 She's done so much that I was able to accept the chairmanship of the conference and then leave town entirely completely out of the state and the conference still went on. I was going to say as though I were here but probably a lot better than if I had been here and I don't know if she's in the auditorium. She's probably off off working somewhere. Elaine Broestrom, are you in here? Stand up and wave. There she is in the back and another person who's contributed a great deal will now introduce our speaker, chaplain Richard Elvie. Thank you. Arthur Peacock is the Dean of Clare College of Cambridge. Cambridge is a little college town in England which easily passes the Dennett test for being a great city. He's been teaching in Cambridge both in the Divinity faculty of the University on the interaction between theology and the sciences and in the Department of Biochemistry where he has been working on some theoretical aspects of physical biochemistry. For over 25 years after studying chemistry at Oxford and doing research in the physical chemistry laboratory, he pursued an academic career in scientific research and teaching. First at the University of Birmingham where he became a senior lecturer in biophysical chemistry and then for 14 years in Oxford as a lecturer in biochemistry and a fellow of St. Peter's College. During this time he worked primarily on the physical chemistry of DNA and proteins and published over 120 papers and two books in this field. He was an editor of a number of scientific journals and chairman of the British Biophysical Society. During this period he also as we say turned his collar around. He had been developing theological interests and interests in the church and so he obtained a Divinity degree from the University of Birmingham and in 1971 was ordained deacon and then priest in the Church of England. In that same year he also published his first theological book Science and the Christian Experiment for which he was awarded the International Lecombe de Neuil Prize in 1973. In 73 he took up his present post as Dean of Clare College where he has been principally concerned with the interactions between theology and science and published what I think is just a very fine book Creation and the World of Science in 1979. At the same time he has continued his work in the theory of in biochemistry and so this past year it's in the States now he has published the physical chemistry of biological organization. Next year in 1985 Dr. Peacock takes up a new post at Oxford as director of the Ian Ramsey Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Ethical Problems raised by modern scientific and medical research and practice. It was my personal joy to have spent a year in Cambridge in some association with Dr. Peacock and so gives me great pleasure to welcome him to Gustavus Adolphus and to the Nobel Conference. His topic is a Christian materialism. Thank you chaplain LV and thank you the president and chairman of this magnificent conference for bringing me this long distance to participate in these stimulating proceedings. I have been puzzled ever since I was invited to come here as to what my role in this distinguished gathering should be and I think I've now if I may use one of my a musical analogy which I always turn to for the sort of situation. I think I know what I am now I'm a coder. A coder and a piece of music often finishes and rounds up a great development of themes. It may if it like and sometimes does refer to the themes that have previously been developed and expounded but it can also with some surprise introduce quite new different themes and even end on a different key from the one in which the music began. So I am the coder to this distinguished conference. I think you wait and see. In reflecting upon the intellectually challenging and impressive presentations of these two days many of you sitting here may have begun to wonder is all this talk about me about that complicated agent of good intentions and practical disasters of logical plans and illogical execution of cool rationality and quixotic feelings that a doctor of many roles and wearer of many hats that is the actual eye that goes about both its solitary and its social business in the world. Don't we most of us react somewhat like Ivan Ilyich to death in the story by Tolstoy who says to himself, remembering the classical syllogism, kios is a man, men are mortal, therefore kios is mortal. But then he goes on to muse according to Tolstoy that kios man in the abstract was mortal was perfectly correct but that he Ivan was not kios not an abstract man but a creature quite separate from all others. It cannot be that I ought to die. After five presentations of a kind we have just heard emphasizing the mechanisms of human intelligence may we not begin to wonder just a little what has happened to the still sad music of humanity that humanity which according to Alexander Pope is the glory, jest and riddle of the world. But the same 18th century poet in the same poem also urged that the proper study of mankind is man and that is precisely what we have been participating in here. Have we in fact been witnessing here the apotheosis of reductionist and mechanistic materialist accounts of the human condition. Although that would be I shall urge a superficial interpretation of what we have heard there can be little doubt that the cognitive sciences are beginning to touch almost literally the very nerve center of our self apprehension as persons in a way that can be both intellectually exhilarating and profoundly disorientating. How is this new wave of discoveries about how the human being functions in his or her distinctively human activities and proclivities going to be assimilated to not only the folk wisdom of ordinary speech but to the accumulated insights of art literature music and religion into the tragic comic dilemmas of the human condition. Such a sense of loss of visible and familiar boundaries with its concomitant vertigo has occurred before when science has advanced so rapidly that the cozy walls of previous snug conceptions of the world and of human beings have begun to crumble under its pressure. For example at the dawn of natural science as we know it another English poet John Dunn at the beginning of the 17th century expressed with unforgettable force his sense of loss of his old world the world of the four elements of earth, air, fire and water and the qualms induced by the new. I quote his sonnet. A new philosophy calls all in doubt the element of fire is quite put out the sun is lost and the earth and no man's wit can well direct him where to look for it and freely men confess that this world spent when in the planets and the firmament they seek so many new they see that this is crumbled out again to his atom is it is all in pieces all coherence gone all just supply and all relaysion all coherence gone or has it. We are bound to ask about the general significance of these fascinating explorations which we have heard about for our understanding of human beings and for our own personal quests for meaning and intelligibility. Does what we have been hearing represent the triumph of mechanistic materialistic understanding of human beings and so of everything else in the world. Certainly all our speakers seem to agree and I concur entirely that there is no thing nothing no thing else present in human brains in human bodies other than atoms and molecules and the nerves ganglions etc. they constitute. No breaking down of the brain into its constituent part seems likely ever to uncover a homunculus an a lan vitale a mind or even an immortal soul is a constituent ontological entity. Of course those who at various times have postulated such entities were as well aware of the facts of death as of the facts of life and had various ways of reconciling the existence of their postulated entities with the dissolution of the human body at death. But let us agree that there is no extra thing no extra entity added to the brain that will per se explain its distinctive activities and human being. That is let us agree in rejecting a two-tiered division of human beings into body and mind or into body and soul two distinct or even interacting entities to which may be attached mutually exclusive predicates. This positions seems superficially to accord with the tenets of materialism however we must not ignore the real distinction between two different approaches. One affirms that human brains in human bodies consist of nothing but atoms hence physics and chemistry and physiology can provide in principle a total and exhaustive account of what brains are or rather are doing. The other affirms that descriptions of the brains activities at other levels are necessary while still recognizing that no things other than atoms and molecules are the constituent parts of the brain of brains. So even materialism in the sense of the recognition of the atomic constituency of all it is including human brains can in this second approach be less preclusive of other possibilities and descriptions than might at first appear. So what about a Christian materialism the provocative the provocativeness of my title even followed when by the inquiring question mark that was inadvertently admitted from some of the literature is not at all frivolous. For did not William Temple the finest philosopher theologian to sit in Augustine's chair as Archbishop of Canterbury since Anselm did not he notoriously affirm I quote that Christianity is the most materialistic of all great religions. The others hope to achieve spiritual reality by ignoring matter calling it illusion or say that it does not exist. And he then went on to elaborate this in terms to which I shall revert later. What then you may well say about the soul. Surely Christian Theism is committed to the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. Not so. Though many Christians have presumed this doctrine in a Cartesian and platonic form and have in fact regarded the human person as some kind of union of a mortal body and an immortal soul. The important philosophical stream of Tomism in Christian thought has in fact been more Aristotelian than platonic with the soul being regarded as a subsisting form of the body the principle of its understanding and in the case of the human soul also as rational. However even this influential position of Aquinas is not basic to Christian belief. With respect to the platonic Cartesian soul as a distinct immortal entity we should note that William Temple went so far as to assert I quote that if I were asked what was the most disastrous moment in the history of Europe I should be strongly tempted to answer that it was that period of leisure when rainy day cart having no claims to meet remained for a whole day shut up alone in a stone. So strong was William Temple's repudiation as a Christian philosopher of the Cartesian dichotomy. So much by way of clearing the air of any presupposition that Christian thought is necessarily committed to a dualistic account of human beings and has a vested interest in one particular solution of the body-mind problem. Although its distinctive emphasis in so far as it has philosophical consequences will be expounded later it is also clear that in company with many non-theistic humanists Christian believers affirming as they do the reality dignity and value of the human person and the appropriateness of personal predicates are opposed to reductionism or nothing buttery as it has been called. In so far as the researches we have been hearing about are exclusively reductionist in their explanations Christians and indeed many others will have to modify their rapture. But do the ideas we have heard necessarily preclude non-reductionist more holistic accounts of human personality and behavior and to examine this question we have to consider the wider question of reduction and the relation between the sciences in general. Of course the expansion of our knowledge of the natural world has more and more shown it to consist of a hierarchy of systems. For example the various levels of organization in the living world. The sequence of complexity atom to molecule to cell to ecosystem represents a series of levels of organization of matter in which each successive member of the series is a whole constituted of parts preceding it in the series. This raises the issue of whether the theories and experimental laws formulated in one field of science can indeed be shown to be special cases of theories and laws formulated in some other branch of science. If such is the case the former branch of science is said to have been reduced to the latter. We academics have all have all from time to time of course been irritated by those of our colleagues who coming from another discipline claim that our discipline X is nothing but an example and application of their discipline Y. X may be sociology and Y individual psychology or X may be psychology and Y neurophysiology or X may be biology and Y physics and chemistry and so the game goes on. It is the process which is being broadly urged upon us when we are told that study X is nothing but study Y hence the colloquial name nothing buttery. In this argument and discussion it's necessary to distinguish carefully the hierarchy of the levels of natural systems from the hierarchy of theories about the systems each usually characteristic of a particular name science or level and on the other hand it's also important to distinguish what one might call methodological reduction from more holistic approaches. Methodological reduction is the largely unconventional procedure in research whereby complex entities are broken down into smaller units and the relationship between these units is studied from the bottom up as it were. In a holistic methodology the whole is examined from the top down. Its total activity and its functioning characteristics as a whole are investigated. Controversy ensues in relation to such discussions as questions as what complex entities actually are. Clearly the laws of the constituent entities are still explicable to those same entities when they function in larger holes. For instance atoms and molecules in biological organisms or in brains but controversy arises when more imperialist reductionist assertions are made of the XY variety I read and many mentioned. It's indeed the ultimate aim of biology for example to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry. We must also distinguish in this argument the processes going on at the various levels being analyzed in a hierarchical system such as a living organism and the theories about the same levels. A reductionism that seems justified to me recognizes that complex processes at one level are the joint operations of processes analyzable and describable at a lower level. Such reduction of processes does not thereby imply reduction of the theories about them. At higher levels of complexity some genuinely new features and activities emerge that require distinctive theories, language and concepts to describe them and these theories and so forth cannot be translated into the terms of theories applicable to the lower levels of analysis. So for example with relation with regard to the relation of biology to physics and chemistry one can be anti-reductionist and yet not vitalist. The biologist finds that at each new level of biological organization new kinds of interlocking relationships emerge and that these relationships themselves these relations require new concepts to order them and render them coherent. To take an example with which I've been involved in my own research the double helical structure of DNA is describable in terms of physics and chemistry. In the nucleus of any particular cell of a given organism within the double helices of its DNA there are particular specific sequences which perform a unique set of coding functions. Since no laws or regularities of physics or chemistry describing the nature and stability of the chemical bonds in DNA as such can actually specify the actual sequence in any particular DNA this analysis supports the kind of anti-reductionism which affirms theory autonomy at the biological level. The concept of transfer of information at the biological level is indeed distinct from and not reducible to the concepts of physics and chemistry. It occurs nowhere in books on purine and pyrimidine chemistry. This is also true of interfaces higher up in the scale of complexity of the hierarchy of natural systems. The non-reducibility of a theory describing a higher level in the natural hierarchies implies that certain phenomena are emergent with respect to lower level theories. As we have heard the complexities of neurophysiology require reference to systems and control theory and to the theory of computers in a way which is not necessary for the lower level study of conduction in a single nerve. It should therefore not surprise us that at the level of description to which the terms conscious and knowledge apply the description of the content of consciousness should not be reducible to neurophysiological terms. However taking our clue from the biology physics chemistry interface we would expect the understanding of consciousness and of the unconscious to be amplified and helped by detailed knowledge of how the brain works. Indeed the two will interact and the knowledge of neurophysiology say we'll provide the context to which psychological theories are relevant but psychological theories may well have an autonomy of their own and a validity of their own in their own sphere an autonomy and validity which has to be separately established. To say this is not to deny that neurophysiological processes occur in the brain but it is to avoid statements such as consciousness is nothing but a physicochemical process in the brain. Here the nothing but implies a non-existent ability to reduce the language of mental events in this instance conscious ones to physicochemical events. The language describing mental events is not reducible to that of cerebral physicochemical events then mental activity and functions consciousness if you like may be regarded as a genuinely emergent feature at that level in the hierarchy of complexity which is the human brain in the human body. Thus consciousness mental activity and function in general may be regarded as activities which emerge when certain complex structures have evolved. They are not activities and functions of some new entity the mind but are new activities and functions of the stuff of the world that emerge when it has evolved a particular kind of organized complexity. As has been amply demonstrated in these two days all the regular repeatable observations link mental activity and processes with the physicochemical activity an organization of the human brain in the human body but we cannot help asking to be colloquial what is for real? There has been a tendency to regard the level of atoms and molecules as alone being real. However there are good grounds for not affirming any special priority to this level of description. Indeed it has been argued by Wimzat for example that there should be a recognition of the need for a variety of independent procedures for examining the existence of character and character of any phenomenon object or result with the aim of looking for what is invariant over the outcome of these procedures. What is invariant at whatever level the procedures are directed Wimzat calls robust which implies that what is yielded by the procedures appropriate to each level of investigation can be said to be real. In other words reality is on this view what the various levels of description and examination of living systems actually refer to. It is not confined to the physicochemical alone. There is in this view no sense in which subatomic particles are to be graded as more real than say a bacterial cell or a human person or even a social fact. Each level has to be regarded as a cut through the totality of reality if you like in the sense that we have to take account of its mode of operation at that level and woe betide us if while analyzing the oncoming car into its component quarks and barions we fail to recognize the reality of the whole. All of which has a cogent and indeed urgent application to the considerations of the last few days. The reality of the capability for intelligent activity is not reduced to zero when we understand how it is that a particular spatial and temporal neural organization can so evolve and function to exhibit such activity. The ability to be intelligent is a real emergent quality at the evolutionary level of human brains in human bodies and so are the abilities to seek the good the true and the beautiful and the willful determination to do the opposite to love and to hate to create and destroy to know God and not to do so to be saint or sinner. Thus we come to view the lower level processes when integrated into the higher level of complexity and functioning of the brain as manifesting the qualities we associate with self-conscious persons. These quality those qualities or characteristic activities are not thereby explained away that is they are still real characteristics of matter organized in the way we call the human brain in the human body in human society. It is still legitimate to employ as accurately and profoundly as we can the language of mental events and a person experience even as we recognize that from dust we are and to dust we shall return. With this biblical illusion as clue I should like now to give some account of Christian perspectives on human existence as well as on nature and God in the light of the worldview of the sciences which will I hope illuminate the provocativeness of the title of my lecture. I hope too that it will provide a wider framework into which can be incorporated the new understandings we have been hearing about so that we can continue to seek meaning and intelligibility in our individual and corporate existence. So now for some Christian perspectives in their relation to the scientific worldview first of all on human being. The early Christian understanding of human nature is of course rooted in its hebraic background though this was often overlaid by later Hellenistic influences. For the Hellenistic distinctions between flesh and spirit between body and soul and indeed those between form and matter and between the one and the many were never made by the Israelites. In particular the concept of a non-material entity the soul imprisoned in a material frame the body is entirely contrary to their way of thinking. The Hebrew idea of personality is an animated body and not an incarnated soul affirmed Wheeler Robinson some 60 years ago in a famous epigram or more recently the Old Testament scholar Eichroth wrote man does not have a body and a soul he is both of them at once. This is not to say that within this view of man as a psychosomatic unity there was no awareness of the distinctive character of the inner life of human beings contrasted with physical processes. For the principle feature of Hebrew anthropology is seeing human nature primarily as a unity with various differentiating organs and functions in any of which the person in his or her totality can express itself and be apprehended. Indeed to the Hebrews personal individuality was constituted not by the boundary of the body but by the individual responsibility of each person to God and so by the uniqueness of the divine call to him and certainly not by his flesh bazaar as such. In this tradition of over a thousand years a common theme that of the human person as a psychosomatic unity clearly emerges through all its variations. Moreover this hebraic background is the key to understanding the New Testament writers. The consensus of careful scholarship indicates a view of human nature in the New Testament very much like that of the old with respect to its understanding of the human being as a psychosomatic unity. The biblical anthropology views human nature more as such a unity and not as the dichotomy or trichotomy which much popular exposition of Christianity would lead one to suppose. The development of ideas in the biblical tradition about death and its aftermath was consistent with this background. The Hebrews did not like the Greeks think of the real core of personality as naturally immortal and therefore existing beyond death in an even more liberated form. The most they could imagine was a shadowy existence which was but a pale reflection of full life. Gradually amongst the people of Israel the sense came that the timeless character of men's relation with God could not be ruptured by death and that came more and more to the fore and given their anthropology a doctrine began to appear in later Judaism of resurrection of the total person which implied some form of expression of the total personality what we in this life call a body. The biblical view is of human nature and the Christian teaching which stem from them are thoroughly realistic in their recognition of the paradoxical character of human being. They recognize the height of human possibilities and destiny with their occasional and intermittent realization conjoined to a degradation and wretchedness which can engender only cynicism and a sense of tragedy. They contrast the eternal longings of humanity and individual mortality. Man is like all other beings regarded by the biblical writers as existing by the will of God who sustains the cosmos in being. He is furthermore regarded especially by the priestly writer in Genesis as created in the image and likeness of God. From both the biblical and scientific viewpoints the human being is thus a psychosomatic unity who is a part of nature and is at the same time conscious and self-conscious. Such affirmations of the reality of conscious and self-conscious activities is not dependent on any particular philosophy of the reality of an entity called mind to one called the body. All I'm concerned to emphasize in the present context is that there are human activities and experiences which demand this special language and that that to which these languages refer is uniquely and characteristically human. I note to and I'm treading on dangerous ground here but I note too that many philosophers who accept that there is identity between mental states and brain states differ as to whether this is a contingent or a necessary identity. They also differ on whether or not mental events fall under any laws so that a single particular mental event could be predicted or explained. I lack the time and professional expertise to follow the trails made by current philosophical inquiry but it does appear that even apparently materialist or physicalist views of the body-mind relation have not been able to capture fully what more mentalist and less physicalist views often aim to ensure namely the ability of the human brain in the human body to be a self-conscious free agent with interconnecting mental events linked in a causal nexus of a kind peculiar to themselves. I myself see no reason why Christian theology should not accept even a body-mind identity position providing it is qualified at least to the extent that the non-reducibility of mental events to the physical and the autonomy of man as a free agent as a self are preserved. This is in fact the case with many of these qualified identitists for the sense of self as an agent remains a given fact of our experience of ourselves in relation to our bodies in the world and so though it may be demands incorporation into our view of our bodies and of the world even if we were to recognize that the mental events which are the experience of being an I an agent are identical under another description with neurophysiologically events in the brain. Such an understanding of both the distinctiveness of the eye and at the same time of its rooting in the physiological and biochemical were well expressed by the Christian philosopher Ian Ramsey who wrote the study of the interactive factors operating in shaping human personality suggests the one unifying concept definitive of personality is not soul nor mind nor body there is no kind of underlying cushion to which all our bodily and mental events are characterized or stuck in as if they were pins the unity of personality on this view is to be found in an integrating activity an activity expressed embodied and scientifically understood in terms of its genetic biochemical and endocrine and psychological manifestations in human beings part of the world has become conscious of itself and consciously and actively responds to its surroundings in human life a new mode of interaction in the world is introduced oddly however this product of evolution unlike any other is strangely ill at ease in its environment human persons alone amongst living creatures individually commit suicide somehow biology has produced a being of infinite restlessness ill at ease with his environment and this certainly raises the question of whether human beings have properly perceived what their true environment is in the natural world new life and new forms of life arise only from death of the old for the death of the individual is essential to the possibility of new forms evolving in the future yet to human beings this is a front and they grieve over their suffering and their own personal demise now to christian perspectives on nature as understood in the sciences the sciences of the 20th century have confirmed that the whole cosmos is in a state of evolution from one form of matter to another and that a significant point in this evolutionary process has occurred on the surface of the earth where the conditions were such that matter was able to become living this process is of a kind that it does not require for its occurrence the postulate of any factors external to the world itself stress on this continuity between the living and the non-living worlds has been thought by some authors to require a materialistic interpretation of life and of evolution and i would not demure at this but for the implications that have accrued to the word materialistic since the 19th century for there is a hidden implication that we know already what we mean by the word matter and it's corollate adjective materialistic whereas the whole sweep of cosmic evolution can be regarded as revealing as the eons unfold that of which matter is capable when it adopts new forms of organization for to put it rhetorically just look at what has become of the simple matter of the hot big bang each level of the development of the cosmos can it appears legitimately be regarded as a manifestation of the potentialities of matter which have been implicit in it from the beginning its simplest forms and have only gradually unfolded our understanding of matter has of course been enormously enhanced as a result of this scientific perspective for matter turns out to be capable of organizing itself into self-reproducing systems that are capable of receiving signals and storing and processing the information from their environment and becoming cognitive in this development matter in the form of living organisms eventually manifests behavior to which we attribute consciousness and self-consciousness when it takes the form of the human brain and the human body with its enormous cognitive powers these manifestations are as real at their own level as any chemical reaction or subatomic interaction of theirs consciousness and self-consciousness cannot lightly be set on one side and by the very nature of the activity itself cannot but appear to us as being one of the most significant features of the cosmos paradoxically the arrival of Homo sapiens as a product of nature must give us pause in thinking we know all about what matter is in itself for it shows the potentialities of matter in a new light there are good scientific grounds for stressing the continuity of the physical with the biological worlds and also for provisionally describing the cosmic process as materialistic provided that term is understood in the light of all this however the qualifications just made of materialistic of the word materialistic may in the end be so drastic that some other less misleading term becomes necessary for matter now appears to be far more subtle in its potentialities far richer and more diverse and ultimately more personal than could be inferred from observations made at any one particular level of the development of the cosmos particularly if that is the simplest and least complex what about the interaction of this view of the world scientific view of the world on christian understanding of god the postulate of god as creator of all that is is not in its most profound form a statement about what happened at a point in time to speak of god as creator is a postulate about a perennial if you like eternal that is to say timeless relation of god to the world a relation which involves both differentiation and interaction god is differentiated from the world in that he is totally other than it indeed this dualism of god and the world is the only one that is foundation or to christian thought god is postulated and answered to the question why is there anything at all he is the ground of being of the world for fierce that without which we could neither make sense of the world having existence at all nor of its having that kind of intellectually coherent and explorable existence which science continuously unveils this affirmation of what is technically known as transcendence has had to be held in tension with a sense of god's imminence in the world for if the world is in any sense what god has created and that through which he acts and expresses his own inner being then there is a sense in which god is never absent from his world science emphasizes now more than ever that creation is continuous and 20th century fierce even more than their predecessors have come to see the ongoing cosmic processes of evolution as god himself being creator in his own universe the basic concept here is that all that is both nature and human beings are in some sense in god but that god is more than nature and the human that there is more to god than nature and the human god in his being transcends goes beyond both human kind and nature but equally either god is in everything from the beginning to the end at all times in all places or he is not there at all what we see in the world is the mode of god's creativity in the world god is in his world as Beethoven say is in a performance of his seventh symphony in the actual music itself in the actual processes of the world and supremely in human self-consciousness god is involving himself and expressing himself as creator however since man has free will we have also to recognize that god as it were puts himself at risk in creatively evoking in the natural world a being who has free will and can trends can transcend his perceived world and shape it in his own way what about the so-called classical relationship the relationship classically known as nature man and god and strangle in evolution there is an interplay between random chance micro events and the necessity which arises from the stuff of this world having its particular given properties these potentialities a theorist must regard as written into creation by the creator himself in order that they may be unveiled by chance imploring their gamut god as creator we might now see as somewhat like a composer who beginning with an arrangement of notes in an apparently simple tune elaborates and expands it into a fugue by a variety of devices in this way the creator may be imagined to unfold the potentialities of the universe that he himself has given it selecting and shaping by his providential and redemptive action those that are to come to fruition an improviser we may suggest of unsurpassed ingenuity the processes of the universe are continuous and in them there are emergent new organizations of matter energy such new levels of organization require non-reducible concepts to articulate their distinctiveness any new meaning which god is able to express in such new levels of organization is not discontinuous with the meanings expressed in that out of which it has emerged both continuity and emergence are inherent features of the observed world so we anticipate continuity with new meanings merging emerging out of the old subsuming them perhaps but not denying them now evolved human beings seek such meaning and intelligibility in the world that is from a theist point of view they seek to discern the meanings expressed by god in creation these are meanings which alone among created organisms we have evolved to be capable both of consciously discerning and also of freely appropriating to give purpose and meaning into our lives although god must be regarded as not more present at one time or place than at others nevertheless we can expect to find that in some sequences of events in nature and history god might unveil his meaning more than in others though in one sense god as creator acts in all events not all events are equally perceived as acts of god some events will be more revealing than others the aspect of god's meaning expressed by any one level in the natural hierarchy of complexity is limited to to what it can itself distinctively convey thus although god must in his own being be super personal and indeed ineffable we may well expect that in the personal in history in personal experience in personal encounter we shall find meanings of god unveiled in a way that is not possible through him through the impersonal levels of existence for the more personal and self-conscious is the entity in which god is imminent the more capable it is of expressing god's supra personal characteristics and the more god can be imminent personally in that entity the transcendence in imminence of man's experience legitimately raises the hope among theists that uniquely in a human being there might be unveiled without distortion the transcendent creator who is imminent that is in a human being or human beings the presence of god the creator might be revealed with a clarity not hitherto perceived it is the distinctive affirmation of christian theists that this has actually happened to jews a stumbling block and to the greeks foolishness to the narrowly religious a demeaning of the almighty eternal one so to enter material existence to the western intellectual a unique lawless serde indeed an absurdity in a lawlike universe the effort to describe with least inaccuracy the nature of that person through whom christians believe god revealed himself constituted in the long run i would suggest a major transition in the way humankind came to think of nature of god and of itself a transition that actually in my view was far more radical than anything we have heard about in the last two days for it profoundly affected our perception of god of human destiny and of nature or to take just the last human understanding of nature was gradually transformed in the christian consciousness because if it was true that god had been able to express his nature in a human being then the world of matter organized in the form we call human must inherently have that capability of so acting as a mode of god's action and an expression of god's being so this in itself constituted a repudiation of all attitudes to the stuff of the world which saw it as evil or as alien to its creator a prison from which no non-material reason or soul must seek release god was to be seen as achieving his ends by involvement with imminence in expression through the very stuff of the world and its events in space and time moreover the assertion that jesus the christ was the ultimate revelation of god's being to men in a mode they could understand and appropriate amounted to an affirmation that nature in its actuality materiality and evolution of which the man jesus was indubitably a part is both potentially an expression of god's being and the instrument of his action paradoxically the christian claim asserts that god fulfills man's personalness and satisfies his most so-called spiritual aspirations by entering the temporal process of materiality as a man made like men of the component units stuff units of the stuff of the world there is indeed a christian materialism in the introduction to this talk i quoted archbishop william tempels dictum concerning christianity as the most materialistic of all great religions now i will continue that quotation in his own words it may safely be said he's i quote it may safely be said that one ground for the hope of christianity that it may make good may make good its claim to be the true faith lies in the fact that it is the most avowedly materialist of all the great religions it affords an expectation that it may be able to control the material precisely precisely because it does not ignore it or deny it but roundly asserts alike the reality of matter and its subordination its own most central saying is the word was made flesh where the last term was no doubt chosen because of its specially materialistic associations by the very nature of its central doctrine christianity is committed to a belief in the ultimate significance of the historical process and in the reality of matter and its place in the divine scheme furthermore there is in the long tradition of christian thought going back to jesus own action words a way of relating the physical and the personal worlds which avoids any stark dichotomy between them seeing them rather as two facets of the one same reality this way of thinking is generally denoted by the word sacramental in the christian liturgy things in the universe bread wine water oil sometimes are taken as being both symbols of god's self-expression and as instruments of god's action in effecting his purposes this mode of thinking can be extended more widely to the universe as a whole which can then be seen as both a symbol of god's self-expression and thus a mode of his revelation of himself or nor so as the very means whereby he affects his purposes in his own actions as agent this provides i would suggest a deeper perspective on the world described by the sciences than the sciences alone can afford a perspective in which the world's continuous and seamless web of self-development of self-organizing by its own inherent properties generates forms of matter that are capable of being persons and perceiving meaning those meanings indeed with which the creator imbued his creation in this talk i've addressed myself to what to many may seem the paradox of linking the christian perspective with materialism i hope the last question mark in my title in at least indicates that the word materialism in it has been taken in a somewhat pic wiki and sense and certainly not that of 19th century materialists far from any reduction of the personal to the material being intended the juxtaposition of the additive christian and the now on materialism seeks to highlight the significance of the stuff of the world its matter as we normally call it but of course now also energy as well this significance lies in the personal potentialities of that world stuff potentialities which have been superbly expounded in the lectures we have heard showing how that stuff can become intelligent and display cognitive abilities but i hope that what i have said will also be heard as a plea for the serious consideration of the christian perspective as a total world view that can incorporate without fear and be open to the fascinating explorations into the nature of the human that the cognitive and other human sciences have to display are involved in furthermore what i have said is also intended as a plea for the humanities it happens surprise surprise also to be my conviction that christianity is committed to a christian humanism in the tradition of erasmus and of the florentine renaissance but that is not my explicit plea now my principal plea is still that as alexander pope said that the proper study of mankind is indeed man that if that is true then the study of human rational intelligence in its choice making assessing consequences of action in its abstract conceptualization all its cognitive functions and so on my plea is that those studies are tending only to the whisper of a hint of a rumor of an echo of that incessant and inner and outer dialogue that constitutes the essence of human self-awareness to know about that we must sit at the feet of the poets the dramatists the novelists the artists the dancers the sculptors the composers and men and women of god briefly our culture needs not only information and information technology it needs above all wisdom science of course has its own style of down-to-earth impartial wisdom removing the layers of accumulated prejudice and here at this 20th Nobel conference we have seen how its powerful methods have begun to shed their own particular kind of light on that great mystery how do we know so to conclude I would urge that the cognitive sciences should in the end not be divorced from the great stream of human experience expressed through the rich resources of language music and symbol that we have received from the past and can continue to receive and create today as socrates as socrates might have said in the republic until humanists are cognitive scientists or the cognitive scientists and computer experts of this world have the spirit and power of the humanities and computing greatness and wisdom meeting one and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside cities will never have rest from their evils no nor the human race as I believe and then only and then only will this our state have a possibility of life and behold the light of day thank you we'll take a five minute break we'll receive questions for dr peacock or for dr denet will reconvene in five minutes for a question and answer period I think we'll reconvene now for questions and answers if people want to come forward and be seated I've asked I've asked dr denet to start off by choosing two or three questions from those submitted to him he will read the question and then respond to it first why don't I address one of the questions having to do with a Turing test itself could a computer pass the Turing test without being self-conscious if so would it be truly intelligent I would say no it couldn't pass the Turing test without being truly self-conscious because you could very easily ask it questions that would require it to reflect on its own previous answers and its reasons for giving the answers it gave and so forth for instance one way of challenging a computer in a in the Turing test would be to ask it do you know anything about quantum mechanics and when it said no say well I'm going to teach you some and let's see how much of it you can really understand now if the system could actually pass the test I would say that it would have to be self-conscious that's why the test is so very difficult another question on the Turing test granted that the Turing test is sufficient to demonstrate that a machine can think would it be a fair test for an intelligence so unlike humans for example it would seem unfair to ask blind people about color or deaf people about sound wouldn't it also be unfair to ask a computer about the realm of human experience absolutely that's what Turing did he made a deliberately difficult test so that nobody could complain that the Turing was being that the computer was being given the benefit of the doubt it's it's a test which would be very unfair if you were asking if you were asking for a fair test you wouldn't choose this this was a conversation stopper that's that was the point of it here are two questions that i'm going to treat together one is does the incompleteness there and that is Gertl's incompleteness theorem have any implications for cognitive science the other question is what would Douglas Hofstadter have to say or add if he were here um well i i'm not a mind reader i'm a sometime collaborator of Douglas Hofstadter's and of course he's written a lot about Gertl's incompleteness theorem and i think that he and i agree completely in how to answer this question Gertl's incompleteness theorem does not have any implications for cognitive science of the sort that i presume the questioner is asking does Gertl's incompleteness theorem show that there are things that people can do that computers can't do and the short answer to that is no the long answer to that is much too long to get into here but is contained in a number of places a chapter in my book brainstorms on the ability of abilities of men and machines and of course in many places in Hofstadter's book Gertl Escherbach it's for most of us a closed issue let's go let's have dr peacock answer a few and then we'll come back to dr denham i've got a bevy of unanswerable questions my first one i'd like to throw over there is god a computer can anybody answer that i don't know why i should be expected to know how to answer that one um there was one question here would you allow that a fabrication of man for example ai could be a new emergent reality that's a bit of a puzzling question because if it was a fabrication of man human being then it wouldn't be a new emergent reality if it was just fabrication of ai would that be a human being so i suppose they mean the question means that if something was fabricated that had intelligence in and fast past the Turing test despite of the skepticism of the possibility of doing that the next 20 years suppose that did happen um would that be a new emergent reality i would thought it would have been a new emergent reality a new fabricated emergent reality um whether we could call it a human being i think would depend on how we class on we wouldn't call it a human being because it hadn't arisen by the ordinary biological processes so that's um i think how i would respond to that but the related question which is a rather amusing one you know church gets people get faced with all sorts of problems but it is i think it's worth reading out as a question though i have no idea what the answer is if a machine met Turing's test and doctor shanks oh doctor shanks requirement of explanation and if in its knowledge it asked to be baptized would it be entitled to that sacrament i think i'll have to refer to higher authority on that one i'm sure we need a world council churches and ecumenical council to settle that one they they were they agonized they settled whether the Gentile should be baptized pretty rapidly but this might take a century or two i think um by which time one might be an arch bishop and it might be settled anyway but but it does raise it i mean behind this question i suppose is is Turing's test as as doctor Dennett has explained it and the requirement of explanation is that a is that a sufficient account of what we mean by being human and um part of the gist of what i had to say was as it was to indicate as we all know that there are many levels in human existence and and the distinctively human situation and the human experience goes beyond just being intelligent and it goes beyond just being able to explain although these are very distinctive and outstanding features of human beings so i think it'd be rather incomplete as a human being even if it was passed the Turing's test and even if it was able to met the requirement of explanation but i think only 400 years notice of that question uh doctor Dennett has a related question to yes um several questions addressed to me i i think related to that they were roughly to the effect uh well if a computer actually passed the Turing test would it be immoral to dismantle it say would would there be such a thing as killing it and would that be wrong and i think the answer is yes i think it's hard to see why without a few imaginative exercises i'd like to suggest just a few first of all i think most people will hit on the idea that if this is to be interesting it's got to be different from the question of would it be immoral to throw the Mona Lisa in a fire and burn it up would it be immoral to dismantle a beautiful new automobile one can see that other things being equal you shouldn't you shouldn't destroy an artifact of some elegance or beauty or utility but one thinks that's because people appreciate or enjoy or own that artifact and and you're not murdering the Mona Lisa you're simply destroying something which other people value so that if it's to be an interesting question it is got to be the question of could such a computer if it passed the Turing test would it have become a sort of locus of value all on its own so that it had rights so that so that we were doing something wrong to it if we destroyed it rather than simply to the people who created it who loved it who who wanted to use it who perhaps owned it now the only way i can think of of getting it this imaginatively to see why the answer might be yes is to think that if if you think imaginatively about just what would have to be involved in the development of such a computer program you would realize that it would have had to have had a considerable history of acquisition of information it would have it would have projects that it was engaged in of some of considerable of considerable complexity and length it would have many of the features that strike us as important when we reflect on what's bad about cutting somebody off in his or her prime interrupting interrupting a life or thwarting a life in some way now one may still not feel the tug to grant such a first of all it's very hard to imagine in detail this system once we've stipulated that it's passed the Turing test if you think about it carefully what would have to what the powers and activities of such a system would have to be i think you could begin to see that one's one's reluctance to terminate that entity so that it could no longer operate so that it could complete its project so that it could go on engaging in whatever activities in the world it was was engaging in the reluctance to do that would begin to look very much like the reluctance that we feel the the the abhorrence we feel with imprisoning somebody with thwarting somebody's project with killing somebody but i see that professor shank wants to interrupt come come here to me you've even got one with your name on it sit out with your remarks is that you're you're forgetting the fact that what computer science is really lies really like that if we have a valuable computer we back it up like crazy so if we had a machine sitting there that was doing some useful task you would have 10 duplicates all reading every day what the one was doing what the what the other guy was doing each time right now the question is would be a moral to kill any one of those so i think no is the answer to that question oh i i i agree with you entirely in fact uh that's a model that i've explored myself and thought that it indeed it wouldn't be death to kill one of those it would be uh um you would have a your system would be like a cat with nine lives and uh you're not you're not really killing the cat till you get to number nine just as a side comment on that it seems to be rather similar situation is regards um ecological awareness and values that um some biologists have argued that to destroy a particular ecosystem where some rare plant or animal is a kind of act of vandalism to destroy something which is a harmonious balance and it's very hard you can't help but agree that there is something in that it is an act of vandalism to do it but it's very hard to pin down exactly why it is an act of vandalism who is being offended by it and um it's a similar similar kind of thing shall i go on with that i've had a question here which boils down to this scientific views of the world are self-correcting religious views seem not to be at fundamental levels how do i conceive the constructive relationship of religion to the scientific enterprise we're taking it that way around of constructive relationships of religious perspectives to the scientific enterprise um the first thing to say of course is to is to encourage that you should encourage it uh that the scientific and enterprise if you are a theist is an exploration into the nature and beauty of creation and that was long been understood and was part of the origin of the scientific enterprise three centuries ago but there are other questions arise and modern science and particularly modern medical science is beginning to touch on some very sensitive areas the ability of medical scientists and biological scientists to fertilize over and then put them in other other uteruses so that you have the idea of surrogate motherhood and that kind of thing does begin to impinge on the whole sense of the dignity of the human person in their totality and i think uh there's new knowledge raises new ethical questions of a kind which nobody knows the answers to don't let's pretend we do because there's nothing in our traditions which is it could forewarn us about this kind of knowledge on the other hand there are resources about understanding of the total function of human beings in their totality which are more about safe to um to the religions and indeed to the humanities then perhaps you would get in a laboratory so i think there's the monitoring of the scientific enterprise when it touches human dignity and life and relationships i think is is essential by monitoring i don't mean a sympathetic discussion with people involved in these researches of the consequences of what they're doing on what they might lead to because it can be done it doesn't mean it should be done and i think we've got the disillusion of ourselves of that the other way around well i've written extensively on this i mean seems to me any religious worldview that takes seriously belief in god will all the time be adjusting itself and taking to account the best knowledge we have of the world around us and uh the sciences are are the contributors to that but part of the knowledge of a world around us is the aesthetic awareness we get from the arts and music and drama as well so that uh there's always a continuous dialogue it seems to me i don't see this as an either or and as religious never seems to change it does the origins do change their outlook i think the the widening perspective on the world is given say by darwinism for example a writer in england in the 1880s coined wrote that darwinism in the guise of a foe did the work of a friend for christian theology in widening its concept in the way in which god had to be conceived and understood as operating in the world and i think that's if you were a theist that's what you would expect from any widening knowledge that is genuinely true should enhance one's understanding of god if he exists i mean that's the presupposition of being a theist it seems to me i have several questions which make the same challenge i'll boil them down to one how would you distinguish between the facades that mark artificial intelligence and those that mark human intelligence the point is well taken human intelligence our own self presentation on the world also has a certain facade like quality and if you probe with ingenuity as for instance some psychologists do people like kahneman and tversky and others you can find that your fellow human beings are rather lamentably prone at to to committing rather grievous lapses of reason and also of course we often pretend to know a great deal more than we do about various topics and shouldn't be trusted so what's the difference i'm saying that ai programs are facades doesn't that isn't it also true that we're facades i think the answer is is finally just one of degree yes to a very small extent we're facades but even to the extent that we're facades we have most of the time the capacity to recoil gracefully from those occasions in which the world impinges outside the boundaries of our usual facade we don't just crash we don't walk into the wall we don't come a complete proper when when we're hit with a bit of information that that we were not accustomed with that we weren't designed to deal with now if one would then they say if some developments in ai permit ai systems to respond gracefully to those occasions when their their the boundaries of their facades are overstepped then won't they look a lot more like us and the answer to that is yes indeed they will but it's a very big if question i've got here which again is all these unanswerable questions is god necessary to intelligence i thought about this is god necessary to scoring goals at football is god necessary to playing the piano well and it's one of these unanswerable questions if i suppose it means is god logically necessary well if you're a theist i suppose you believe god is the source of all being god is necessary to all that goes on in that sense but i don't think god is any more necessary in in a causal sense to intelligence than to any other human activity so i don't think if people think that intelligence is it were a special god given a gift which is sort of a wire from heaven which connects up with our brains and makes us intelligent and that artificial intelligence is a kind of blasphemy then i think i don't think i would accept that i suppose that seems to be what lies behind this question is god necessary to intelligence i think it's not a question i would want to ask but uh i have really one more question that which again came in two forms uh could you comment on whether the future application of computer control to nuclear weapon systems and space based defense systems is an example of overestimating the capabilities of computers i'd very much like to comment on that many of you saw the film war games which was in many regards a very silly film and it had a very implausible artificial intelligence villain at the center of it a computer program which is believe me not conceivably realizable in the near future but for me there was indeed one very chilling moment in that film and it happened right at the beginning during the credits when we see the air force i guess it is testing out some human operators who have to turn the special key on direction from the the artificial intelligence system which is telling them okay you've got to turn the key this isn't the test you've got to launch these vehicles and we see these these officers terribly worried sweating bullets trying to decide whether or not to turn the key and the computer has just told them to turn the key and some of them don't turn the key some of them it's a moral crisis for all of them and some of them just refuse to turn the key and then we learned that it was all just a fire drill anyway but the next scene you see the the the pentagon brass saying well we've got to figure out how to screen out people like that from roles like this they've clearly cracked under the strain they didn't they didn't turn the key when they were supposed to now that's a chilling moment because independently of the actual intelligence of artificial intelligence systems there is the perceived intelligence of artificial intelligence systems now in so far as there's an overestimation so that these systems are perceived to be adequately intelligent so that they should be trusted they establish a very great authority an authority so great that a human being might simply not have the hutzpah the guts the courage the craziness to say well no i just don't i'm not going to take this advice i'm not going to believe it i'm not going to i'm not going to take the advice i just got from this system now if the day comes when we have systems which are perceived to have that authority then as that little moment in the movie suggested we might just as well stop kidding ourselves and remove those those safety valve human operators because they're not really they're not really performing the function they were put there for don't kid ourselves if if they don't if you can't imagine circumstances where they would have the the wherewithal the whether the intelligence or the courage or the combination of both to overrule the directive they got from the computer then you might just as well hook the computer right up to the nuclear warhead and let it fire them because your your your illusion that you've got a safety break in there is just that it's just an illusion now this is this is science fiction we don't have that yet but we're we're closer than we should be and it's very important to recognize that the remaining questions are really rather far off from the main theme of the conference except if i can extract one phrase from one paper here it says can't there be a life force and unfolding and evolving of matter inherent in the world itself and not beyond it or more than the world uh is your view your christian materialism more comprehensive and valid than an atheistic interpretation or do they or do they um equally compete um the concept of a life force and a land vital of course is what i was referring to in as the idea of vitalism which does postulate another x another entity which as it were is added to matter in order for that matter to be regarded as living and it's that view which i reject along with most biological scientists because what we have become to see is that inherently into the nature of matter itself whatever that is is the possibility of it by its own inherent properties forming patterns that are self-reproducing and uh and developing in a hierarchy of complexity due owing to the nature of the forces that exist between different forms of matter and come into existence as the organization matter changes to the cellular and higher levels and so that would be that's why i can i'm anti vitalistic but one can need not necessarily be reductionist in the in the epistemological sense as that's what i was saying so i wouldn't um i myself would would not want to argue for a life force another x to be added to to matter when it's in the form of living organisms and i think most biology has has managed to exorcise such ghosts from its own particular biological machines um is my view is my whether my view is more is more consistent with the that is a matter of you to decide but um i want to make it clear i don't quite see god as it was an extra thing added to the universe in that way whatever god is and however one has to be described um it's he it is one uses metaphorical language going beyond anything we can use in the universe describe him and therefore the um there is only this world in one sense that the god is when i use the analogy of the seventh symphony when you're listening to performance of a Beethoven symphony if you ask yourself where is Beethoven now in in in this music and the answer is the Beethoven who Beethoven who is the creator of the music is there only to be experienced in and through the very music itself as you apprehended and it was something like that that i'm trying to get across about our understanding of god's presence in the world he is present in and through its creative processes because that is on a theistic premise god acting as creator the world is what it is is god's mode of being as creator um but to avoid pantheism namely identifying god with the world there is one has to and all theology has for several centuries had to try to combine this sense of immanence in the world with god's transcendence it is it is a puzzle but it's no more than the puzzle we all of us have in trying to rectify trying to um make a coherent sense of our own transcendence over our own bodies as ego is relative to our bodies which are obviously very much subject to the physical laws of this world so it isn't a puzzle which is very far from the inner nature of our own being this contrast between transcendence and immanence but i think that's enough i can say in a short answer it isn't really an answer but reflection on the questions raised by that question we'll um close with one one last question that'll be answered by daniel denett as someone asks please amplify what you mean by ai system should be able to demonstrate their own limitations what's the purpose what methods would be appropriate anybody who's used any computer software just a word processor for a micro or or a lotus one two three or any any software at all knows that wrenching experience of assuming that it can do something like that it just can't and you they didn't tell you yet that it can't do it and you find yourself suddenly strung out with a problem that you wish you didn't have and you wish they'd they'd warned you about that this there's nothing particular to ai about this this problem of proper documentation um there's no reason why every program can't this that's available for use by the unsuspecting public uh shouldn't go out of its way to to demonstrate its own shortcomings insofar as they're known could be in fact quite amusing you'd think you could do this on this system try it you'll see that it won't work now try that you'll see that doesn't work either sorry maybe the next version will be able to do it now that's one of the simple things i have in mind is that uh such systems should insofar as insofar as the limits and boundaries are known they should be candidly revealed in fact an effort should be made to to inform users of those limitations now roger shank has a good idea he talks about explaining in the explanation game uh kids drive grown-ups crazy by asking hierarchical why questions you know why are you sawing the plank well to make a table why are you making a table while in order to have something to put the food on why do you want to have something in order to put the food and so far until we finally get fed up and just say well just because now if you have a system that can be explored in that way that you can challenge and say why did you do that why did you ask me that question why did you say this and keep it up more than just one answer so use that as a i mean that is a very familiar human way of probing i think roger is right about that and if you build systems that are amenable to that then you've then you've done something uh you've you've added a feature that helps people understand what the strengths and limitations of a system are i was fascinated recently to read that one of the people working on expert systems had suggested that a very good device to build into the system that he was working on was if a user began asking obstreperous weird questions the system would kick that user right off the system as this was somebody who didn't know enough to use the system i thought this is i see the reasoning behind it was absolutely wrong if you have that as a rule then people are cowed they're they're they're thinking will i qualify to use this system am i good enough i better make sure i only ask the right questions or it'll say you dummy and kick me off but that's the way of concealing your shortcomings and that's that's the wrong sort of thing to build into a system thank you for coming and thanks for the questions thanks for the answers