Well, good morning. I'm glad to see that you've decided to come again. I'm going to forewarn you that this particular lecture will be more dense than the last one, partially for timing reasons and partially because I'm going to try to introduce some concepts that I'm sure many of you will be familiar with, but some might not be as familiar with. which does not correlate to any distinction between depth and brilliance, just to clarify that. So I'm going to try to, I don't know, speak for maybe 40 minutes, something about that long. And then maybe we'll take a five-minute break to settle down a little bit, go get a cup of coffee. And then I'll come back and finish it with another 20, 25 minutes, something like that. So, all right. So I left you yesterday evening with two questions, one to come back for this lecture and one to come back for next lecture. The question for this lecture was, what does the modern technological order suggest to us day in and day out, tacitly and explicitly, what it means for a thing to be real? What it means that things are real. And the question I left you for the second lecture today was, how interested is God in people merely believing in his existence? So this first lecture today will get at, perhaps circuitously in some way, that first question. What I want to do in the present lecture, as promised yesterday, is to attempt to explain why it is that someone can both find atheism philosophically and intellectually incoherent and yet still find themselves attracted to it as a plausible conception of reality. In my judgment, to capture why this is so necessitates our looking carefully at modern attitudes towards science, the relationship between science and technology, as well as the relationship of both science and technology to the plausibility of religious claims or their alternative. Though the relevance of these things might seem obvious, I beg your patience if the relevance is not immediately clear to you. While my ultimate goal is to get at how it is that atheism can have an intellectual pull, even to those who find it incoherent, I don't think we can do this without trying to understand why it is that atheists conceive of themselves as being reasonable in being atheists, and why theists conceive of themselves as being reasonable in being theists. In much of the recent discussion, this conversation has tended to focus on the relative value of the concrete sciences, on the one hand, and the relative value of comparatively speculative and abstract thought, on the other hand. And so the way I think of what I want to do today is a sort of intervention into that discussion, a discussion, broadly speaking, between those who believe that the scientific method has materialist or naturalist implications and those who believe that science cannot even in principle address matters traditionally labeled metaphysical or religious or fill in the blank with any parallel. For the sake of just because I like using words that start with the same letter, not because it's wise necessarily, I'm going to call them materialists and metaphysicians. I was really worried if anybody was doing translation here whether there would be sign language for metaphysicians. I think I invented that word just now. In any case, we'll call them materialists and metaphysicians. Metaphysicians are just people who believe in God, believe in something beyond the material world. And there are problems with both terms, but those are just a first approximation for what we want to do. And let it be noted, when I talk about the scientific method, there's lots of discussion about this. Some people call it a set of rules. Some people call it a sort of intellectual value structure. I'm not sure it particularly matters for what I'm discussing. In any case, for what I'm calling metaphysicians, the materialist group appears to be frustratingly obstinate when it comes to questions of philosophy, of being. Even as they, so argue these religious folk, they unwittingly play the parasite on irreducibly religious assumptions. To the materialists, the metaphysicians appear to play with words concerning abstract objects about which human beings have no good reason to confidently speculate. Or put more simply, materialists believe that the emperor of metaphysics has no clothes, while metaphysicians argue that materialists only perceive the emperor to be naked because they wear philosophical x-ray glasses without being aware of them. And so here, I'm going to attempt an intervention in this in several steps. First, I want to summarize a fairly common naturalist or materialist viewpoint concerning the nature of causality, how things happen. What is causality? Why might an understanding of causality have materialist implications? I'm treating naturalism and materialism together here for reasons I might explain in a moment. I might skip over that section, actually. For our purposes, again, it might not matter so much. Suffice it to say, I'm trying to capture pretty broad phenomena and general intellectual tendencies, which certainly on both sides admit plenty of exceptions. But we're trying to get kind of basic, something that nevertheless captures a lot of people on each side. So please don't think I intend to speak for all atheists, though I hope to speak for many or most of them. So first, I'll go over the materialist notion of causality. Secondly, I will briefly detail the historical and philosophical response to that view, as well as why I don't think those responses to materialism sufficiently address what makes materialist claims feel plausible in the first place, even to those who reject them. And third, then, I want to argue that this disjunct is explained by certain features of the modern technological order. OK. So if you didn't get all that, that's fine. We'll go over it again. So first, let's talk about causality, the notion of causality and its relationship to atheism. For those who argue that modern science has materialist implications, it is often thought that identifying a regular sequence of events in the material world which terminate in something happening, in a phenomenon, that constitutes a sufficient causal explanation of this phenomenon. Again, science here could be understood as a set of principles or an epistemic value structure, but I think this applies to both. And I've mentioned two elements. There's sequence and the fact that I can observe that sequence terminating in an event, in a phenomenon. And somebody might identify more features of a definition of causality, though I suspect with the same import. So by regular sequence, I mean the repeatable and predictable correlation of one event with another. The sequence aspect is important because it is normally assumed that the prior event in a sequence sufficiently explains the appearance of the subsequent event in the sequence. One modern field, for instance, where the emphasis on sequence is particularly prominent is, as I understand it, though I'm no expert in this, is cognitive neuroscience. It is commonly supposed that if we can identify a brain event, say the lighting of a certain area on the MRI scan, which is apparently prior to the correlated mind event, say the person undergoing the MRI saying, I feel something. that we can conclude that the brain event is a sufficient explanation of the mind event. At time one, lighting on the MRI scan. At time two, I feel something. So there's a sequence that we've observed. Perhaps what's happening in the brain is a sufficient explanation for what's going on in the mind. And this example highlights, as well, the meaning of observability in these sequences. We do not, for example, see atoms. We don't see mind events directly. But they're observed through a medium, an MRI machine in one case. I'm not quite sure how we observe atoms in another case, but that's because I'm not a scientist. But I believe it's indirect. We don't see them directly. We measure them in other ways. In this type of observation... is normally our ability to predict the effects of a thing materially and in principle, but not always in fact, to interfere with, manipulate, shape, and redirect them. This is because the thing under consideration manifests itself in the realm of materiality, the material world. And material is in principle manipulable and capable of being interfered with. Perhaps one way of saying this is that these regular sequences must be publicly verifiable events which commonly confront the human senses, sometimes through a medium, yet which manifest themselves as part of that order of things over which human beings can, in principle, exercise some degree of control. So why might that be a sufficient explanation of things? Why might that have materialist implications? Daniel Dennett is one proponent of this position, and his really stimulating Darwin's Dangerous Idea is an intoxicating argument for the naturalist viewpoint. Darwin argues Dennett has provided us with an idea, a universal acid. which threatens to eat through all of our intuitions. So all the apparent complexity of nature might be the outcome of a basic algorithmic property, a very simple rule of sorting what does happen and what does not happen, in physical sequence after physical sequence. And for Dennett, this model, especially as it is able to dig deeper and deeper and explain more and more, seems to increasingly explain all of the phenomena we encounter. leaving us with no need to reference anything beyond the material realm. He, of course, does not argue that we have explained everything. He argues, rather, that there is no phenomenon of which we are aware that has refused an explanation in materialist terms. And so by implication, sequences of, in principle, observable events operating on extremely basic underlying rules account for everything that we see. Or there's no reason to think otherwise, at least. It was difficult. Dana makes an interesting argument. It was difficult, in his judgment, to imagine this before Darwin. But when Darwin introduced the possibility that complexity could arise out of a relatively mindless process, It rendered plausible the notion that a mindless process, a purely material sequence, is all that there is. Dennett uses the interesting analogy of skyhooks and cranes. The construction of all that we see before us does not require suspension in anything outside of our realm of awareness, like a building construction project performed by a skyhook. whose foundation we cannot see in the sky. Rather, each design is suspended atop something very simple, even as it interacts with the world and creates even greater complexity, the way a crane constructs a building, which is itself sitting atop the very same ground as the building. Human beings for instance, are the product of an enormous amount of physical, chemical, and biological cranes, then, you might say, that have come together from simple beginnings to this complex outcome of nature's construction project that we call the human being. But in this view, no reference to skyhooks is needed to account for the building of this organism, the human being. Victor Stenger, a physicist I believe in Hawaii, as well argues that the trajectory of anything meaningfully called science throughout its history tends toward materialism. His recent God and the Folly of Faith, is largely a survey of the history of science and its relationship to philosophy, religion, and metaphysics. In this survey, beginning 100, 150 pages of the book are sort of a survey of the history of science. In his survey, he argues that concrete observations have continually falsified theories built atop a foundation of philosophical and religious speculation. And over time, science has been so successful that there is very little explanatory space left for undetectable agencies or any other imaginary placeholder for fine-grained empirical evidence. Stenger's narrative is a particularly prominent example of what Charles Taylor has recently called a subtraction story concerning the advent of modern materialism. That is, modern materialism, or our religion, or atheism, is basically a function of taking away things bit by bit, taking away anything but material postulates, such that all that is left over eventually is just predictable and relatively manipulable material. I think I'll skip this paragraph. And I'll skip that paragraph because they're not that important. One response to this view of causality is to agree with the starting point that causes are identified through observing regular sequences in the physical world, but to argue that the final result of the starting point leads us beyond the material world. The proponents for intelligent design, for instance, basically accept the scientific starting point of observability and regular sequence, but then conclude that these necessarily terminate in their own inadequacy. That is, the material phenomenon that we observe cannot be accounted for on an algorithmic model, but necessarily require a skyhook as part of the explanation. In other words, the skyhook is just where the evidence leads. They speak of what they call irreducible complexity. That is, the existence of certain physical phenomenon which cannot, they say, their argument, reasonably be argued to have been the outcome of a process. And so they go on to invoke what their community has labeled a design inference, which must obtain when materialist explanations simply don't work. This is too complicated to be sort of an incremental aggregate of little causes. It has to all come together at once, basically, in a way that the Darwinian model wouldn't predict. God, then, or something mind-ish, mind-like, person-like, is therefore seen as a sort of necessary explanation for things which cannot possibly be explained by sequences of material events. That is, retorts the materialist, until they can. The critical response to this is that it's sort of the typical response to intelligent design is that it's what they call God of the gaps argument. Intelligent designs allegedly fill in gaps of human knowledge with a just so story of sort of invisible powers. But this, it is argued, is to ground science in human ignorance rather than in positive postulates that is inferred from the evidence itself. It is a failure of scientific imagination and patience. It is destructive, it is argued by the critics of intelligent design, it is destructive to the scientific enterprise which would here call for an admission of ignorance and a commitment to further investigation rather than to the sudden conclusion that God must be what fills in gaps that we can't fill. The point is not to claim that it is demonstrably wrong, but that one cannot know that it is right because future work might yield explanations which we do not currently know or might not even be able to currently imagine. Stenger's book that I mentioned previously, is actually quite helpful in showing precisely how this logic has, at least in the past, sometimes failed. Throughout the history of natural philosophy, or science, perceived gaps have been filled one after the other. with models which explain material realities in a way that would have previously been considered inconceivable at some points in the history of natural philosophy, and for which God, in the history of natural philosophy, was often invoked as necessary for the explanation. And so this is why for Dennett, Darwin is very important. It is not just that Darwin presented new facts and theories, it's actually that Darwin had a scientific imagination. He imagined a different world. And the world yielded, and for Dennett, in Dennett's view, continues to yield. to his idea. Perhaps the greatest criticism, then, that could be made of intelligent design, then, is that it stifles the scientific imagination. It is not that it is impossible, the critics might say. The critics might say it is rather that it is lazy. I'm not necessarily speaking for myself when I sell these things. It's important to say I'm trying to present the mind of somebody who finds this side of things plausible as fairly as I can. So let's move then to some typical philosophical rather than scientific and historical responses to modern materialism, both of which I take to be correct, in fact, but also I will argue inadequate. I'll argue for correct. I'll argue for correct and inadequate now, and then we'll get into my own explanation maybe after a five-minute break. So let's go on. So, first, let's talk the philosophical response to materialism. What is almost always missed in these discussions is the difference between this modern intelligent design debate, this response to materialism, and the relatively broader function that God plays in late medieval and early modern religious thought. For these philosophers, the explanation of events in terms of materiality and in terms of divine agency were not necessarily intention. Divine and natural agency were not of a common causal reservoir, you might say, such that if you could account for a material thing 75%, then God accounted for it 25%, or vice versa. There was an aspect of each event that answered 100% to God causality and 100% to material causality. To this day, this is why there are many religious persons, especially in the Roman Catholic community, who are quite comfortable, I mean, don't really bat an eyelash at Darwinian evolutionary theory, and even comparatively strong forms of it, but who don't believe that anything like that or any scientific hypothesis can even in principle Get at that aspect of causality and explanation that is uniquely accounted for by God. So, moving on. Essential to this non-reductionism of causal space, as they might think of it, among these thinkers is their appreciation of Aristotle's four causes. So we'll go over those a little bit. I'm going to try to speak slowly, because I was at a conference a couple of years ago around a bunch of academics. And we were talking about Aristotle, and one of them stared at all of us and said very suddenly, guys, can we just admit that nobody understands Aristotle's four causes, like including us? So we'll try. So if you don't get this, it's not your fault. It's probably mine. It might not even be mine. Maybe I don't even understand it. We'll see what we can do. All right. So aerosols for causes. Typically, this is a traditional explanation. There's probably some fancy exceptions, explanations that I'm not getting into. But typically identified as material causality. There's the material aspect of a cause, the efficient causality, formal causality, and final causality. So that's material, efficient, formal, and final. So try and go over those. so it is argued, constitute an aspect of the total explanation of a thing. Together they make the total explanation of a thing. Materiality is the stuff within which an event happens. Efficient causality has to do with the sequence of one event after another, the sense in which a prior being causes a subsequent being. That sounds familiar. These two aspects of causality, some might argue, capture what is the explanatory realm of science. Science is concerned mainly with sequences, again, in the material realm, the sequence in which things happen and the stuff within which it happens. But on this view, Aristotle's view, early modern Thomist view, Even if each event in the world had a material correlate and an efficient causality chain that went back infinitely into eternity past, in no individual case, nor in the case of all of these causes put together, all of this whole chain put together, would this constitute the total explanation of any individual thing or all things together? A total explanation also requires, and here's the weird stuff, a formal cause. The in virtue of what? One thing produces a certain sort of effect rather than another sort of effect. Or conversely, the in virtue of what, the because of what, the how. A thing is affected in just this way rather than that way. This is the piece of the explanation of events that your child is fascinated by when they say, perhaps to your annoyance, why? Why was the glass shattered? Because a brick was thrown at it. Why do bricks break glass rather than bounce off of it? Because glass is fragile, and bricks are very hard, heavy, and hard. Why does heaviness rather than lightness break fragile things? Admittedly, this is a philosophical child. But because of their chemical compositions. Well, then why can't this chemical composition have this sort of effect rather than that sort of effect? And that chain can go on almost ad infinitum. We'll make an exception in a moment. For the medievals, what you could tell your child is that the nature of a thing, either in terms of its power to affect certain types of outcomes, say the ability of my hands to mold clay, or its passive powers to be affected, the other direction, towards certain ends. say, the ability of clay to be molded by hands. It's part of the explanation of how an event unfolded as it did. Even if one reduces the how a thing happens, the why it happens to its components, say, water behaves the way it does because of its elements, its elements behave the way they do because of the particles. At some point, one will presumably need to account for why it is that a particular sort of thing rather than another sort of thing happens. For instance, even if all causal force really reduces down as a current theory in science, though I'm no expert in this field, this is what I hear through the rumor mill. For instance, even if all causal force reduces to the motions of collapsed quantum waves, that's the real ground zero of causality, one can still ask, Why, in virtue of what, the field, the quantum field, produces just these sort of effects, rather than other sorts of effects? One can imagine a possible universe in which that very same quantum field produced radically different effects, or even had a radically different range of options to effect. The question is, therefore, what it is about the quantum field itself, that reduces its causal force to just the effects that it does, in fact, in our world, in our experience, produce. Unlike we moderns, the medievals actually had a stopping point for that inquisitive and sometimes annoying child, and that stopping point was because God willed it to be that way. Why did God will it to be that way? Because of His wise, holy, and loving will. Why did God's wise, holy, and loving will decide it to be that way? Because of His wise, holy, and loving will. This is not, I don't want to insist on this, this is not actually an explanatory throwaway. But rather, that beyond which no answer is possible by the very definition of what an answer even is, including the definition of that about which there can be an answer in the traditional sense. That came out of my mouth, and I have no idea what that latter clause meant, so you can strike it from the record. So here, we've talked about the will of God, we've mentioned it, and here we're going to talk about this much maligned, controversial aspect of Aristotle. We've gone over efficient, material, formal, now final causality. While formal causality is focused on the what that is producing an effect, Final causality is focused on that end, that end which the what produces. That is, natures, the natures of things, tend toward certain effects rather than other effects. And this is just to say they act—this may be stretching our brains a little bit—they act as though they had conscious goals toward this outcome rather than that outcome. Again, imagine a possible world. in which a particular sort of event terminated in a radically different effect than it does in our world. Say that ice cream produced a strong sense of sourness. Given that it doesn't in this world, it is not difficult to imagine why, and again this would be without our modern instincts, which I'm not denigrating, but I'm just trying to help us imagine the way people used to think. Without our modern instincts, it might have been natural for our ancestors to think about then sweetness, especially in its natural relation to natural ends. I mean, we live in a world full of sugar, but historically we haven't had a lot of sugar. And there's a natural relationship between sweetness and things that are very good for your survival, fruit. So most of our ancestors, if they found something sweet, it was actually good for them, which is largely why we like sugar. If you eat fruit, it's good for your energy, et cetera, et cetera. So it might have been natural for them to think about sweetness especially in its relationship to the goal of sweetness itself, which is the production of high amounts of energy in our survival, as the more primal reality, the what and the how and the where that is producing this effect of sweetness and therefore our survival, Answer to the why, at precisely the moment they are shown to be inseparable aspects of the explanation of a thing and not reducible to one another. That's a really important point. These sort of explanations for Aristotle, none of these things can be collapsed into one another. I'll use a different example. I was concerned this morning because I was thinking about that paragraph and I thought, I don't like that example. But thankfully, I wrote another one. So, we'll go over that one. Think of those human experiences about which we have the most certain access. Most of the time, It is that final effect of things that's actually our first access point into understanding what a thing is. It is our portal into a thing, a what, a form, for Aristotle, standing out in the community of beings as they confront us commonly in shared space. For instance, we, or our children, see hopping green thing. Certainly, hopping green thing is material, but our minds don't think material or hoppingness or green, but we are confronted with this kind of phenomenal hull. Wow, a hopping green thing. This phenomenal peculiarity, it's actually its distinction from other things that causes us to distinguish it from other critters, and we name it colloquially or conventionally as a frog or toad. I don't know all my frog-toad distinctions, I apologize. But that's what it is. It's a name for its special activities as they confront us that distinguishes it from other things. And that's why we make distinctions. Closer inspection, then. An observation shows us a larger complex array of sequences of which this thing is regularly a part and out of which it originates, so generation and environment. And so that would be sort of then looking at it, that's a more immediate sense of its efficient cause, the sequences which produce frog. And it's actually here, interestingly, that its materiality becomes the most manifest. Composed as a frog is of many material parts, with which we can, and with which many little, mischievous children do interfere. One way of saying this is that we are not confronted I think this statement is important. We're never confronted with matter when we're confronted with a frog. Instead, a better way of getting at this would be to say that we're never confronted with matter at all in any abstract sense. Matter, in fact, this could be qualified, but I like it. Matter, in fact, does not exist, stand out, in the community of beings. Things, like frogs, exist as a particular mode or relative manifestation of materiality. But our mind's first motion is actually to grasp the unique act of a thing. then consciously distinguish it from other things, examine how it is, now our inefficient causality, how it is what it is, and then perhaps to interact with it via its materiality as such. Granted, all of this is, and this is the most dense bit we're in, so I apologize if anybody's getting lost. Granted, all of this is manifest materially, necessary as our senses is to present a frog to the mind. But the point is that this manifestation can't be abstracted from or conflated with its being manifest also intellectually, consciously, understandingly, interpretively, relative to other things and aspects of reality. That is to say, we can't reduce the materiality of a frog. We can't conflate it with these other ways in which we understand and relate to frogs. And while all of these causes present themselves simultaneously, our actual grasp of the material aspect of a frog's cause, how matter organizes to produce just this thing called a frog, is actually later. perhaps lay test in our understanding and interaction with the thing itself. Though, of course, we are aware that it's a material thing immediately. Materiality answers to questions. What's it made out of? What does it feel like? How many gizzards does it have? What happens when I do this? How does materiality coalesce to produce just this sort of thing? And those kinds of questions usually come later in our understanding of a thing's uniqueness and its distinction from other things. This manner, as difficult as it is for us to kind of wrap our head around that way of staring at things, This manner of speaking about causality and of explanation was really, to some extent, the common sense. This wasn't really just philosophy. This was really kind of the common sense of the medieval and early modern worlds. And despite famous criticisms, it remained influential for significant portions of the philosophical community until well into the 18th century. That is to say, this model survived, and many did not see it as in tension with the scientific method. But dependent as its plausibility was on philosophical language, it tended to die wherever scholasticism, as a movement in schools, failed to exert influence. Nevertheless, interestingly, this is sort of an aside, there actually has been a resurgence in recent philosophy of this non-reductive notion of causality. I am skipping over this part. There's a philosopher, Nancy Cartwright, one of the most famous philosophers of science in the 21st century, and she actually argues quite compellingly that Aristotle's notion of causality is in many respects superior to modern scientific notions of causality. She has some very interesting hypotheses along these lines. She's still nervous, though, about anything that might be called immaterial. So she has an appreciation for Aristotle, but doesn't like any notion of immaterial causes. So I want to talk about that for a moment, largely because it helps us say a lot of things I've already said one more time, because that helps us. It's hard to see. It's hard to see how we can talk this way and not get beyond a merely material notion of causality. How Aristotle's or Thomas's notion of four causes could be reduced to some materialist interpretation. So let's think just a little bit more. One can imagine a world in which thing one, produces this rather than that. The question would then be, why doesn't Thing 1 produce that rather than this? And it would be difficult to answer this beyond saying, well, because it doesn't, or because of what it is, what it does, and does not do in virtue of its nature. But then if we use that latter language, we would have to ask why, well, having this nature means that you produce this rather than that. And so on through some inferential chain. Well, because of this thing's relationship to this meta thing. And so, but we're just moving back. Well, why does this meta thing only produce this rather than that? At some point, it will be very difficult to avoid something occult-like, some explanation that goes like, because that's just the way things are. Even if all causes reduce back to some quantum field, the question is still going to be why the quantum field produces this rather than that, when it really is possible to imagine a world, a coherent world, not a contradictory world, not an unimaginable world, in which that quantum field did radically otherwise than it does in this world. In short, it does not seem a sufficient explanation of its own effects because there are still more basic realities, possible worlds. So what am I saying there? It doesn't seem sufficient to say, well, the quantum field does this rather than that. Well, why? If we can imagine it doing otherwise, if we're talking about the most basic reality, so we've explained everything else by this, by this, by this, by this, and if we stop somewhere, the question is, can we make one more move? Can we say, well, why? Do we stop here and just say, well, that's just because that's the way things are? The question is, does a quantum field explain its own effects? The moment where we can say, well, why doesn't it do this rather than that, assumes that there are still more basic realities, possibilities. In other words, basic realities being the possibility that something very similar could produce a radically different thing without contradiction. It wouldn't be a contradiction to say that quantum waves could collapse and produce an effect that's very, very different than the effects that they in fact do produce in our universe. And so the question then becomes, it seems like then that whatever when we talk about quantum whatever, we're talking about something that is still kind of floating in concepts and beings and possibilities that are bigger than itself, which means we haven't sort of reached rock bottom reality. That's maybe one way of looking at what I'm trying to say here. It's not a sufficient explanation of its own effects because there are still more basic realities, possible beings which do not obtain existence itself, that's actually an important one, being itself, existence itself, which are left out of the equation and ultimately unrelated And that's really important. These things, being itself, possibilities, what's even possible to be, these realities, those are real ways of looking at the world. Those realities actually remain unrelated, if we stop here, to what actually exists. In other words, that annoying kid who keeps asking why could still one-up you. This is why, for the scholastics, for the medievals and early moderns, a first cause, we talk about first cause still, but they meant something actually a little bit different by it than we do. For them, a first cause was not the first domino in some causal series kick-starting the great chain reaction of history. Indeed, Aquinas actually, interestingly, did not think that you could refute an infinite series of causes in temporal succession. And yet he does still think about a first cause metaphysically. So Aquinas says, is the universe eternal? It could be. It has nothing to do with God. I don't think it is because of the Bible. The reason Aquinas actually rejects that option is because of divine revelation. It's not for philosophical reasons. But that is not what he's talking about when he says first cause. He is thinking of first cause not as a kickstarter of efficient causality, but he's thinking of first cause metaphysically. The first and first cause is a metaphysical first, the sort of ground of being existence itself, being qua being, if you want fancy philosophical terms, which suspends all possible and actual beings in itself, and which therefore is not a being in the typical sense that we talk about that, about which our ordinary language of existence and nonexistence even makes sense. Rather, properly understood, such a first cause is that without which there is no explanation for any particular possible or actual beings at all. In my judgment, I think this argument is actually inescapable. The cosmos we live in is irreducibly particular. There are no forces, nor can we imagine materially related forces which are metaphysically or rationally necessary, such that their non-existence would entail something like incoherence or contradiction. But we can say, I think, this of the act of existence or being itself. to imagine the nonexistence of being itself, of existence of self, of isness in its most basic sense. People disagree with this, but I'd argue that they shouldn't. That's nonsense. It doesn't mean anything. And I think it's actually this very, very, very basic insight, in this very basic insight, is the distinction that the early moderns and the medievals make between necessary and contingent being. Being itself, existence itself, being as being, is necessary. Its alternative is unimaginable and incoherent. And this we call God, by the way. That's necessary being. All contingent beings, we'll talk about those right here, A necessary being is just purely actual, just is. It is what it is, and it is as it is, the contrary of which is just incoherence, as if we could truly imagine nothing, truly nothing, in its most basic and metaphysical level, which Aquinas and I would argue we actually cannot do. The latter, contingent beings, can rationally be conceived of as not being. I could not be. This table could not be. Patrick could not be. Danny, as horrible as that would be, could not be. The latter can rationally be conceived of as not being. The contrary of this being completely rational. I'm going to say that again. I got caught up a little bit here. Let me just read this part. No, I'm going to go forward. All right, this is hugely important. Even if a contingent thing has always existed in time, and even if there is a massive multiverse, you know, universe, you know, millions and millions of alternative universes out there. This is some way some people try to avoid God. There's some big massive multiverse. It is still a multiverse, which is not absolutely metaphysically necessary at the cost of incoherence. That is to say, the world could make a lot of sense and there'd be no multiverse. And it's eternal even if it existed eternally, that is, it didn't start in some sequence of time. Oh, okay. Its eternal existence does not mean that it is absolutely necessary. It just means that it didn't need to come into being temporarily. We could imagine a world in which some other thing existed eternally rather than this thing. A thing might not have come into being temporally, but might still be metaphysically contingent and absolute and non-necessary. And this still leaves us with the question of what accounts for it at all, even if it had no temporal beginning. This is the difference between the traditional definition of God and the being of the created order. There is necessarily, in traditional concepts, some just purely actual reality, this we call God, Aquinas would say, which just is. The incoherence of atheism is that it declares purely actual and metaphysically stops at a non-necessary and could meaningfully have been otherwise reality." Quantum fields at all. We could imagine worlds in which it wasn't quantum fields. It was something else that did what we see. Which then has no explanation for why it is that the universe is just this way rather than another way. Why is this possibility actualized? Why is this multiverse eternally actualized rather than some other multiverse? And if the multiverse or quantum field does not exist by some metaphysical necessity, and yet we say that it is the most basic reality, then we have effectively violated, in a traditional sense, the law of causality, saying that something which does not have existence by definition, that is, on the pain of incoherence, nevertheless just does exist without explanation. Of course, some take the bait, but only, I would argue, at the cost of a deep and foundational incoherence. Forgetting his name, which is embarrassing, the atheist universe, Alex Rosenberg, I think, takes the bait and denies the principle of sufficient reason and the principle of causality. This isn't so with theism. God is the I am. He is being, necessary being, the denial of whom is incoherent, not some actuality within the realm of other possibilities, but the very ground of possibility. In respect of being in existence, it is contingency and finitude that are really the great mystery. And this then explains precisely why the universe is what and as it is, why gravity could have been 9.87 meters per second squared rather than 9.86 meters per second squared. If a thing does not have its being in itself, It must have it in another. If it does not have its being by necessity, it must have its being suspended, donated by something that does have its being in necessity. And what sort of reality bridges the gap between contingent beings, which only might be in principle, and the contingent beings which actually are in fact? Ultimately, it must be a matter of agency, of will, and of personhood, the way an artist makes a single thing out of infinite possibilities, or a poet writes a beautiful particular poem out of infinite linguistic possibilities. The alternative is to say that contingent things are made necessary by other contingent things and those by other contingent things and so on. But if all things in our cosmos are precisely as they appear to us necessarily contingent and could have been otherwise, then this leaves the entire chain, eternal or not, suspended in mere contingency. something must still bridge the gap between might-have-been-otherwise realities and what actually is reality. And indeed, it is worse than that. This is not just true of the chain as a whole, but of each link within the chain, each link being a could-have-been-otherwise effect of its predecessor. The implication of this is that the marks of agency and will, personhood, God, do not depend upon, and I'm denying irreducible complexity here, the intelligent design argument, but they don't depend upon irreducible complexity or intelligent design or some other such notion. Agency, will, personhood, God, and art are necessarily manifest at every step of the causal chain because every step could also have been otherwise. The whole could have been otherwise and every step could have been otherwise. And this is true whether we are looking at the complex human eye or if we are looking at a single simple particle. The whole chain and each of its links are suspended in mind-like directedness, having this rather than that nature in performing this act rather than that one." And I realize this is all very dense, and we can discuss any of these matters. We're going to have a Q&A later today, so we can talk about any of this at length during that time. But I do not think that the basic insight, or excuse me, I use that not again, I do think, I do think that the basic insight here could be grasped by a child. Medieval children could ask why, and their Thomist priests could gleefully tell them about pure actuality. The terminus point of the why for any finite thing itself necessarily existing, and its will, because its will, accounting for things which could have been otherwise existing. The gap between what must exist and what does not need to exist is necessarily mediated by the gift, by a gift, of what necessarily exists. That being, existence is a donation, if you will, of what necessarily exists of God. And that requires will and it requires personality. Our act of existence is suspended in and is a donation of existence himself, being himself, life himself. in whom all things hold together, and are what and as they are from whom are all things, for whom are all things, and in whom all things hold together. Much more could be said. We could talk about other arguments that might give someone a reason to believe in God. We could modify this argument, talk about other features, mind, love, beauty, transcendental properties, and blah, blah, blah. all this on why someone might believe in God, because it's incoherent not to. Okay. That's a philosophical response to materialism. We're going to briefly discuss this much more brief. The historical response to materialism, we'll take a five-minute break and then we'll get back to why I don't think, and then I'll briefly talk about why I think both responses are actually inadequate for our time. I think right, but I think inadequate. And then we'll take a five-minute coffee break, and we'll come back and then talk about technology, which I think is important for our discussion. In fact, kind of the central point of our discussion. It's 10 already? No. What I'm going to do is actually skip the historical response to materialism. Let me, I don't think it's particularly necessary for the larger point we want to make. OK. Give me just a moment here, and I will Ah, let's talk about this. Yes. And so we have before us a philosophical and historical response to materialism. In my judgment, these responses are helpful, but by themselves will usually be unpersuasive. One cannot help but get the sense that there has been little advance in this debate on either side, despite the fact that the substantive arguments have not really changed. The materialists, having the ethos of a younger generation which dismisses its elders, often portray the metaphysicians as anti-progressive, dogmatic, full of linguistic speculation and gobbledygook, and therefore as unworthy of engagement. And the metaphysicians, having the ethos of grandparents who grumble about kids these days, tend to private insecurity, and hopefully we'll explain that in a moment, and to public dismissal as materialist is basically juvenile. And so for the sake of persuasion, I think the above arguments need supplementation with an account of why the materialist option is felt to be plausible in the first place. Why does it, for many, seem like an intellectual default position? And perhaps most illuminating, why do its hypotheses and its mistrust of philosophy resonate in many instances even with its critics? who does not feel the sting of enlightenment witticisms regarding scholasticism, its critique of system building and speculation, and its orientation to concrete realities, which often win arguments simply because once observed and understood, a person's will is normally powerless to disbelieve what is manifestly in front of their face. Such as it would be impossible for you by an act of will, almost impossible for you by an act of will to disbelieve that I'm speaking to you right now, even if you didn't want to believe that I'm speaking to you right now. Some of you might wish that I wasn't speaking to you right now, in fact. So there appears to be a plausibility structure which is shared. by those who affirm and those who deny this option. And the question is what this is. And I'm going to skip over this section. All right. Where does this leave us? How do we explain where we're at if that's not a sufficient reaction? It is often suggested that this enchantment, this sense of the universe that we've described, sort of the Aristotelian Thomist option, changed when human beings were able to predict the alleged agencies of the cosmos. I don't think this is quite a sufficient move. Regular prediction, regular prediction of the cosmos might shift one's perception of just how rigid what were perceived formerly to be kind of agentic aspects of reality. But the perception was still that nature's communicating to us, things, stars, grass, trees, were communicating beings by acting on our senses. In other words, a tree confronts my senses. And that was seen as, because non-necessary, that was seen as having a sort of quasi-personal quality, explained by God, not the personhood of a tree. But these things communicated to us. This was sort of the natural perception. In fact, still is the natural perception in lots of the world. Medieval philosophers, so what I'm reacting to here is this notion that all of this changed because we were able to suddenly predict agencies. Once we can predict the weather, well, we don't need God to explain it anymore. But, in fact, people have always been trying to predict the weather. Natural philosophers were constantly trying to predict the course of nature, and even to influence the activities of angels and demons, rendering them predictable. People do this through sacrifice, through ritual. And so, alternatively, what I want to argue, and then we'll take a break in just a second What I want to argue is that the real key to the progressive change and sense of things that has shifted in the West in the last 500 years is actually a change in the human ability to control these alleged agencies, rather than just to predict them. If a person is not only able to understand a thing, but to use it for our own ends, that same thing might increasingly be perceived less and less like an agent to which I am subject than like a tool which is rather entirely subject to my agency and my ends. And here we see a significant shift in the human's immediate practical sense of reality, sense of things. As the modern era progressed, Droughts, which were formerly signs of divine judgment, were now possible to control because of one's tools. Indeed, in our day, it is even normal to seek out the desert for aesthetic purposes. Death is less and less a threat through medicine, through infrastructure, and comfort and distance from nature a more ubiquitous and extensive given. The philosophical waters were made even more murky when ecclesiastical invocations of divine judgment for increasing philosophical blasphemies or for the exploitation of nature went unrealized. So you're trying to control nature in a way that I don't like. You're asserting doctrines about nature that are out of accord with the church. Well, God is going to judge you. And then he doesn't. Well, I mean, the church was perceived to be kind of exhibit A in some sense. of God's agentic power in the universe. And once its threats go sort of unmeted out, it's kind of like, okay. That sense of reality as suffused with sort of God's direct intervention is going away if the church is sort of trying to sort of channel God's power and nothing happens. This rendered even the presumably most agentic, most personal, most sort of godlike aspects of the cosmos effectively silent and invisible. The real story here then is the story of modern technology and its implicit postures towards what it means for a thing to be real. So, why don't we take a break for a few minutes, and the rest of this will maybe only take, I'd say, 20 minutes to go through, but a chance to stretch your legs and your brain and go to the bathroom and whatever. And so, we'll start maybe 10, 20. So, five minutes. And it's implicit postures towards the real. What? Thank you. Oh yeah. God's presence in a lot of modern literature, in a lot of our culture, is highly correlated with nature. And it used to be that nature is much more complex than it is in a lot of the temples in Sydney. The God of Oxford, you know, he's not in Oxford. That's Amos. Yes. This is right. I mean, the Bible carries those things. Yeah, the Bible carries those things. I don't know. I was just really worried. This is very personal. Before we say this, I'd like to make a point of statement on this discussion. I was thinking of your introduction, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said, and what you said But this whole idea of a church in Greece, like how close is it to Greece? Yeah, the one even wonders at that. Yeah, so like, I don't, I don't, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Thank you. th th Thank you. th th And one. Right. Yeah. Right. Right, yeah, so some of them, yeah, there's a couple of approaches, right. Yeah, so, I want to say, like, Dembski and Werner Gitt, yeah, there's several of them that are working in information theory, like, yeah, post-Shannon information theory. A lot of them, a lot of the, and I actually think they kind of started with both, because Behe, I want to say, argues it more from, like, biological structures, but I want to say Dembski was more a mathematician and does more, like, Yeah, so I think there's kind of two schools. The information theory people are interesting and could very possibly – the thing with the information theory folks is that to some extent I think their arguments would work whether or not it has any implications for, whether or not it has any implications for like the age of the earth or those other things, like information theory, because, yeah, you could argue for some version of information. In fact, people do, interestingly, argue for some degree of information, though it's not necessarily, and there's still sort of... Whereas I think the irreducible complexity argument is also against even like the incremental, that tends to be more against the... Yes. Right, right. Right, right. We were supposed to, oh, okay, yeah, we're a little behind. Okay, that's fine. Yeah, yeah. We'll go to the 30 seconds or so and then I'll get this. I think this bit is... No, I mean, Plato... That's mainly because I'm talking about causality. I mean, in terms of the concept of being and the dependence of contingent beings on necessary being, I think there's a relative similarity between them. There's differences in terms of how they think that concretizes. And really, the late medieval, I mean, the scholastics of the Middle Ages are kind of a blend. I mean, a lot of people would argue that the scholastics were basically neo-Platonist Aristotelians. So, whatever that means, you know. So, all right. All right, folks, we'll gather around. This next bit will thankfully, I think, only take 15 or 20 minutes. But I wanted us to have a slight bit of brain freshness for this section. It's much less difficult than anything we've talked about. But it's actually the most important thing I want to say, so I figured let's go into it with fresh minds. What I want to talk about is the relationship between modern technological order and the way it shapes us to relate to the world, the way it shapes us to think of reality in general and in particular. So, I'm going to proceed from the concrete to the abstract. So, I want to first talk about several possible or arguable correlations between the proliferation of modern technology. and the plausibility, the background noise that makes materialism plausible, whether in its explicit philosophical version or its sort of practical version. And then I want to explain, try to articulate what it is about modern technology which in principle, not just a correlation, but in principle can be interpreted as having a causal effect on the plausibility of materialism. So correlation and then causation. So several factors in terms of just making a rough correlation between materialism and modern technology. Modern technology is the most obvious and prominent payoff of the scientific method. Indeed, some have argued that there is less a difference between the two than we are typically prone to think. But the tumultuous relationship between science and metaphysics starts at about the advent of what we call the modern scientific method. Well, not without precedent, Francis Bacon is fascinating for his massive influence on the development of the modern scientific method, which he specifically opposed to the methods and views of Aristotle. Bacon's method was self-consciously technological in focus, sort of attempts to control nature, and self-consciously anti-Aristotelian, anti-teleological, when we're talking about explaining the natural world. So that would be one loose correlation. Correlation number two. Further, while certain scientific theories have changed, and while certain cosmologies have changed, some drastically so, you know, geosyn, you know, sun is at the center of the solar system, I'm sorry, Earth's center of the solar system, the sun at the center of the solar system, that sort of thing. What has not ceased to progress is humans' ability to control their world. Arguably, there has been more control over the natural world gained in the last 500 years than in all of human history before this time put together. Alongside this trend has flourished modern materialism philosophically. This could be a loose correlation, but arguably the more specific correlation of materialism to major technological booms implies that the connection is looser, tighter than looser. So maybe three moments where we sort of see the advent, greater flourishing, and then an even greater flowering of modern materialism. So number one would be, it's not really until the Enlightenment philosophes, that one detects a sizable number of materialists among the European intelligentsia. But this also happens to be an era of massive technological advancement. Indeed, many of the philosophers felt themselves to be living in the dawn of a new era, not just politically, but religiously and technologically. They were experiencing the first fruits of the scientific method, the payoff that proved its unique claim to contact with reality. B, materialism did nevertheless remain a fairly minority position among the elite until its popularization in the middle to the late 19th century, especially in England and in America. And in the realm of technology, for you historians, this is obviously the era of the Industrial Revolution. The latter of which was arguably a far more significant factor in the decline of religion in the late 19th and early 20th century than was Darwinism. C, the next great leap in modern materialism was probably where it became maybe, Taylor would say, this is the 1960s, I was about to say it's the 1960s in the West. Charles Taylor would argue this is the moment where It's not just sort of intellectuals and intellectual circles and philosophical circles that are materialists or you're kind of village atheists. But this is the moment, around the 60s, is when it becomes a much more plausible option for the common person, for you guys, for me. But this is when it became a live option for the common man, at least in America. But at least in America, this is highly correlated with the height of the American middle class, as well as perhaps the greatest era of American world leadership in the realm of technological advancement. This is close to when we made it to the moon. And even now, it is significant. to note that irreligion is highly correlated with a materially comfortable lifestyle. That is, it is mostly a white, well-to-do phenomenon, which is to say that it is a phenomenon tied to a maximal state of self-agency, control of my environment, and freedom. Conversely, one will find very little irreligion among the third world or even much less irreligion among the poor in western countries in Rochester. A common retort to this is that such persons, of course, need a crutch of cosmic comfort, whereas the already comfortable, needing no such aid, are less motivated to consider the divine. And this is, of course, just the alter ego of the people are atheists just so they can do whatever they want argument. Sometimes true, but not always. So those are some kind of prima facie observations which might suggest a correlation between modern technology and the evaporation of the plausibility of God, of things traditionally labeled metaphysical. But what might actually a causal feature in technology be? I think this is more important. It is perhaps obvious what this is, but let's go over it nonetheless. bound up with the early modern abandonment of an Aristotelian definition of nature was also a new relationship to that nature, such that it was perceived to be nature for me rather than an order of agencies to which I am subject. One can make too much of this, and it is important not to sort of reinvent history and sort of idealize the way everybody was in the past, but it is not particularly controversial to note a relatively simultaneous shifting posture towards nature as kind of raw material for human agency and human interaction and human purposes. And of nature and a perception of nature in general, more philosophically, is not a collection of things. It is rather a collection of things with which I interact, with which communicate to me and I communicate to them. Rather, it's a pile of matter subject to laws. That's still somewhat how we speak about nature, is there's sort of stuff and there are these things we call scientific laws that explain why stuff does what it does. And if we want to control nature, we harness those laws to make it do stuff that we want it to do. That is to say, the way we begin to even speak about nature is such that it is passive, it's inert. moved by laws outside of itself, and so human control could be realized inasmuch as that relationship could be harnessed for human ends. So the world does not communicate itself to my senses, but rather my senses are active, and the world is the object which I shape. In as much as this relationship to nature yields, and it does, in as much as it yields the fruits of technological advancement and of knowledge in respect to sequences in the material realm, this initial posture seems reality revealing. It works. So we've tapped into reality, folks. That is to say, nature has yielded and continues to yield. to what Charles Taylor would call an instrumental posture toward nature. It has subjected itself to mankind and given of its fruits and sensing that we have tapped into reality by construing our relationship to the world in this manner. Our psyche might easily interpret its itch for reality in general to have been scratched rather than in very important respects to have actually been numbed. So, number two. This is the most important point. This relationship to nature, of course, is not absolute, was not absolute, never has been absolute. But the continued holding of this posture and the increased proliferation of its technological fruits cannot but have had a massive effect on the Western sense of what it means for a thing to be real at all. Different authors identify different points of technological development as of particular significance in this regard. Lewis Mumford is really interested in modern mining. Jacques Ellul is less interested in locating particular points in the development of the machine. A lot of people talk about that, but in the concept of technique, he calls it itself. Neil Postman, a more popular writer, points out the influence of early 20th century management principles. A really interesting essay by Martin Heidegger, everything Heidegger writes is impossible to read, but his essay on technology is easier to read. He's fascinated by the difference between technologies which develop the inter-nature of things and cause them to flourish rather than those which impose human ends upon nature in an artificial manner. Whatever the case, each of these authors is arguably trying to capture the way in which our posture towards nature which is itself reinforced by the technologies which then, which mediate that relation. And this is huge, how those things shape our imagination concerning the real. I'm going to say that again because I think it's important. Each of these authors is trying to capture the way in which, the way that we posture ourselves towards nature. And a posture which is, in fact, reinforced by the very technologies within which we're actually creating that relationship. They're interested in the way that shapes our imagination concerning how we experience reality in general. Putting this differently, one might ask the following, and I've asked it several times already, but I'm going to say it again. What does the modern technological order and the relationship to nature, reality, the world that it mediates to us suggest about what it means for a thing to be real at all? I think this is the central question I want to get at. The modern technological order tacitly communicates to us day in and day out that reality the sort that actually concerns us, belongs to the order of the manipulable, subject in principle to human activity. Again, the modern technological order tacitly communicates to us day in and day out that reality belongs to the order of the manipulable, subject in principle to my agency. Yeah, I should read that. Each of the authors I just mentioned make this point in different ways. Heidegger argues that modern technology is what he calls the destiny of revealing. So what he means by that is that nature, the way nature relates to me, is shaped by the very questions I bring to it. So I kind of bring a filter to it, and all that's going to make it through to me is filtered through the very questions, postures, the implicit values that I have in constructing it and in approaching it in the first place. That nature appears to manifest itself as only material has everything to do with how we've approached reality in the first place. For Ellul, technique is a pattern of thought which changes everything it touches, a reduction of reality to the terms of the instrumentally rational and the ordered and the efficient. What does not fit this is ultimately to us, in some very practical sense, invisible to us. Mumford and Postman are particularly concerned with invisibility. It is not that there is no longer a philosophical argument for invisible realities out there somewhere, but it is that we have been shaped to relate to the cosmos practically, and therefore to imagine and be concerned with the cosmos only in its visible dimensions, or that dimension within which human agency can in principle interfere. As such, any aspect of reality which does not manifest itself as visible, as part of that realm in which I am able to manipulate and control, is perceived to be non-existent, or stated differently. The material and efficient realms are the only realms of concern or care to us, practically. And so they alone are felt to exist. And scientific discourse, then, is tacitly perceived to explain reality without remainder, trafficking as it does in the realms of material and efficient causality. Inasmuch, then, as materiality is practically that as which we perceive the real, it is natural for us in this world, in this context, in the West, in the 21st century, it's natural for us to feel as though anything else is superfluous. This account further helps to explain why it is that a certain aversion to metaphysics, to philosophy, to speculation, is particularly prominent in well-to-do areas and nations. It is here in well-to-do areas and nations that one can move around in a world that has been controlled for the human and for whom then speculative, unpractical, that is immediately impractical, questions are really quite irrelevant. I, for instance, live in an air-conditioned house. When a storm comes, which would have been a crisis for my ancestors, I do not even flinch. I can hardly imagine what it is like to get food or water anywhere else but a grocery store or a tap, the products of each appearing for all practical purposes as by magic, albeit, I assume, of the demystified technical sort in the hands of an anonymous and a very different sort of clergy. When I experience nature, or what I perceive to be nature, it is manicured nature. Whether it be the neatly placed trees in my neighborhood, the mowed lawn, the pruned bushes, the non-threatening sky, when I walk outside to the bus every morning, the notion that my path is artificially lit, that I walk on smooth concrete, that I am in a vehicle which transports me at high, efficient speeds, doesn't even enter my consciousness. This is just my world. This is reality to me. I know that it's technologically mediated, but that's only when I'm thinking about it. When I'm simply moving around in it, it is simply the world. One could go on to speak of technologically mediated encounters with health and with death and with other persons. Even those things, the most kind of personal aspects of reality, human relationships, are increasingly subjected to media, to surrogates, to Facebook, and options to eHarmony. which are historically, not knocking either of them, I'm on Facebook, which are historically unprecedented and mechanistic. To put it bluntly, the world is a world for me. I do not find myself, practically, in a big, mysterious world suffused with agencies to which I am subject and around which I must learn to navigate. I find myself in a world almost entirely toolified, a world of my own subjective agency before an increasingly silent cosmos. And a silent cosmos echoes no ultimate speaker. Of course, I live in a bubble. It is an expanding bubble. My argument would suggest that the status of Western religious beliefs will be largely dependent upon what happens to this bubble. Many, though by no means all, posthumanist or transhumanist theorists are conceived to be religious, religionless ones. Increasingly, the traditional arguments of metaphysics are rendered dismissible by just being rendered forgettable, because they're invisible. They're not immediate. They're impractical. The more we are able to move around in the world, to relate to other persons, to have social institutions and find personal fulfillment without reference to them, the more metaphysical claims just seem implausible to us. They're just not part of our practical world. The more philosophical reflection seems pointless. The inverse of this is that religion is likely to flourish where control over nature is at its least. This is not arguably, and this is very important, this is not arguably because such persons need a crutch, but because reflecting upon and considering the invisible as real, the personal as real, seems plausible to those who experience the world as something to which they are subject, as a powerful set of forces outside of them which they cannot harness. Indeed, in most dystopian fiction, even those which are explicitly atheist, it is interesting to note how often the question of God suddenly becomes relevant. And even where metaphysical questions are not engaged directly, much of this dystopian fiction tradition has a sort of haunted quality, an almost re-enchantment of the cosmos in the smaller sense that it is once again rendered mysterious, quasi-agentic, a force outside of me to which I am ultimately subject and around which I must learn to navigate. This is largely because in such stories, the world is reoriented. Our sense of how the world fits together is completely shattered. My world of concern is not what it was. I would argue that even now, there are, in fact, two basic features of reality which often result in massive shifts in religious perspective. I mentioned these briefly last evening. And I would say these are confrontations with death and confrontations with other persons who either hurt or love us. Love and death are both tremendously agentic, though death might also be called anti-agentic. extremely difficult to harness, disorienting facets of reality which are not easily fitted to manipulability, but which situate us and which render us ultimately passive. And in so doing, what they suggest reality is like is the opposite of what our technologies suggest reality is like. And therefore, they make manifest entirely different dimensions of reality. So I'm going to summarize here. We have maybe just take one more minute, I think. To summarize, my argument has been that the common response to materialism, which involves defending certain Aristotelian positions and noting the historical circumstances in which Aristotle was prematurely dismissed, that part we didn't go over, must, for the sake of persuasion, be supplemented by an account of why it is that materialism is a live option for modern persons in the first place. Even if one is persuaded intellectually that materialism is not cogent, it sure feels like a plausible, possible account of things. And why? My argument is that we have been shaped to perceive reality this way by the technological order that we tacitly imbibe every day in its psyche-shaping act. of reducing the real in all of our practical involvements with it to the manipulable, observable, visible order. The most important point is that the world within which this is plausible is the most important point. The world that I just described in which this is plausible is a shared world between those who believe in God and those who do not. In recognizing this shared background noise, as it were, it is worth asking how bringing it to explicit recognition might help to change the debate between materialists and religious persons. In my judgment, the implications of this argument for materialism are somewhat deflationary for the materialist option. By helping to explain what remains attractive about the position, materialism, even to those who don't hold to it, I've also tried to relativize it against the background noise that both makes it attractive and simultaneously renders philosophical analysis powerless, as it were, in its persuasive charm. It is non-compelling because it is coded as belonging to a different order than the order of what is real. the world in which I am immediately, impractically, and socially engaged. Once this construal, though, of the real is relativized, so are then its philosophically dismissive instincts. But we are where we are, and even if our mind is persuaded of this, persuaded that perhaps we've been shaped to approach reality in a way that's not fully revelatory of all the dimensions of reality, We are where we are. So what do we do? I mean, basically the question becomes, what do we do? And that is the question I will take up in my next and much less dense lecture. So thank you. All right. All right, thanks once again for coming back. Hopefully this one will be, I'm confident this one in fact will be significantly less dense than the previous one. I've entitled this particular lecture, Seeking, Finding, and Being Found. The first two lectures have been largely descriptive, and I hope this one will at least in part be prescriptive. Here I want to evaluate what is the calling of the Christian in light of our struggles. Indeed, are there distinctive emphases in Christian doctrine or practice which uniquely minister to persons who find themselves in this situation? Not surprisingly, questions close to the one we are addressing have their own market niche. Not a month goes by without a new tome on atheism, secularism, modernity, and the Christians' or religious persons' calling and responsibility in light of these phenomenon. Arguably, many or most of them contain implicit longings for a lost past or a hoped-for future. I've argued, perhaps without much originality, that our modern plausibility structures have more to do with the technological world than with anything else. And yet, this is not as such what one might call a fall narrative. wherein the hope is to recover some pre-technological world, as though our spiritual future depended upon our ludicrous aspirations. While much of the modern situation is unique and problematic, much of it is also good. There's no question about the relationship between modern technological advances and many fulfilled opportunities, for instance, to reach people with the gospel. More immediately, advances in medicine, agriculture, education have drastically improved the condition and quality of life of many people living on earth. We in the West, of course, experience this most of all, still more than most of our international neighbors, and perhaps precisely to this extent, the problems and challenges we're describing are ours as well, more than anyone else's. But suffice it to say that what I want to suggest here is that our goal should not be to go back to when we didn't have any of this. That's largely because that's not going to happen. We are where we are. And going forward, the technological world and the challenges and pressures that it gives us are only going to become more prominent And that's the situation in which we find ourselves. It is both exciting and dangerous, and we'll only get more so on both accounts. The question then becomes what a Christian response to this might be. How do we navigate the world we currently actually live in and will be living in? And I'd like to begin trying to approach this by reading the following from King Solomon. Two things I've asked of you. Do not refuse me before I die. Keep deception and lies far from me. Give me neither poverty nor riches. Feed me with the food that is my portion that I be not full and deny you and say who is the Lord or that I not be in want and steal and profane the name of my God. Perhaps here we can put together both the ancient and modern sense of divine absence, seeing them as two modes of the same problem in different contexts. For those whose deepest experience is their own dependence, their own fragility, their own ability to take care of themselves, the tendency is to forget God's providence, promises, and provision, to steal, and rather than trusting God's goodness and generosity, to profane his name. For those who experience their own independence, abundance, no fear concerning whether or not they will get their next meal, their tendency is simply to forget God's being. Certainly, I don't think Solomon is talking about atheism here, unimaginable as that would have been likely in the ancient world. But I think he's talking about a sort of out-of-sight, out-of-mind response to God. God is not the one with whom we have to do, because our world of concern is full. In the words of that wonderful speech in the film Network, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, and all boredom amused. In our situation, our world of concern has become so suffused with the illusion that we control it that we do not just forget God the way we forget a friend, we risk forgetting why we ever thought he was our friend in the first place. The way an adult can't quite recall whether certain childhood memories are childhood memories, dreams, or projections. Whatever the case, the plausibility of God is often as ephemeral and fragile as a vapor. and that is unless we remember. This is the movement of many psalms. In the moment of crisis and in the context wherein what seems real is entirely defined by the immediate, the psalmist must pause, be still, and resituate his own immediacy in the context of deeper truths which are both closer to the psalmist objectively, but psychologically far away. And so the psalmist struggles. The psalmist wrestles with God, and like Jacob wrestling with the angel, says, I won't stop until you bless me. And this is what modern Christians need to do. We have to wrestle with the angel until we emerge from our struggle with a new surety. And I want to argue that the following is absolutely key. This kind of remembering that we're going to discuss is an act of will. I want to focus on this for a good bit of our remaining time. The practice of remembrance is an act of the will. I have argued that we can be intellectually persuaded of God while still having a sense of his unreality, Our tacit sense of things can be in tension with our intellectual grasp of them, and that background noise is not going to change anytime soon. It is what it is. What can change is us. Not in the sense that technologically mediated reality will not continue to find its echo in us any more than the figure of an attractive member of the opposite sex will ever cease to be attractive to us. But take this example. If we have a strong tendency to lust, how does that change? Certainly not through getting rid of attractive people. God forbid. Rather, we change. Think of the parallel. We know objectively that lusting is bad, that it objectifies that person over there, that it is not dignified, that it is not even ultimately fulfilling to the wonder and freedom of pure sexuality. And yet, this objective knowledge does not mean that in the moment of temptation, in a culture telling us thousands and thousands of times a day that our deepest fulfillment is to be found in objectification, that our tacit sense of things in that moment is not entirely in tension with what we know to be true. The world surely often seems very much like lust is better, more beautiful, more good than what we know to be good. What changes is not the fact of our temptation, not the background noise, but the person. And we have been thrust into and find ourselves in a situation where to bring together this objective good with our subjective sensibilities and tacit plausibility structures actually takes training, exercise, discipline, and faithfulness. So this morning, previous lecture, we emphasized God implicitly as the highest object of the human mind, being. I guess it's not afternoon yet. All right, this before noon. I want to emphasize that God is the highest object of human desire, of human longing. God is beauty and love and plentitude. When we seek God with these both aligned, our minds and our wills, which are interacting but separate, then we are seeking God with our whole person. And is this not what scripture refers to when it refers to seeking God? Hebrews speaks of those who believe that God is and that He is the rewarder of those who seek Him. God desires to be sought by mankind. And so let us then finally get back to this clever girl at agnostic camp who we met yesterday. The question is, could God be more obvious than he is? Could he erase all atheism? Could he overcome all intellectual doubt in an instance? Yes, yes, and absolutely yes. But he doesn't. Why? Because God is only interested in his revelation being clear enough for the purposes he has in revealing himself. And God is actually not that interested in people simply believing that he exists. Think of the parallel even with Jesus and the Gospels. How often does Christ actually conceal his teaching and his identity precisely because he knows that people will simply abuse his teaching and seek to manipulate his identity for their own ends? Christ is most clear to those who pursue, who hunger, and who thirst, and he fills them, as in the case of the woman at the well. This does not mean that his identity was as such unclear. It means that he was not interested in maximal clarity. His clarity was fitting to his purposes in coming and revealing himself and his father. And so it is with God in natural revelation. God is not interested in people merely believing in him. If they do, great. If they don't, that is not necessarily any worse than when they did. So why fix it? Was, after all, that medieval world suffused with divine agency, what some people call the sacramental universe, a world of godliness, of love of God, of pursuit of his kingdom? No. Was ancient Israel full of faithful Hebrews because God's cloud was in their midst? No. was the New Testament church, fine and dandy because they had the immediacy of this spirit's movement. Read the book of 1 Corinthians. In each of these cases, God's presence was more clear in a relevant sense than it is to us, and yet human beings were no different than they are now. If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, Christ says, then neither will they believe if someone rises from the dead. Now, Jesus is not talking about believing in God's existence or power, but believing on God as a child. The problem is, and always has been, the human heart and the human head only by implication. What this highlights, then, is that while the temptation to atheism is not necessarily a vice, overcoming that temptation does require the formation of virtue. And a lot could be said here. And I don't have very much time. And so I fear my reflections will be sporadic, suggestive, and terribly incomplete. But I want to mention at least three ways that the will is involved in remembering God. First, in the context of intellectual temptation, it is likely more important for us than for many of our spiritual forefathers to go over our reasons for thinking what we think again and again. This need not be done from a posture of doubt, but our minds do not float free of our bodies and our contexts and our stories. And without the exercise of reminding ourselves why we believe the things that we do believe, we will perhaps tend to make ourselves vulnerable, more vulnerable, to all the tacit and explicit assaults on our faith. In a moment, I'll suggest a list of three items. And I think this is really important, because that could be read as saying, go read a bunch of books on apologetics. It's actually not. In a moment, I'll suggest a list of three items, which I think we need to constantly go back to, constantly re-persuade ourselves of. So that for in a moment. Second, I don't think we can underestimate the importance of the church in our battle with temptation, these temptations. Christ established a community around the word precisely to help and encourage one another. Like any community, the church can sometimes feel very alienating to the doubting Christian, especially when everyone seems to get it while you don't. But it can also be alien in that it unjams your reality signals, so to speak. I can certainly say that for myself, many simple statements from other believers have encouraged me over the years and helped reorient me in the context of a sort of navel-gazing on we, and have reminded me that I'm small and I'm fragile. It would not at all surprise me if many of those who lost their faith have been those who first abandoned assembling together with other believers, or who had become a sort of psychological island that was not vulnerable to visitors. Third, the spiritual disciplines. If we must exercise our minds, if we must meet together with a community of practitioners, we must also exercise our bodies and our hearts in such a way as to reorient our loves, to reorient our sense of what is real and most valuable. This also applies to corporate Christian worship. While the mind can be persuaded that a thing is true, it is often the disciplines and postures of the body, faking it till you make it, that actually reorients our more tacit sensibility. And this takes devotion, practice, and again, it takes will. Marriage counselors know all about this. If a husband and a wife are struggling in their marriage and struggling to see good in one another, even though they know good to objectively be there, one practice is actually deciding to utter thankful words for your spouse. If a man commits to actively thanking God every day for five good things about his wife, and a wife commits herself to thanking God every day for five good things about her husband, their hearts are often inevitably reoriented because they are re-narrating the world to themselves, sending different signals which access those very same neuroplastic portals that process reality in general. Only the difference is that this takes actively shaping our cognitive inputs rather than mere passivity as it pertains to the world around us and our emotions. In other words, it takes a strategy. So, let's capitalize on that word strategy. Let's strategize together. I said above that I want to emphasize three things that I think will help reorient our sense of reality. I would like to go over these then and conclude with a few final comments. The three bits I want to emphasize fit largely within the first point, things we need to remember. God is pure actuality. We can say that a bunch of different ways. God is being himself. We can call it that. Second, God is for me in Christ. And third, human beings made in God's image are guilty of sin before God. I actually think from a faith perspective, from an apologetics perspective, these are actually the most important central truths to go back to. Now. One of the things that our reflection yesterday leads to is a vision of God that is deeply mysterious and absolute. So here we're thinking of God as pure being, pure actuality, being himself. One of the things our reflection yesterday leads to is a vision of God that is deeply mysterious and absolute. God is absolute personhood who sustains the entire cosmos in being, who donates life to it, and which before him is but a drop. The atheist love, actually, for looking at big cosmic images is actually quite helpful here. Not far from the kingdom of heaven, we might say. The human is haunted by the big and the other, and the universe is so fantastically large. Its nooks and its crannies are unimaginable and unimaginably beautiful. We truly cannot comprehend its vastness, and yet before God, it is less than nothing. It is all incredibly specific thisness as opposed to thatness, and an unimaginable potentiality of could have been different, And yet, these are, this is, these particular beings, because God in his wisdom wanted this world and this universe and these physical laws, this human race and this history. And we must cultivate this sensibility in us and in our atheist neighbors, that the oceans are but a drop in his palm, that the king's heart is in his hand, that he rides on the storm, that he controls the seas, that life and death are in his hands. He is unimaginable. And while the highest object of human reflection, the rock bottom infinite concrete against whom human reflection smashes into pieces, and if so, And this is important. If so, if that's who God is, how should we not expect mystery? Now, and I want to insist on this, this is not an intellectual punt. It is rather to say that if I am confronted with something that I don't understand, and there are many things that I'm confronted with that I don't understand, this does not negate God any more than it negates the mystery of quantum field theory, which I also don't understand. What is more, such lack of understanding is precisely what I'd expect of my finitude attempting to grasp the infinite when I cannot even grasp all of the finite, much of the finite. The only world In which this could be rendered a philosophically unpardonable sin is a world which is irreducibly manipulable to my control over which the human mind is a greater order of being and human control a greater order of agency. But we are absolutely dependent upon the free upholding of God's creative word. We are a vapor. It seems to me that the moment we grasp this, the moment we truly grasp that it is metaphysically necessary that there be a God before whom we are all less than nothing, the shape of our questions change. He does not stand anymore before us as one owing an account. We stand before him. It is fascinating to note the hubris of the modern problem of evil in this respect. Why do I call it modern? Isn't it ancient? The problem of evil is ancient, but take note. The problem of evil is presented as something like this. If evil exists, God cannot both exist, be good, and be sovereign. So which one of those do we get rid of? We say he doesn't exist. Or we say that God is not absolutely in control. In the ancient world, this would have been insane. Of course God exists. Of course he's in control. But is he good? That's what the psalmist actually struggles with. And that's what most of the world struggles with. Even if it is metaphysically necessary that God is, we are still left with the more ancient version, then, of the problem of divine absence. And that question is of his fault. Goodness. And that leads to my second point of remembrance, which I'll get to in a moment. First, I just want to, as an aside, I want to highlight that this first act of remembrance I want to say that I'm not sure we have an imagination shaped to grasp this in the modern world. That God exists in his great and mysterious means saying that his ways are above our ways is perhaps the height, saying that is perhaps the height of intellectual rationality rather than a punt, an easy punt of laziness. It means to see God or to say God is to say, wow, and to know our finitude, but our culture sends us thousands and thousands of messages every day which trivialize the greatest good, which cultivate in us a mind and a heart which can't imagine this, which can't feel something about something like that, a world which is awash in triviality. Religion, which reduces God to the shape of my wishful thinking, In as much as modern atheists preserve a deeper sense of wowness about anything, they are ironically the best of the world's religious. In any case, once this is clear, what does that leave us with? Reality is what it as it is. Sometimes it sucks. Sometimes it's hard. Much of it is disintegrated by evil. And so the ancient question of evil, is God laughing? Is he an uncaring demon? Is he a father to be hated? And I think we're talking when we ask that question. I think that's the real question. I think that's the deepest question. I think it's the brave question. If our first remembrance then took us to Aquinas, to Aristotle, it only took us as far as a Muslim, traditional Jew, a Hindu, a Buddhist might go. Indeed, as David Bentley Hart has shown in his wonderful book, The Experience of God, much of what I have argued so far would be agreed upon by most of these groups and would excite them. And yet, Paul's statements in 1 Corinthians 15 haunt me. If Christ has not been raised, then we have no hope and we are still in our sins. If Christ has not been raised, then we must eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. If so, I think this first point is not enough. God as pure being must also be God for me. And if the former took us to Aquinas, I think the latter takes us to Luther. God is for you. The reason I know God is good is because God has actually sought to resolve human evil in himself. The reason I know God is good is because he's forgiven my sins. The reason I know God is good is because Christ has been raised from the dead, because the Spirit has been sent, because he is making the world into the kingdom of God, This does not mean I know why this particular evil event happened, or why God didn't stop this or that evil thing. I don't. I, in fact, suspect He stops evil all the time, and we don't recognize it because He stopped it. But why does this particular thing happen? I don't know. But I do know why not. And it is not because God is unconcerned. In Christ, we see the smiling face of God to the sinner who lives in ethical tension with him. In Christ, God has sought us. We have not ascended to heaven, but he has rather descended to earth. Christ is the presence of God, which answers all divine absence. Where are you? Where are you? Where are you? The answer to this is a cross, a resurrection, a spirit, forgiven sins, and renewed living eternal hope. No person has an ultimate answer to the problem of evil, but I would argue that only in the Christian message of the resurrection do we have a definitive answer to what the problem is not. And note how beautifully I think these two remembrances work together and go back and forth to one another. God is pure beatitude and love, pure being, and we find ourselves in a contingent world which he didn't need for himself. He made it in love. It's already a pure gift, pure donation, pure contingency, purely an act of his freedom. And this must be. And yet we find ourselves in a situation where all is not well. But it is a world into which we have then no reason to imagine that God cannot and would not speak and intrude and address its brokenness. Creation is already his free act, revealing himself as not a different sort of act. A miracle is not a different sort of power than the power it took to create in the first place. Divine speech is not more impressive. than upholding a contingent world which has not being in itself by the power of his word. The very shape of the puzzle piece of reality and our experience of it fits its complementing puzzle piece in the special revelation of the gospel, that God is for us and that he's the rewarder of those who seek him, and that he has fundamentally sought after us in Christ. What I want to highlight here is just how much the shape of what we agree upon with the sages of the nations actually resonates with and quite seamlessly is fitted with what is specially revealed in the gospel. And this is why we call Christ the desire of the nations, right? Let's get to our third call of remembrance. Human beings made in God's image are guilty before God. To say that God is interested in being sought by whole persons is not to say that whole persons often seek Him. Indeed, it is precisely what they do not do. And this is because we are in ethical tension with God. It is because we actively see Him as an object to be manipulated for our ends rather than an end in Himself. Our minds and our hearts stir. with an ancient echo, but we fill them and distract them with thing after thing, and we are creatures of distraction and of a pathological sort. Our failure to seek God is not a warranted inference from the world as it reveals itself to us, but rather a sort of insanity of our species, a refusal to eat the real bread and wine for which we were made and which are ever before us and available, but to fatten ourselves on their artificial surrogates. It was really fun, actually, to read the sages of the world on this. They actually, I encourage everyone to do so, they do actually often see the problem, and they often diagnose it fairly well. And they pursue all sorts of solutions and asceticism, discipline, new perspectives, harmony, balance, love, sacrifice, perhaps even claiming divine revelation along the way. But what remains suppressed, I think, usually, among many of the sages is guilt. So let's face it. We can't just promise to do better. We violated and we've sinned. We failed. We stand before the ground of our being as violators of his bond with us. We're born in sin. And our race perpetuates ruination. And we really can't imagine what a big deal this is until we get God right. Sin is not trivial because God is not trivial. To reject the fountain of all beauty and goodness, to whore ourselves after fake copies of the one in whom is our every breath, who is closer to our being than we are to ourselves, is cosmic treason. We must cultivate the psychological and intellectual capacity to feel this in our bones. It's not trivial. There is a problem. And there's guilt. As we must remember, though, that God upholds us in being as a pure gift, we must also recognize our own ethical tension with him. And most of the world's sages, I think, fail to see this sufficiently as a problem. If, in our second point, Christ's work is the only moment wherein we see a definitive answer to what the problem of evil is not, it is also the only moment that captures sufficiently how bad evil itself is. The cross says that sin cannot just be ignored or made up for. We're guilty. And as Anselm writes, if you want to see how bad it is, look at the cost it took to fix. That's a modern translation. And now again, here we highlight the seamlessness of natural and special revelation, this time as it applies to our guilt. If God has made us freely and generously, and we are in ethical tension with him, are we not dependent upon him for the solution, not on our ascent, but on his descent, his further free act in defeating evil and in renewing us? The necessity of God himself to intervene amidst human unfaithfulness has perhaps never better been captured than in the second chapter of Hosea's prophecy. I'm going to read you the second chapter of Hosea's prophecy. Of course, it's coming in the context of a history of very unfaithful Israel. They come back, they go away, they come back, they go away. And finally, God says, This is sort of a portion of the Old Testament where God says, well, I have to intervene. This will only get fixed if I intervene. So here's a prophecy from the second chapter of Hosea. Therefore, behold, I will allure her, bring her into the wilderness, and speak kindly to her. Then I will give her vineyards from there, and the valley of Achar as a door of hope. And she will sing there as in the days of her youth and in the day when she came up from the land of Egypt. It will come about in that day declares the Lord that you will call me a she and you would no longer call me badly for I will remove the names of the balls from your mouth from her mouth so that they will be mentioned. They will be mentioned by their names no more. In that day, I will also make a covenant with them, with the beasts of the field, the birds of the sky, and the creeping things of the ground, and I will abolish the bow, the sword, and war from the land, and will make them lie down in safety. I will betroth you to me forever. I will betroth you to me in righteousness and justice, in loving kindness and in compassion. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness. Then you will know the Lord. It will come about in that day that I will respond, declares the Lord. I will respond to the heavens and they will respond to the earth. And the earth will respond to the grain, and the new wine, and to the oil. And they will respond to Jezreel. I will sow her for myself in the land. I will also have compassion on her who has not obtained compassion. And I will say, though, to those who were not my people, you are my people. And they will say, you are my God." I think you can read all the literatures of the world and not read that. The God who broke through nothing and made something, intruded into this world to speak to our forefathers, intruded into history to reveal himself to Israel, has intruded most fully and finally in Christ, in his cross and in his resurrection, and says, I have taken your guilt here. I will forgive you here. I will bind myself to you here. Many gods in the literatures of the world exercise mercy. But here, God forgives his enemies by sheer grace, not by ignoring the enormity of their crime, but by drinking his own righteous judgment in the person of Christ to the very last drop. Personally, I can say I've never had a time of doubt where I could bring myself to find it plausible that this was the invention of men. It is scandalous, and it's the positive side of the statement that God does indeed work in mysterious ways. Here we do not abrogate our critical judgment, but we adore his. Finding in Christ divine actions which minister to reality as it actually manifests itself to us historically, corporately, and individually. So three remembrances. We're not left without questions. We have rather confronted reality as manifested in God's general revelation in nature and his special revelation in scripture. And we are rather left reoriented to relook at our questions. We are left as creatures, guilty creatures, asking questions to a God who is necessarily beyond comprehension and who is demonstrably and irrefutably good. And who, if he cares about our guilt at the cost of his son, cares about our whole selves and his whole creation, how will he not, with Christ, as Paul says, freely give us all things? The God who would bear the curse in the person of his son is not a God who does not care about the economy or the welfare of a nation, about the triumph of justice, that you want your child to get into a certain school, that you want a particular job, that you are lonely, that you are sick, or that you have a headache. He might answer no to some of these requests for his very good reasons. But he has shown that he is God for you, for us. And so I want to conclude with a few final reflections. I've said already that we're left with not a new set of answers to our questions, but a new posture from which we begin asking the questions in the first place. There are lots of mysterious questions concerning the relationship of humankind to Adam, how it's fair that we have corporate guilt, how it is that God can be sovereign over the cosmos in history and that we can be responsible for our actions, how to interpret the boundary between evil as a tragedy and evil as a judgment for sin. I have all of these questions still. And perhaps we can take up some of them in the Q&A. I'm not telling you I'll have answers. But all of these questions sit atop three basic, demonstrable, in-front-of-your-face realities. God is great beyond my comprehension. I am a fallen, fragile, and contingent creature who sees the smallest bit of reality. And God has demonstrated himself to be good. I do not see how all that fits together, but why should I? That would be asking me, perhaps, to understand how every property of the universe relates to every other property of the universe. And I cannot, and you cannot even imagine such a calculus. But I'm insisting right now that this is not a cop-out. It's a rational conclusion. I'm arguing that this is the shape of reality, and therefore necessarily confronts the questioner with the pedestal upon which they question. And we question as creatures who have been given enough for our pilgrimage. And if Christ is not enough, then neither will you believe if, insert anything here, fill in the box, fill in the blank. And this is not because reality is not clear enough. It is because our hearts are angry. which itself speaks to a deeper pathology and a distorted vision of the good. I'm speaking with confidence about this because I think Christians should be confident about this and seek to cultivate confidence in themselves. Not a confidence born of self-flattery or some inflated sense of intellectual superiority. Not many of us are wise and strong, Paul says. No, Christians should speak with a confidence born of confronting reality at its hardest edges. It is not that we couldn't be wrong in as much as we're creatures. It is that nevertheless, we find ourselves confronted with reality in its clarity. And we can only echo it back. And that's where I think the apologetics, a word, a moment about apologetics, I think the apologetics of ordinary believers is actually very valuable here. Most believers don't read a bunch of books. Often they just say things like, can't God just do that because he's God? Actually, many books could be written to work out the mechanics of that sentence, but they could not revise that most fundamental and basic insight. In fact, God can do that because he's God. Many of our grandmothers are confident that God is because they are comforted when they're sad. They're joyful in their uncertainty. They know a beauty amidst distortion and a certain and unshakable truth, reality himself, which cannot be removed by men. though this is perhaps to subjectivize it too much, the reason they are confident is not just because of God's comforting act, though it is that, but because of the relation of that act to all of God's other acts. The God in whom they trust is a God who is being himself, who's created, who's spoken, who's organized, who's directed, who's planned, who's intruded, who's sustained, who's forgiven, and has done so for all time, and is available to them right then and there. Same guy. In scriptures, trusting God is never abstract, but is always connected to a pedigree of clear activities that reveal to historical and contingent creatures just who it is that they trust in. Graney might not be competent to ward off all the objections to this, but inasmuch as the objections ultimately have basic reality and its historical manifestation as their object, those objections are founded on nothing. This orientation to and confidence in basic realities is particularly important when we confront the hard questions of scripture and of theology. They're difficult. The Bible has lots of bits which are hard to understand and which might be thrown in our face as those things which render us gullible. And what, of course, of other religions? What about the relationship of human responsibility to divide sovereignty? I've tried to present a two-edged sword response to this. On the one hand, a reorientation to God himself enables us to reassess what is ultimately plausible and implausible. And secondly, the shape of reality and its basic questions are spoken to in Christian revelation, I would argue, in a unique fashion. And its emphasis on God for me, and particularly God for me in my and in our most basic existential crisis, which is to say our guilt, it echoes with the same voice of the one who called creation into being out of nothing. This does not de-incentivize, though, the pursuit of these other questions. any more than the basic truths of a scientific paradigm, de-incentivized trying to figure out the unclear bits of that paradigm. There are actually very helpful treatments of the difficult portions of the Old Testament and the New Testament, of the historicity of events, of the relationship of God's sovereignty to human freedom, of the nature of corporate guilt, lots of these questions. And just as a practical aside, one filter for finding the good ones, there's lots of them on all of those subjects, but I think my own preferred filter for finding the good ones is to find the ones that show how these questions, how these items under our consideration are parallel to questions and problems which obtain whether or not Christianity is true. Is divine sovereignty and human freedom a uniquely Christian problem? And is corporate guilt a uniquely Christian problem? Why do human beings sacrifice? We talk about how does the atonement work, why sacrifice? Well, it would be interesting, I think, if I wanted to ask that question and think through it, I might want to find somebody who thinks through it by observing the fact that sacrifice happens all throughout the world, apart from Christianity. What's going on? What echo is reflected there? How does it still show up, even though we think it's gone? How do we understand human freedom and responsibility in any vision of the universe? Here's an interesting one. Why are we sympathetic? This is a corporate guilt one. Are we sympathetic sometimes to radical environmental movements who look at the whole human race as a cancer which is destroying the earth? Is that a secularized corporate guilt? Interestingly, the movie Noah was, the movie Noah was really interesting in this, if anybody saw it. It was actually, it made plausible God being very angry at the world for destroying it. It's not biblical. It's not particularly biblically accurate or anything. But it was interesting in that you do feel like humans should be judged. And I thought that was a fascinating. You can see, read it in a radical environmental way. But there was some sense of kind of corporate guilt that I think is parallel, perhaps a cryptic echo of concepts we take also from scripture, natural revelation. The treatments that ask and answer the questions on that level are just dealing with reality. Most of the time, those who trivialize or are trying to embarrass you with the Bible are simply shallow readers of the Bible, and demonstrably so. But all that to say, this reoriented posture I'm talking about does not de-incentivize going back to these questions. But we can't look at all those questions right now. Let's just look one last time at this one. Let us ask once again as dependent creatures why it is that God doesn't show up. Why does he allow me to struggle? Why won't he just appear when I need him to and when I beg him to? I want to look at this Christianly one last time. I've said that God's clarity is suited to the purposes he has in revealing himself. But why is he not interested in being more clear to me? Who wants to know him? Is his absence a divine judgment on the world? Certainly that's part of the answer. But even in the Genesis account, note that it's not entirely the case, the pre-fallen account. In the Genesis account, note that God apparently comes and goes from the garden. even before the fall. There's still some distinction between God's divine heavenly realm and man's earthly dwelling place. And while God descends into the garden, as he later descends into Israel's tabernacle, God's presence is accompanied by God's absence. This is why God can say, where are you, Adam? And Adam can say, and I'm paraphrasing now, I heard you coming and I was afraid. In Israel, God comes and goes. He is silent, and then he speaks. He speaks to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and then he is apparently silent as his people live in slavery for centuries. He shows up and redeems them, sets up a tabernacle, a priesthood, a kingship, though the nation of Israel ultimately disobeys and goes into exile. But not long after the exile, God is apparently absent for several centuries again. And then he comes climactically in the person of Christ, and yet, this is the weirdest one. Note, even Jesus himself, after the resurrection, goes away. He ascends into heaven. Just when it would seem that God is finally with us permanently, he goes away. He bridges this absence through the spirit, who feeds us as God fed his people manna in the wilderness. But even this is often experienced as an absence, a silence, a context that necessitates trust, which the spirit nevertheless works in us through word, sacrament, and prayer. And so we still long for a time when heaven and earth come together and the presence of God with men is permanent. So what's going on here? Why all this absence, even in creation and even in Christ? I believe the answer to this is largely in front of our face, and that is that we're contingent creatures who develop. We mature, and we mature and change and are perfected by means of shifting circumstances and their challenges. God actually gave Adam, for instance, a task to cultivate and keep the garden and to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth, to subdue it and rule over it. Adam was to grow in this. Adam was meant to become a man, to be perfected and to be crowned with glory. In his failure, we failed all. But this maturing structure is still built into us. The British sociologist Anthony Giddens, for instance, writes about the way in which infants develop through their parents' absence as well as through their presence. This is Giddens. Quote, crucial to the intersection of trust with emergent social capabilities on part of the infant is absence. Here at the heart of the psychological development of trust, we rediscover the problematic of time-space distanciation. For a fundamental feature of the early formation of trust is trust in the caretaker's return. A feeling of the reliability, yet independent of experience of others, central to a sense of the continuity of self-identity is predicated upon the recognition that the absence of the mother does not represent a withdrawal of love. Trust thus brackets distance in time and space and so blocks off existential anxieties which, if they were allowed to concretize, might become a source of continuing emotional and behavioral anguish throughout life." Note here that without absence, the very experience of presence is very different. It is actually absence which makes us associate presence with not just a given, but personal love, reliability, and agency, which will never abandon us or fail to return. And God desires his contingent creatures to know this. And so he does not just create beatitude, but he creates history. a history which involves a dialectic of comings and goings, presences and absences, failures and successes, precisely so that we will develop and be cultivated into the sort of person he has made us to be. And this is built into the very structure of things. And when we fail to mature, What does he do but enter into our humanity through Christ to bring it in him to its intended perfection and glory? In Christ, the maturity which was always meant to be ours is achieved, our nature is perfected, and we are given the fruits of his labor through the Spirit who nevertheless then echoes that same narrative in us. Though Christ is the ultimate pattern, like him, we suffer and grow and mature and enter the glory which he has already achieved. In some sense, One might say, locked herein are deep questions of why God has made history in the first place. Why is he interested in development and change and something which goes from one stage to the next? To some extent, this is built into the very structure of finitude. But history is more than mere capacity for change. In any case, what does it mean when we find ourselves begging to see God and he does not show up? When he effectively and providentially says, no. It means, my grace is sufficient for you. I've already shown up. I've already raised from the dead. I've already forgiven your sins. And just as I've done all this for your good, so for your good I want you to grow up. I want you to be strong. Trust me, I'll carry you. I will allow you to suffer, but I will carry you through. I will allow you to hit the bottom, but there you will find the eternal living and true God, and you will say with joy, this is enough. Like Job, you will be reoriented in the gravity of God. This is the reality that many of our grandmothers know, and it is a deeper insight than can be found in all of Aquinas. Indeed, Aquinas himself called all of his work straw compared to the simple personal knowledge of God, the absolute person. And is this not then the counter-ethic to the attractiveness of the atheist bravery narrative in all its hubris? Can it be that we are brave enough to say that in spite of evil, like the frightened child in the crib, in spite of raped children, in spite of racial tension and genocide and war, that God is here and he is good? Not as wishful thinking, not as calling evil good, but as receiving reality just as it is and it must be, despite what the world often feels like. Perhaps, indeed, atheism is not bravery after all, but rather capitulation. Perhaps it is an intellectual, spiritual, and psychological failure to endure. It is a failure to say that God, that the good, is greater and denser and more fundamental and deeper and wider, that love is higher, that all is grounded in the infinite plenitude of God's pure being, which is love himself, who was God for us through the trauma of rape to the discomfort of wrist pain. This is just orientation to reality, despite the mixed signals of our contingent order. This is precisely the sense I get when I meet those who confess God's goodness in the faith of the death of a child, for instance. Each of us has met several persons who do so from unthinkable grief. And let's be honest, when we are confronted with them, they do not come off as though they need a crutch. but as though they are deeply conscious that their story is not ultimate. Rather, God is ultimate, and his goodness and eternal being are still greater realities and contain a greater reality and a greater gravity than death and pain. Indeed, the Christian faith stands in profound critique of human avoidance. Humans avoid pain and suffering and doubt and insecurity. They avoid the truth about their world and about themselves. Even when they are honest, they stop short, often, of the deepest diagnosis and hide the unsavory bits of reality. Christianity is so profoundly human in its confrontation of the human and the human's world and its brokenness, fragility, and discomfort. And these are not overcome through removal from finitude, from avoiding attachments, which is just to say an avoidance of love. We do love. We are attached. We stay in bodies. But our reality is not the reality. Our story is not the story. Our darkest selves are not avoided or smoothed over, but recognized and then taken up into a greater self and history. which is not to say that we see it all through some pure act of intellection. We simply see enough to have every reason to trust the fundamental goodness of being and of the person who enacts his cosmic drama on its stage, which is to say that we can trust chiefly because of a cross and a resurrection without which all our musings and practices are vain, without which we eat and drink and be merry. And so a final thought concerning human practices. It has, in fact, always been true that the reality, the woe-ness of God, is most clear to those who will God, to those who love and seek him. This is not because he is more obvious in creation as such. Philosophy has always been able to establish the idiocy of our tendencies, our collective insanity. Rather, reality itself is more manifest to those who love because, these words I hope express it well, because our capacity to be revealed to is enhanced when we love. When one has a lover, they observe little things about them, not by inventing them, not by constructing them, but by posturing themselves to have the sheer otherness of that person confront them in all the particulars. The best scientist, by comparison, is not the one who approaches with an agenda, but who study and observation are crying out to be revealed to, to be confronted with the objects of their observation. As you can see, our very way of stating what is happening in scientific observation makes all the difference for whether or not we consider creation personal. It is about us? Is it about us? Or are we human beings that mysterious receptacle who is spoken to, communicated with, and who can refine our ears and our other faculties to listen for reality's subtler voices? This is as true when we are trying to more deeply understand tree bark as when we are trying to more deeply understand God. Both postures, both take postures and practices and pursuit. Failure to attend to the finer notes is not a function of their non-existence, but rather of our distraction, suppression, or our treating them as insignificant. It is virtuous to really want to learn and to know. And this hunger and virtue is formed through practices and communities and reflection. These public realities, public realities, actually show our common intuitions to be odd. But like ancient Israel in its own struggle with respect to divine absence, simply knowing that God is, is not finally openness to reality. Rather, what is required is an openness and seeking that which resonates at the frequencies at which we are sought. And this being sought shows up in both nature and special revelation. The world manifests itself to us and will manifest more if we answer back with opening ourselves to it more. The way, again, a good scientist refines his instruments, his or her instruments of observation to increase their capacity to be revealed to by creation. The instruments don't make the world, but only enhance our capacity to receive the world. Similarly, God has spoken more clearly and ultimately in scripture. And we know it and understand it the more we open ourselves to it as receivers, as hearers, as listeners. Here, God has spoken in Christ and we respond and are further able to listen more deeply and to know and learn more. This ultimately takes the love of knowing and of understanding And we are, perhaps as a culture, the worst listeners in history. We know, but we know very shallowly. We are addicted to the quick and the pithy. Just note, QED, most books on the Bible. And indeed, when we listen to creation and we listen to God's speech in scripture, we find that we are not ultimately the seeker. but that we are being sought, that we can answer back, that he has stirred an unrest in us, which opens up all of reality in its plenitude and beauty, and which, despite tragedy, is most fundamentally good. Our seeking God is what some would call middle-voiced. Active voice, passive voice. Middle voice is a tense. Am I getting that right? Tense, if they have another language. That's not right. Anyway, our seeking God is middle-voiced. A doing which is more fundamentally a done-to. An example of middle voice in English, that kind of concept, would be, you know, I slept. Sleep is, am I doing sleep? That's different than saying I ran. So it's said in the active, but it's also a kind of done-to thing. Sleep happens to me, even though I put it in the active voice. So our seeking God is middle-voiced in that sense. It's a doing, which is more fundamentally a done-to. And this gets us back to the will with which we started. God's pursuit of us is not in the manner of working on a machine, but rather employs our agency, our creaturehood, and our freedom. And it is precisely to his glory that out of such freedom he infallibly accomplishes his purpose in history and in eternity. The theologian Hermann Bavink says it very masterfully when he says this, quote, A freedom that cannot be obtained and enjoyed aside from the danger of licentiousness and caprice is still always to be preferred over a tyranny that suppresses liberty. In the creation of humanity, God himself chose the way of freedom, which carries with it the danger and actually the fact of sin as well, in preference to forced subjection. Even now, in ruling the world and in governing the church, God still follows the royal road of liberty. It is precisely his honor that through freedom he nevertheless reaches his goal, creating order out of disorder, light from darkness, a cosmos out of chaos." End quote. I think this is precisely right and both illuminates and relieves our problem in LATIC one last time. Note also the corporate emphasis here. Divine speech illuminates reality largely because it concerns humanity rather than just you and me. Most of the world can tell you that the modern West is very much out of touch with reality on this score, this issue of sort of corporate versus individual emphasis and identity. shaped as its sense of the primacy of the individual is by the mediating technologies which make that individualism possible. But perhaps that can be taken up in the Q&A. So for now, let me thank you once again for your attention and your kindness to me. That's it.