The Museum of the Bible visit sparked a reflection on the Bible not just as a religious text, but as a foundational "technology of the book" that has shaped Western culture and the very concept of a canon, leading to a deeper exploration of how we perceive, interpret, and derive value from texts and the world.
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about
a month and a half ago
i went to the museum of the bible in washington
washington and
and
that was pretty interesting
a really good museum i if you ever go to washington
washington
i would highly recommend it for what
that's worth
it's very carefully done
very comprehensive
and it struck me while i was going
through the museum that
that although
although
in one sense it was a museum of the bible
bible
in possibly a deeper sense but possibly not
not
they'd set up the museum so you
we walked through the
history of the bible chronologically
you can walk through a variety of
different ways in the museum but that's
one of the pathways through the museum
and so
it was a history of a technology
you know and the technology is the
technology of the book and
in some sense one of the things i really
realized that the museum brought home
for me was that
all books grew out of the
in some profound sense particularly in
the west all books grew out of the bible
and so
that's that's interesting to me it's
interesting to me partly because we seem
to have a lot of trouble in our culture now
now
agreeing on what might constitute a
valid canon of books
i mean
part of what the humanities offered
certainly part of what religious
tradition offered was a canonical book i
mean judaism has a canonical book and
christianity has a canonical book and
islam has a canonical book and all the
major abrahamic religions have agreed
that in some sense
the followers of those religions are
people of the book and that's quite a remarkable
remarkable
it's quite a remarkable
proposition first of all because
it isn't
obvious that you would consider
consider
a book the most fundamental element of
your culture you know it might be more
obvious that you might consider a city a
more fundamental element or a dynasty or
you know something overtly political but
that isn't what
a huge portion of the world has decided
we've seemed to have decided that no
we're founded on a book
and we have some dispute about just
exactly what that book is and what it means
means
but the fact that we've at least agreed
that it's a book
that's something and and i don't know
what it is exactly and that's partly
what i want to investigate tonight
now the bible
in its various forms isn't exactly a
book it's a library of books right it's
a collection of books but it's an
interesting collection of books to say
the least because despite the fact that
it's a library so a collection of books
it also has a narrative theme that runs
through it right it has a beginning and
a middle and an end and it has a plot
strangely enough and i say strangely because
because
how did it get plotted exactly
you know i mean
obviously believers believe that
it's the word of god and fair enough you
know but
that's not a very detailed explanation
right it's it's a it's a
it's a religious interpretation but it's
shallow in some sense it lacks detail it
still doesn't explain
fundamentally compelling sense how the narrative
narrative
got organized across time when you say
well it's the spirit of god working
through the multitude of people who
aggregated the bible and transmitted it and
and
fair enough
it's still not a deep enough level of understanding
understanding
to make me feel that when i for what
that's worth
when i encounter that explanation that
it's been thoroughly explained and
you know that's not a criticism precisely
precisely
anything that's complex is susceptible
to ever increasingly deep explanations
you know in some sense if something's
deep you never get to the bottom of it
and all explanations are insufficient but
but
i think it's a remarkable fact speaking
psychologically and historically that
there's a book at the basis of our culture
culture
and and that's how we define the culture
as based on the book and that it's a
collection of books and that the
collection was aggregated so that it
that a plot emerges from it and
and
christians take that idea
one step further in some sense because
they assume that not only is the old
testament a library of books that has a
plot but that implicit in that book is
the new testament it's somehow their
a priori before the events actually
unfold and that's an extremely bizarre
and interesting idea and it's very
difficult to know what to make of it
so i was thinking these things when i
was going through the museum
and i was thinking about the idea of the
canon and about the idea of
fiction and truth and about the idea of
literary depth all of those things
trying to make sense out of them partly
because as i said
we now seem to have
reached an impasse in our culture
about what can be validly considered
canonical and part of the way this came
about i have to take a detour through
it was discovered
discovered
in a variety of different disciplines
after the second world war really i
would say starting in the in the 60s that
that
the problem of perception was a much
more intractable problem than anybody
had heretofore
suspected and so that emerged partly in
the field of artificial intelligence when
when
the first artificial intelligence
researchers who were interested in
robotics tried to make machines that
could operate in the real world like
animals could or like people could to
build robots
the idea to begin with was that
the difficult part would be programming
the robot to operate in the environment
the easy part would be getting the robot
to perceive the environment because
after all there it is you just have to
look and everything's self-evident
and it turned out that that wasn't the case
case
at all and this was reflective of a
philosophical problem that had been
recognized by david hume some time
earlier which is the problem of the
relationship between what is and what
ought to be and david hume believed that
there was an unbridgeable gap between
the factual world and the ethical world
in some sense that
you never had enough facts at your
disposal to compute your trajectory into
the future with any degree of certainty
and i think that that that's been proven
true beyond a shadow of a doubt as a
consequence of recent investigations
which have demonstrated not least that
well one of the problems is that and
this is associated with the problem of
perception is that there's an infinite
number of facts
and so
how do you guide how do you guide your
actions in light of the facts when
there are
endless facts about absolutely
everything absolutely everywhere all the time
time
which facts do you attend to
to guide yourself forward which facts do
you prioritize
and which do you ignore because
obviously you have to ignore most of
them because there's a near infinite
number of facts and you're not going to
pay attention to all of them because you
can't and so how do you decide what not
to pay attention to and the answer is
you don't know
and that's the general answer is which
we don't know and it's exactly the same
as the problem of perception because
when you look out the world
look out at the world or
or
hear the world for that matter or taste
the world any of those things any any sensory
sensory
interaction with the world is there's
way more things to look at than you can
possibly look at and yet you do look at
things and you see
and then the question arises how do we
do that and the answer is we don't know
and it's such an intractable problem
that we haven't been able to build
machines that can do it that's why we
don't have general purpose robots and
you know i think the closest thing we've
got to them probably so far
are elon musk's self-driving cars but
you still don't really see those everywhere
everywhere
right they cracked that problem
80 percent maybe something like that but
that last 20 is not going to be so easy
and it's partly because for example you
know imagine that there's a navigation
problem that having a car
propagate itself down the highway is a
navigation problem
and and you might think that's a
technical problem you need to know where
the road is
the the edges of the road and so forth
which isn't so easy because roads don't
actually have defined edges but that's
one of many problems and so we've had to
put up a whole satellite system to map
the roads in detail and to feed that
information into the cars and the cars
can compare where they are on the road
to the satellite image and they have to
have very detailed perceptual knowledge
of the world to operate but then
there's additional problems that have to
do with navigation that aren't so
obvious for example let's say you're
driving down the road and there's a
mother and a child
in a pram on one side of the road and
there's like three old women on the
other side of the road and you have to
run over one set of them
and that actually turns out to be in
some real sense a navigation problem
obviously but just as obviously it's an
ethical problem
and how do you solve that
and the answer again is well you don't
know if you were in that situation i
don't know what you would decide or how
you decided but i do know that you don't
know how you would decide it and
and
actually our navigation problems are
always ethical problems that's a at
least that's the proposition that i want
to offer you tonight is that our
navigation problems are always ethical problems
problems
and that the problem of perception
and the problem of ethical endeavor are
the same problem
and this is i think if i've
made any radical claims in my life and i
the most radical claim is that
and it's becoming increasingly radical i
think in some sense is that we
we can't see the world except through an
ethical framework
it's actually technically not possible
and this is a new this is a new
realization we had hume's observation
that you can't easily get from what is
to what ought to be and that's a
that's an early statement of the same
problem why can't you well too many
facts which facts you're going to use to
guide you you select facts how do you
select facts and if you're selecting
facts why are they facts because you've
selected them right you might think if
they're facts you have to sort of
randomly select them because otherwise
you're biased in your selection of facts
and if you're biased in selection of
your facts then it's not facts it's more
like misinformation or disinformation or
whatever the hell it is that people are
accused of following now you know
because your bias is is
disturbing your interaction with the facts
facts
well it has to
there's no way around that and and
is that does that mean that it's is it
bias per se that's determining which
facts that you interact with so is all
your action merely a consequence of your
bias and i would say that's one of the
claims that the post-modern radicals
make all the time is that your
perception is nothing but your biases
which is a pretty bloody dismal way of
looking at the world it's like there's
your bias and my bias and there's no
truth and there's no ethic there's just
your bias and my bias and which one
should win it's like well
i guess we'll find out won't we because
there's no well there's no there's no
appreciation in that realm of
philosophical inquiry for the notion that
that
there is an ethic
like a fundamental ethic
that has some basis in let's say some
basis in reality a transcendent ethic
that's real
and certainly no appreciation that
that ethic is something that people
could mutually explore as a consequence
of their good will and their honest
discourse those are propositions right
they're deeply embedded in western
culture and i think they're they're
fundamental to the people of the book
they're particularly well developed well
both in judaism and christianity i don't
know the development as well in the
islamic world but you know we do believe that
that
as believers that people are of divine
worth and that they can exchange
information honestly and the information
is actually about the world and that
there is such a thing as an ethic and
that ethic is related to the in integral
worth of each individual and that worth
manifests itself let's say in our
capacity for honest speech in that
capacity for honest speech is in some
real sense redemptive and we do believe
that and that's that's part of our the
religious presuppositions in which our
whole culture is embedded um
um
i say religious in part because i think
they're first principles and maybe you
could define what's truly religious as
what is the first principle you know if
you're thinking about it psychologically
there are quite there are what would you
say there are um
um
phenomena i suppose
that we regard as
part of the realm of depth what's deep
what's deep in literature and what's
deep in philosophy i would say
technically that the realm of the
religious is the realm of what's deepest
and what's deepest is
first principles and maybe you come to
those first principles maybe in some
sense you have to abide by them as a
consequence of faith
you know you choose to live a certain
way you choose to live for example as if
other people have worth and you do too
and that worth is absolute in some sense and
and
you know if you if you're an admirer of
the natural rights tradition well you
would claim that we derive our notion of
natural rights from a deeper
understanding that each of us
is of
fundamental and intrinsic worth which i
think is pretty much akin to making the
biblical claim that men and women are
created in the image of god if if god is
the example emblematic of what
constitutes the highest worth and we're
made in that image that means that we're
we partake in what's of absolute worth
and then you decide in some sense to
base your whole society on that
presupposition and it looks to me like
societies that do
accept that presupposition and
move forward from that first principle produce
produce
the sorts of societies that people would
rather live in if they had their choice and
and
societies that don't accept those first principles
principles don't
don't
and i don't know if that's proof because
because
when you ask a question like that you
have to ask
the question of what are you willing to
accept as proof and well that's a very
very complicated problem but
it does seem to me that
societies that presuppose
presuppose
intrinsic worth at the individual level
which is a very weird proposition given
the radical differences in ability
between people it's much easier in some
sense to see that highly successful
people are much more worthwhile than
people who are poverty stricken and
struggling or that people who are highly
intelligent or worthwhile in a much more
fundamental way than people who aren't i
mean you could say that with regard to
every individual difference and every
talent it's a much more natural way of
thinking the notion that we're all of
intrinsic worth despite our variability
it's like that's a hell of an idea it's
absolutely amazing to me that that idea
ever obtained any purchase anywhere
under any conditions you know we we sort
of think about it in some sense as
self-evident now although it's subject
to intense questioning at the moment but
that blinds us i think to just exactly
how miraculous that
idea really is and how unlikely it is and
and
and uh and yet it seems to be a
fundamental necessity for the
organization of the kind of social
institutions that we would
choose to
inhabit if we had our choice
and so you know that's
that's interesting
back to the problem of perception and
the biblical corpus well
the the ai types
discovered much to their chagrin that
perceiving the world was
rubber hits the road in some sense
as a consequence of those dilemmas that
i just described with regards to
self-driving automobiles it's like well
if it's one group of vulnerable people
on one side of the road and another
group of vulnerable people on the other
side of the road and you have to run
over one set what do you do
and the answer is well we don't know and
we do compute that and how do we compute
that we're going to have to figure that
out if we're going to build machines
that are going to do that they're going
to have to be able to think ethically
and that'll mean we'll have to
understand what it means to think
ethically and we don't understand that
because it's really really complicated
and and so
the problem of perception arose to be
devil robotics and it's certainly not a
problem that we have solved which is why
we don't have general purpose robots some
some
researchers believe that that problem
won't be solved in the absence of
embodiment that a robot
robotic intelligence has to be embodied
before it can act in the world in any
real sense because
perception is dependent on embodiment
and i think that's very interesting
especially in relationship to the
particularly to the catholic emphasis on
the on the resurrection of the body and
the valuing of the body body as opposed
to the mere spirit you know that the
body is actually a necessary
precondition even for perception in some
way that we didn't understand
before the last 50 or 60 years so
so
anyways um
when this problem arose in the ai world
uh it simultaneously arose in
of all places
well in in psychology in relationship to
the problem of perception which
psychologists are still beetling away
trying to solve
with some success
but more particularly it arose in the
humanities departments especially in
in departments that were associated
concentrating on literary criticism
because the literary critics especially
the french the post-modernist types came
to a similar realization at some point
um i'm condensing a lot of work here but
their basic proposition was um well how
do you know when you've landed on the
proper interpretation of a text
and the answer is well
we don't know well
well
so you take a text like hamlet
um and you get a hundred students to
write an essay about you know a
particular stanza a set of stanzas uh
soliloquy and
a hundred of them have a hundred
different opinions
so like which opinion is right
and if none of them are right well
does the text mean anything if there can
be a hundred different interpretations
of only one tiny section of the text
and you can't decide which
interpretation is the right
interpretation how do you know there's
any interpretation at all
and so how how do you know the text is
meaningful in any real sense if you
can't even agree on what the meaning is
and you can certainly see how that
problem be devil something like biblical
criticism because biblical stories are
susceptible to a very large number of
interpretations that's for sure
and so
if you can't agree on the interpretation
well how do you even know that there's
anything of any meaning there at all
it's like hey
we seem to have been able to manage it
we seem to have come to some consensus
about what constitutes let's say quality
high quality literature rather than low
quality literature we seem to remember
the high quality literature perhaps and
to transmit it and we don't remember the
low quality literature at least that's
what the humanities types would suggest
and something like that
winnowing historical winnowing seemed to
be at work as we aggregated the stories
that became the biblical corpus as well
right these were picked out from a wider
variety of other ancient stories and
made canonical for
all for reasons that we don't understand
all sorts of decisions were made about
which books to include in which books
not to include in what order to include
them in and
that's a mysterious process we seem to
have done it
and we've had wars about it too because
it's a complicated problem so
so
so the postmodernists then thought hey
well here's a problem if we can't agree on
on
what text
what a given text means just one text or
even a paragraph from a text
how can we agree on what the canonical
texts are
because if it's problematic to interpret one
one
fraction of a story it's way more
problematic to put a whole sequence of
stories together maybe that would be the
classic books of the western tradition
let's say and say those books and not
others it's like well who says and why
those books exactly
and uh
what's your motive for putting those
books together and that's where things
got even more peculiar because i think
it was perfectly reasonable of the
post-modernist in some sense to say
well how do we decide what the meaning
of a text is we don't know how do we
decide which book should be canonical we
don't know but then to take the next
step which was well
well
your motives for aggregating these texts
are suspect
and it looks to us
this is where the marxist
twist came in extraordinarily and
appropriately in my estimation is that
is nothing but your will to power that
aggregated those texts
right the reason there's a western canon
is because the idea that there is a
western canon supports the domination of
the west and it was that drive to
domination that was the spirit that
aggregated the texts to begin with and
that justifies their choice as canonical and
and
that's your support for that canon
is either your conscious participation
in that let's call it structure of
oppression or the manifestation of the
same will to oppression operating within you
you
and that's sort of
where we're at
now in our culture
because that's the accusation and i'm
not very fond of that idea partly
because although i do agree that we
don't know how we make sense out of
things we don't know but that doesn't
that lack of knowledge that ignorance is
where it should have stopped in some
sense there should have been an
investigation there it's okay we don't
understand this we shouldn't have leapt
to a like a quasi-marxist determination
that said oh well it's all will to power
it's all the desire to dominate right
and because that's well first of all
really you're so sure of that are you
what what makes you so sure of that that it's
it's
will to power that's the organizing
principle let's say for society as such
you really believe that does that work
in your personal relationships is that
how you conduct yourself with your wife
or your husband it's domination all the
way and same with your friends it's
domination and when you go out you know
you have a business and of course if
you're radically left you assume
businesses are oppressive structures to
begin with because you're jealous and
stupid and
well and because and also because
sometimes they are you know because
structures do warp and bend and they can
tilt towards oppression and tyranny and
human structures are susceptible to that
but that's a deviation as far as i'm
concerned from the
certainly i would say from the norm but
certainly from what's optimal and is it
your relationship with between husband
and wife is governed by nothing but
power that's sort of the patriarchal
oppression theory of marriage theory
it's like well women have always been
dominated by men that's the historical
reality it's like
really that's your story for the entire
corpus of the cooperation and
competition between men and women since
the beginning of time it's essentially
domination and nothing else that's how
it works is it it's like i don't think
there's a bloody shred of evidence for
that by the way because i've looked at
the principles that
appear to underlie the establishment and
maintenance of stable social
institutions at the micro level so let's
say within the confines of an intimate
relationship and among friends and among
business partners and among
well political entities for that matter
and it looks to me like all the evidence
suggests that it's something a lot more
akin to reciprocal altruism and honest
trade than it is akin to domination by power
power
because it's just not stable you know if
you're around people who do nothing but
exploit you so you're going to
participate in that voluntarily you're
going to do your best in a situation
like that or are you going to fight it
in small ways and large and bring it to
its knees and i think i really do
believe that's that's quite clear those
systems don't work
and it's also the case that psychopaths
for example who probably do operate in
the world primarily on the basis of
power aren't successful and they never
they never get to be more than about
three percent of the population because
it's just not a successful strategy you
can oppress people and exploit them to
some degree and that might be better you
know in a biological sense than just
laying on the floor doing nothing you
know as a reproductive strategy but it's
not successful enough so that it
characterizes the bulk of human beings
it just doesn't work and it doesn't even
characterize animals if you look at the
principles upon which animal
societies for social animals are
structured especially complex animals
mammals it isn't obvious at all that
it's the meanest scariest toughest guy
who climbs to the top and then hangs on
by brute force it isn't even the case
for chimpanzees so
all right so if it's not power
then what is it well i suggested it's
something like reciprocal altruism and
that's a biological term but it's
something like do unto others as you
would have them do unto you as the basis
for social organization you know it's
something from me something from you
something from me something
from you and not in a zero-sum manner
either understanding that if we treat
each other as if we're both of worth and
we act honestly that we can both have
more of what we want and need than we
would if we were operating independently
and isn't that the basis for your
relationships fundamentally you get
married because you assume that you're
better in the marriage than you would be
outside the marriage and i don't mean
things are better for you in some
narrowly selfish sense although perhaps
that's also true i mean better in
general right you're wiser because you
have a partner you're more careful you
you're more attendant to the needs of
others and
you can think of that as you know
finger wagging you should be more
attendant to the needs of others but you
can think about it as proper proper
ethical training too because if you
learn to treat the person you love with
a certain degree of respect and
reciprocity maybe that prepares you to
do that with other people
at least you've got some practice that
way and isn't it better to run a
business under those auspices anybody
who's run a successful business is
inclined to say yes i mean you have to
make tough decisions and sometimes you
have to be
cut and dried and maybe even somewhat
cruel to make the proper decisions but
still you're fundamentally looking at
something that
is akin to voluntary cooperation and voluntary
and the voluntary choice of the people
that you associate with voluntary
association exactly that and the right
to speak your mind
hope hoping that if you do speak your
mind you can keep the pathways in front
of you clear
and so
well so back to the biblical corpus and the
the museum
museum
i mean i was thinking about all these
things that i've sort of laid out in this
this
i was trying to solve the problem of the
canon how do we figure out what's
canonical it's like well is it merely
we pick the books that justify the
dominance of our culture well first of
all you have to presume that we
basically identify as human beings with
groups to to take that tack right because
because
we're trying to support the domination
of our culture i don't think that way i
don't think most people in the west
think that way i think most of us think
at the level of the individual and i
think that's more appropriate and so the
idea that we aggregated a canon to
justify the domination of our like
ethnic group i think no
i don't think so i mean fair enough and
sometimes things go in that direction
but fundamentally
no i don't think that's it
what's canonical how about this how
about the more texts text is influenced
the more canonical it is that's pretty
damn straightforward and it seems
straightforward enough so i don't even
know why it would be questionable a text
is relevant
important vital valued
if it has had a tremendous effect on
other texts and so maybe you write a
book of genius like right now today but
it's not going to be canonical because
it hasn't had the time to
when its influence through the entire
corpus of text that constitutes the
culture and so we could say well maybe a
corpus of text does constitute the
culture how do we make decisions of
value how do we see the world
well i think there's two ways one is
we do it in an embodied manner because
we have emotions and we have motivations
and they're built into us and part of
the reason that we can understand each
other is because we have the same
motivations and emotions and so we can
make reference to them without having to
explain them i don't have to explain
what anger means to you i don't have to
explain what jealousy means i might have to
to
specify the conditions under which they arose
arose
and we could have an interesting
discussion about whether that's relevant
or not but i don't have to tell you what
they are you're like me enough so that
we can assume that and so that's part of
the ground for our fundamental
understanding our
our shared embodiment we're very similar
as embodied creatures and we're even
similar enough to animals that we can
more or less understand complex animals
for the same reason you know you know
when a dog wants to play if you have any
sense and you know anything about dogs
the dog bounces around in a playful way
and you think
dog wants to play and you know and the
reason you know that is because you want
to play too and so you don't have to
talk to the dog to establish that it's
it's there to begin with
and so we have this biological substrate
that enables us to communicate that's
enables us to solve the problem of
perception but then on top of that we
have a historical overlay and i think
and this is the point of this talk fundamentally
fundamentally
this is the idea that i've been
wrestling with most recently is that
imagine that
you had a map of all the books that
there are
in the west because i'll just stick with
the west for now because that makes
things easier um
um
you have a map of all the books that
there are in the west and you could map
out the relationship between every book
and every other book the dependencies
and you'd find for example that
you should read hamlet because a lot of
other books refer to hamlet or you
should read shakespeare because a lot of
other books refer to shakespeare and if
you don't understand shakespeare then
there's a whole bunch of books you can't understand
understand
and then you might say well having to to
understand shakespeare what should you
have read and the answer to that could
easily be well you probably should have
read the bible
and maybe that's maybe that's a claim
that you could make about wanting to
understand any book
because if you mapped out the
relationships between all the books that
there are
you'd find that the most fundamental book
book
is the biblical library and i think that's
that's even
even
merely true historically it's partly why
the museum of the bible was so
interesting to me because
walking through it you see how the books were
were
how the book aggregated itself across time
time
and became fundamental the first book
that was really widely available for
purchasing for printing purchasing and
reading was the bible and all the books
that we know about now on the millions
of books that we have emerged from that
base that trunk
and they're all related to that and it's
certainly possible that without an
understanding of that fundamental book
you can't understand all the other books
and maybe it's possible that
without an understanding of that book
you can't understand other people
so you know to be people of the book
means that we're all inhabited by the
same book or but it's probably more
complicated than that like it's not just
the bible because there's lots of books
it's the biblical corpus which is a
library and it's the relationship
between all the texts in that book to
one another and then it's the whole
structure of the relationship between
all the texts that grew out of that
and you could imagine a map of that
and then you could imagine that
what you do as an educated person
is sample that
and so there's this
structure that constitutes
the sum total of the civilizat of the
texts of our civilization
and then there's you
as an agent that needs to understand
that structure but you can't read all
the texts obviously because how much
time do you have nowhere near enough
time to do that
you have to sample it in a way though
that gives you an understanding of the
let's say of the gist of it something
like that
and so and maybe the best way to do that
in a fundamental sense is to become
familiar with the biblical writings per
se and then to move on
to other
literary forms from that
and so
one of the ideas i've been
wrestling with here and and you guys can
think about what you think about this
you know people of faith
christian faith
believe that the bible is true but
that's never been that satisfying to me
because i don't know what they mean i
don't know what people who make that
claim mean when they say the bible is
true it's like well what do you mean exactly
exactly
is it true like a videotaped recording
of what you did this morning is true
i would say no it doesn't seem to be
because who cares about the videotape
recording of what you did this morning
there's nothing about it that's relevant
or interesting you know except
peripherally well really you know even
when you talk about your day you don't
say everything you did who who wants to
hear that
no one and you know that not even you
you don't want to like watch a videotape
of your morning the next morning
so well and so that's an interesting
thing because the videotape recording
would be true in some sense but it's
irrelevant who cares it doesn't matter
and so maybe if it doesn't matter
there's a form of truth it isn't because
maybe there's a form of truth that's the
truth that matters
that there's an identity between what
matters and the truth and i think these
old stories biblical stories are
condensations of what matters
that's what they really are and i i
think they're they're true not like
history is true if we think that by true
history we mean something like literal
or empirical history it's actually
impossible in any case because
well what happened in world war ii
well you had to be there
to see it where do you have to be everywhere
everywhere
and that's not even possible and so even
when you have a
accurate history of world war ii it's
obviously an unbelievable select
unbelievably selective history and
there's a point of some sort to the
history which which the whole historical
en enterprise in some sense
coalesces around you don't want to read
a history book without a point the point
seems to define the investigation the
story in some sense appears to define
the investigation i mean generally the
histories we have of world war ii the
the
point around which they aggregate is
that what hitler did was wrong
so there's an ethic an a priori ethical
in some real sense that defines the
frame within which the events are
interpreted even so they can be
aggregated because you might think well
the most relevant events
the most relevant events of world war ii
are those that are the closest to
hitler's evil something like that
and you know maybe
you want to dispute that and fair enough
dispute away but my point is that if
you're writing a history there's an
ethic around which the history
aggregates and that begs the question
which is
otherwise it's incoherent it begs the
question is what's the ethic
and that's the question that that
confronts us i would say most starkly in
the modern world and that's really in
some sense what the entire cultural war
that we're all
experiencing right now that's what it's
about it's what is the ethic
you know and and i'm i'm interested in
the judeo-christian answer to that i mean
mean
the the ethic and the post-modernist
types like dereda actually criticized
western thought for this very reason
dereda called
the west foul logo centric fal phallus
and p-h-a-l-l phallus so masculine logo
centric it's like yeah that's right it's
felt logo-centric well he thought that
was a bad thing
and my response to that is yeah compared
to what
exactly like what do you got for an
alternative what's the logos
that that is the source of the bias that
characterizes the west well
it's uh the speech that renews the world
that's part of it seems to be it's the
speech that calls
order out of chaos at the beginning of time
time
it's the word that finds its embodiment
in the figure of christ which is an
extremely interesting idea right is that
the divine word finds embodiment and
that somehow is emblematic of the
relationship between the infinite and
the finite that's a hell of an idea you
know it's an unbelievably profound idea
it's a bottomless idea as far as i can tell
tell and
and
to accuse the west of prioritizing
the logos
doesn't strike me as
a particularly damning
damning criticism
criticism
again because
compared to what exactly and no
no
i've spoken with a lot of people who are
dubious about religious claims and
fair enough because they're difficult to
understand and and can be misused in all
sorts of ways but
the idea that
there's some relationship between our
notion of intrinsic worth and our
capacity to be the bearers of the honest
speech that redeems seems to me a be a
pretty bloody solid proposition
it's certainly what you hope for from
the people that you have around you that
you love and
who you want to be of service to and
vice versa you hope that you hope
that they tell you the truth in some
in the tall in some tolerable manner
that still illuminates you you're bloody
fortunate if you've got that and i think
you do search for that in every
relationship unless you become bitter
and cynical and you know that's its own
set of problems and it's not like
anybody necessarily wants to go there so
i don't think we'll bother with that
exploring that tonight
and so
i've been more and more thinking
of this as a as a definition of what
constitutes religious truth so i think
we have to look at the world
i think the structure we look at
the world through
has to be a structure of ethics
i think it has to be
and this interesting because i would say
i came to that conclusion not
not
as a religious thinker but as a
scientific thinker i couldn't see any
other solution to the problem of
perception other than the imposition of
a structure of value
and so what do i mean by that well i i
made some allusion to it but it's it's
even as simple as this
you have to prioritize your perceptions
so for example when you use your eyes
and i mean technically you're pointing
your eyes at something all the time and
the very central part of your vision is
extremely expensive it takes a lot of neurological
neurological
territory for you to see clearly and so
you can only see a very small part of
the total visual field clearly and you
move it around all the time and where
you move it to is where you want to look
well where do you want to look well you
look where you think it's important to look
look
so i'll say that again you look
where you think it's important
to look
and that means that well in a hierarchy
of importance is no different than a
hierarchy of value they're the same
thing a hierarchy of priority is the
same as a hierarchy of value and a
hierarchy of priority and a hierarchy of
value and an ethic are all the same
thing right because you're going to look
at what you believe to be of cardinal importance
importance
otherwise you look well if you're
talking to someone and you look at their feet
feet
that's not going to be going very well
right first of all
they're not going to be very impressed
with you because they actually want you
to look at their eyes
and that's because we communicate value
with our eyes and we do that directly
our eyes have even evolved to do that
our eyes have whites around the iris so
that you can see where people point them
because it's that important to know what
people think is important we see the
world through a structure of value
and i think that a huge part of that
structure of value is actually derived
from the entire set of texts
entire set of texts and their
interrelationship that have the biblical
corpus at their base and so it seems to
me that you i think you can make a
pretty damn strong case
maybe on scientific grounds
that you can't see the world except
through the lens of the bible
like literally you actually can't see it
now if it's not the bible it might be
some other corpus of texts but it might be
be
it isn't
and if it was well is it going to be a
corpus of texts that we share because if
it isn't then we can't share our
perceptions and our values and if we
can't share those then we fight those
are the options right we either
stabilize our hierarchies of value in
some way that we agree upon mutually or
we fight that's or we're unbelievably
chaotic and confused and that'll just
produce fighting in any case and so
we have this structure of texts built
from the bottom up it's predicated on
the biblical narratives
and the texts exist in relationship to
those underlying narratives and derive a
fair bit of their meaning from the
meaning of the underlying narratives and
and so then the biblical is it possible that
that
biblical truth is the sort of truth that
is the precondition for truth
right because you think well it's
religious people make the claim people
of the bible make the claim the bible is
true well there's all sorts of different
kinds of truth that's that's an
interesting claim but it's not very
elaborated it's it's insufficient um
um
and you know often what happens to
christians when they debate skilled
atheists like richard dawkins is they
treat the bible like it's a scientific
theory and dawkins just mops the floor
with them because it's actually not a
scientific theory compared to scientific
theories and so as soon as you go there
well it's like a scientific theory it's
like no it's not
it's not and so does that mean it's not
true well it means that if the only
thing you think is true is a scientific theory
theory but
but
i don't think that you can practice
science except within an ethical
framework that's not in itself science
and so it's possible that there is a
deeper truth than the scientific truth
which is the ethic that has to be there
a priori before you can even begin to do
science i did talk to richard dawkins
about that a little bit you know because
he's someone who appears to believe that
the truth will set you free which is
what scientists believe because
otherwise why would they pursue the
truth right for malevolent reasons well
hopefully not
they believe the truth is redeeming but
that isn't a scientific assumption
that's a religious assumption and so is
it possible that you can't practice as
an honest scientist without making the
religious assumption that the truth will
set you free
it's certainly possible i mean it's
impossible to undertake the scientific
enterprise in any real sense and
discover anything that's
truly factual let's say without
abiding by the truth in an
extraordinarily rigorous manner you just
don't get anywhere certainly what you do
won't be reproducible
i know
maybe i'll
wrap up
with this
so
i spent a lot of time studying
cybernetic models of perception and so
those were models of perception that
were informed by
artificial intelligence theorizing
stretching all the way back to a man
named norbert weiner who established the
field of cybernetics and he basically
claimed that
you organize your perceptions in
relationship to a goal so
so
for example if i want to walk across the stage
stage
then i'll
specify my endpoint and i'll see that in
high resolution
and then i specify the pathway and that
the observation of that untrammeled
pathway produces positive emotion
because positive emotion is an index of
an untrammeled pathway towards a valued
goal which is also something that's very
interesting to know
because it suggests that
there's no positive emotion without a goal
goal
and also suggests that
the more noble the goal the more
complete and elevated the positive
emotion and that could be true
that could be true you know and
it's it's the case as well that when you
organize your perceptions around a goal
and that provides a container for your
negative emotions so if i want to walk
across the stage because i think that
getting to the other side is preferable
to being here so that's a hierarchy of
value that place is better than this place
place
then when i observe myself undertaking
the actions that will get me to that
place that's comforting and provides
security because it shows that
the structure that i'm using to
organize my perceptions and to reduce
the world to a manageable
to manageability is
is
sufficiently accurate so that i can
implement it
and so we seem to inhabit those
structures all the time whenever we're
looking at the world whenever we're
interacting we specify a goal and so
that's an ethical enterprise and we
organize our emotions within the
specification of that goal
and then we produce hierarchies of goals
so you know you go to you
you
you sit down in front of your computer
so you can write a paper and you write a
paper so that you can finish an essay
and you finish an essay so that you can
get a grade in the class and get a grade
in class so that you can graduate with a
degree and you do that so that you can
get a job and you do that so that you
can be what a good husband a good wife a
good citizen and you do that so you can be
be
a good person
there's a hierarchy of ethic that
permeates the entire enterprise right
from the microcosm up to the macrocosm
and i think that's something like the
whole landscape of religious value with the
the
outermost container so be a good person
let's say that's the
ultimate aim of the religious enterprise
that's something like the imitation of
christ in the most fundamental sense and
all the things that you do within that
or reflection of that or you're confused
and chaotic and if everyone's doing that
at the same time then you have a society
that's integrated and aiming up and
capable of telling the truth
something like that does that seem reasonable
reasonable
so what's the proposition here well
i think when we describe these
the name we give to the description of a
framework of perception is a story
and i think the reason that we
like stories so much is because we need
to establish frameworks of perception in
order to operate in the world and to
allow ourselves to
be integrated peacefully with other people
people
and so we're extraordinarily interested
in anything that has a narrative basis
and the reason we're interested in that
is because we're trying to build within
ourselves and collectively the structure
that enables us to perceive the world
without undue confusion and chaos and in
a manner that provides some value to us
and some sustainability that's the goal overall
overall and
and
that seems to me to be the goal of the
entire religious enterprise and so
is it possible that
well i guess that's
that's the claim i thought i'd
elaborate out a little bit today is that
the bible is true
in a very strange way
it's true in that
truth itself
and so it's like a meta truth
right without it there without it there
couldn't even be the possibility of
truth and so maybe that's the most true
thing the most true thing isn't some
truth per se it's
that which provides the precondition for
all judgments of truth
i can't see any holes in that argument
and i can't see any holes in it from a
scientific perspective either because i
think we do know well enough now as
scientists that
the problem of
deriving ethical direction from the
collection of facts is an intractable
problem there's too many facts there's
an infinite number of facts they do not
provide an unerring guide for action
they can't
there's too many of them they have to be prioritized
prioritized
and as soon as they are prioritized
well then you're in the ethical domain
and then that begs the question what's
the valid ethical domain and the
postmodern answer is well there isn't
one it's all the expression of
domination and power and i think that's
nonsense i don't think that's a tenable
solution i think that
we stumbled onto the proper answer in
some sense in our religious enterprise
which is that we aim at what's highest
or or we don't
we aim at what's highest jointly or
we're divided
we aim at what's highest and that's
gives meaning to all the things we do
that are subordinate parts of that
we aim at what's highest and that's what
collects us and gives us structure all
of that you know singly and jointly and
that's all what we've been trying to communicate
communicate
all these centuries as we've been trying
to communicate the whole religious
corpus generation after generation and
to sort this out and to straighten it
out and to try to understand it and
and
i think that's where we're at now you know
know maybe
maybe
a little bit more conscious of what this
all means and maybe a little bit more
capable of being more
more certain
certain as
as
people of the book that
we just haven't done better than that
and we strive to flesh it out we strive
to understand it but fundamentally
fundamentally
it seems
to be true in that fundamental sense
that i just described which is
not merely true but the precondition for
truth itself
and so
that's what i thought i would talk to
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