segment by giving you both a chance to challenge the people here are in the crowd first and worse and we'll start with you well I'm not sure the makeup of this audience but what I would like to encourage is think whichever part of this debate you are on imagine the most intelligent and best intention the one with the best will on the other side and try to talk to that person when you think about this question and that's generally a good way to think about any question which is important and this one I think in particular yeah thank you yes I would like to challenge people actually to sit down with either Matthew or mark or Luke or John they're all very different and just read read it straight through John will take you maybe an hour half mark will take you maybe 45 minutes so it's not asking a lot but most people I think have never actually clearly many Christians have never actually read through a gospel at a city read it as if it was a short story that you just bought by one of your favorite authors just sit down and read it through and say to yourself who is this what is this story about and which minor character might I be playing in this drama [Applause] [Music] [Applause] we're going to take a five-minute break there are questions in your program that you can look at if you want to think about and then at the end of that those five minutes will come back you can line up at the microphones and you'll be able to ask your questions to our speakers so go ahead and start with this young man here hello I'd like to respond to some of Professor Wright's points particularly the ones about these gods of war money and sex that we worship or at least appreciate or set as goals and I'd like to say that rather than the way you look at it where you say like we have religion and then these are all sort of like religions and themselves I'd prefer to group them all under a broader category that I called dogmatism which is unjustified belief or belief without sufficient reason or evidence and that you seem to say that secularism is in itself claiming to be a response to all of these problems whereas what I would say is that secularism is claiming to be a response to particularly religion but the more broad response to all of these forms of dogmatism I think is approaching problems with skepticism and rationality and be open to new forms of evidence and show empathy towards the other side and there are all these kinds of ways that we can approach claims like you know oh we need to go to war because you know the evil people are over there you know something like that is something that can be discussed rationally and I think that trying to avoid these problems by just claiming like these are all bad forms of dogmatism but we have religion over here and this is a little bit better so let's just plug this in rather than approach the broader problem again that is dogmatism so I just like to offer that as an alternative method and secondly on your comment that science seems to be separate or incapable of appreciating like the you you worded it as love in just kind of appreciation of existence and the way things work I'd say that rather science is a way of approaching that and get it you know seeing lovin things from a new angle in terms of you know getting into learning how they work and my question is not really specific just how would you respond to those thank you too much to respond to briefly but on your last bit yes science at its best which happily has often been the case involves or even constitutes a real appreciation of the wonders of the world in which we live and there are many many scientists I've been privileged to know some of them who never lose that sense of wonder and integration that's why I tried to distinguish between and I know this is very broad brush between science and what I call scientism which is itself a dogmatic belief linked to that epicurean philosophy which says that the only things that really we can know about other things that we can actually measure in some physical way and this this reached its climax earlier with the logical positivists of the 1950s and 60s on your first point I didn't recognize my own argument in your summary of it so there's there's a bit of slippage going on there I didn't think I was saying well dogmatism is so bad but actually a religion is slightly better and I wouldn't use the word religion anyway it's too slippery a word both in its 18th century form and in its first century form actually the first christians would not have been seen as particularly a religion they didn't have temples they didn't offer sacrifice they didn't go to the Oracles they didn't have a priestly caste etc most of the stuff that religions did in the ancient world the early Christians didn't do so they seemed to be in different categories they weren't quite like a philosophical school either and but that that's not really an answer to what you're saying it's just a kind of a let's park that way of doing it dogmatism again that's that could mean a number of different things I think many of us here would agree that dogmatism that is coming with a closed mind which only will accept something that fits into a box that's already made that that is very dangerous one of the things that I delight in as a Christian theologian is the vocation to have a thoroughly open mind in all sorts of directions however to quote GK Chesterton again the purpose of an open mind is like the purpose of an open mouth that you should shut it again on something solid in other words you just if you go around with an open mind all sorts of stuff will blow in and out and you'll be very vague and and woefully and it's much better to have the mind open and then to think about what's there and then to reach some convictions and then go on beyond and open the mind again to the next stage but without you see what I'm saying and so it's not from my mind a question of either dogmatism or something else I wouldn't myself use those categories perhaps I can sharpen on the the gentleman's question a little bit one of the things you mentioned was that you know when Christians talk to each other or when like Christians scientists who are Christians or or perhaps scientists or religious believers in general will talk to each other you know that they can talk to each other and that they can model for their relationship and their communication after the at least I thought the communication between between the believer and and and God or between other believers within the community but I at least with respect to you know inter when scientists talk to each other when philosophers talk to each other they often use justification they're justifying the reasons that they have and they're offering the reason is to another and it seems to me at least that the model breaks down with respect to a religious believer in his relationship to whatever God he might believe in because at least to some extent least the way that I read for instance the Bible is is that the God that it reveals doesn't justify himself to his believers at least in all respects or in all questions and so I mean I would be really interested how you would what you would say in response to I mean how does a Christian offer justifications to other people in you know in terms of and how does that work it's a great question of course the notion of in this sense justification which is obviously different from the theological sense of justification which means something quite different entirely but the sense of here of how you can tell when a belief is justified you know when am i justified in saying that this glass has water in well we can do some chemical tests and and say no that's h2o and we can be pretty darn sure about it but the nature of the justification of belief varies according to what sort of the thing it is how do I know that my granddaughter loves me I've actually just so happened by accident I found in the back of this notebook a wonderful picture which says I really love you granddad which she did which she did just a couple of weeks ago bless her happened to get it to herself into this notebook and I found it then assumed it's a very nice spurt but how do I know that somebody else loves me it may not be so obvious and yet I'm a base my life on that or may structure something very important around that different sorts of justification you can't prove it chemically or or or in some other way and yet it's very important how do I know that Sibelius is seventh symphony is one of the most sublime pieces of music ever written well you know okay you might have a difference of opinion but you can rate it up there but without being able to justify it in a scientific way now how do I know in the appropriate sense of know that the God who is spoken of in Scripture is the God in whom I should believe the answer for the Christian is always Jesus and the point about Jesus is that he is specific and definite and actually lived and died and rose again within human history and the New Testament says that again and again we're not quite sure about God but when we look at Jesus then it comes clear it now of course that raises a second ordered a set of problems about the historical evidence for Jesus etc it's why I've spent half my life looking at that stuff because I wanted to get to the bottom of it but that's the route one would go and then one is into history meeting up with all the other questions what why is there beauty in the world it's so puzzling why is there justice in the world it is so elusive what is this spirituality thing all about which slips through our fingers yet we all sort of wanted at cetera what is freedom and and how do we and and when you then as I say put Jesus in the middle the answer is not simplistic answers but you start to find that those things sort of make more sense than they did at least lots and lots and lots people find that and that combined with the historical evidence is pretty powerful seems to me you please please yes if you're thinking behavior justifying what one should do science can't go one inch there right because what science can provide evidence for belief in a particular scientific theory but it can do not once you say and therefore we should do this you're outside the realm of science altogether there's no possible way you can give a scientific answer to what you should do in life and since most of what I imagine you are doing in life is not justifying scientific theories and you have no choice but to find ways of justifying behavior that are non-scientific yeah yeah yeah I win I want to go ahead and go to the next question since we have a long line here go ahead okay so I see this is a very popular topic and I guess we can continue talking on it with my question so I'm professor Wright I have a couple short few questions first so we're on the same page so would you agree that divinity is inescapable that gods will always pop him in society would I agree that divinity is inescapable that gods were always pop up in society whether we acknowledge them or not kinda like how you talked about the God of love or money or what Jesus said there Hindu god as I said nature and theology abhors a vacuum and when you drive gods out one door they tend to come back in the other I merely observe that as a historian and indeed as an ancient historian that it's quite hard to keep divinities out right okay and so come with the implications of that so on does that imply that we will never have to choose what gods are gods we will worship whether that's the Christian God or the Hindu god or the god of money or erotic love etc or but and if the decision to believe in or follow what we do is not able to be corroborated completely by science or prude by tangible evidence what should guide our decision I come back again to history with Jesus of the middle of it now that's a Christian perspective obviously but you have to come to terms as Jesus sooner or later any thinking person has to look at Jesus and say what do I make of this person if you do that in parallel with all the other questions that why is thinking human beings asked about beauty love freedom justice etc then as I've said I think you may find there is a confluence even though that confluence can be uncomfortable and it strikes different people in different ways so this is not a sort of one-size-fits-all here's a neat apologia that'll get your tomatoes I was going to say Zed but I'm in a Mary there's a Z okay so I think I want to say yeah sorry I'm thinking of three things at once so can you just sharpen up your your your last point again and I'll try and give it a one-liner okay well since what we ultimately believe on relies on sort of unprovable assumptions at least assertions that science cannot prove then why do we believe what we do if it we can't prove it I think that's kind of what well um the idea that science can't prove something again as my colleague has said here if we wait for science to prove something we will sit twiddling our thumbs or just walking around the laboratory for a very long time because there are a million things that we need to make decisions about as to how to get on in the world how to do what we have to do in the world and the the entire area of aesthetics of literature of music of art of all the things that actually many of us think makes life rich and wonderful and and beautiful are completely unprovable by science you know scientists technically listening to somebody scraping a violin will hear a piece of catgut scraping on on a piece of horsehair or vice versa they won't say this is beautiful and sublime as a scientist so if we do say it's beautiful and sublime we are saying there's all kinds of very important stuff out there which science per se cannot comment on that's not to denigrate science science is the study of that which can be repeatable and hence that which can form the basis for all sorts of things about how we relate to the material world that's wonderful we need that it's vital medicine travel all sorts of things would be inconceivable without it but good scientists know that that takes them so far I was once in a debate with with an astrophysicist in in Sydney Australia and we've got to he's an agnostic and we got to exactly the point about somebody saying well should we then do that and he said you don't need a scientist to tell you that you need a prophet which is very interesting you need with experience and wisdom well well I think that he would have he would have been happy with that so so so science science is hugely important but it is precisely important up to a point and then there's all that other stuff out there which we all do and relish and enjoy that doesn't need that sort of scientific proof kind of the most basic life experiences like discerning the beauty of something or falling in love or grief all sorts of stuff yeah dr. Wright and dr. Morrison you both modeled humility as as you talked and I'm wondering if you could play this out a little more how does epistemological humility function in combating the supposed dualism between science and religion and can you humility be a primary herrmann herrmann neuticle lens in which we can shape the world some Paul says in first Corinthians we know in part and we prophesy in part but when that which is perfect is come then that which is in part will be done away and that's part of his poem in praise of love and yes it seemed I like what you say I mean it's very interesting that among the Christian virtues are four things which were never virtues in Aristotle in the ancient pagan world humility patience charity and chastity and nobody in the ancient world thought there was any point in those the Christians made them central and something's going on there something quite major is going on there and I like the idea you apply at least humility and I think patience at least to to epistemology that we know this much and we go with that and we recognize that other people have other angles of vision that doesn't mean that we collapse in a sea of relativism that nobody ever knows anything at all far from it it means that we share knowledge that we know as a community corporate knowing is important and it means that our knowledge is always in process of of hopefully growing and maturing but that will only come if we are prepared to listen to other voices and that listening to our voices doesn't mean agreeing with other voices often other voices that I listen to force me to say I really think that's wrong but if I'm going to explain to myself let alone to anyone else why it's wrong I'm gonna have to get up very early in the morning and do a lot of homework and that's exciting and scary but it can be done sometimes I then come round to agree more often I don't but well that's the point of that line of John Stuart Mill he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that as a very weak version their side of the case and if one could be humble enough to realize that no matter how convinced one is of one's opinion its opinion and there are intelligent well-intentioned people on the other side and don't look for the stupid people in the other side any idiot can find idiots on the other side work by the rule there is many fools and knaves on your side of the aisle as on the other side of the allow and you look for the best people on the other side that's what humility and knowledge consists of and then you become smarter and more empathetic at the same time that's what I would say humility in it's a tool of empathy and I don't see how one can go wrong starting with empathy yeah it's good excellent John we've reached the end of our time so let's thank our speakers for more information about the veritas forum including additional recordings and a calendar of upcoming events please visit our website at Veritas org

Channel: The Veritas Forum

Views: 69,719

Rating: 4.7352943 out of 5

Keywords: veritas forum

Id: LQYCE5-DtdY

Length: 105min 32sec (6332 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 21 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/Temujin_123]

WARNING: This is a long one (nearly 2 hours).

But the exchange between Wright and Morson is a great example of people with different world-views genuinely trying to understand one another. Wright's answers in the Q&A session are epic (yet humble).