Stephen Hawking was a great theoretical physicist and cosmologist, perhaps the most important since Einstein. It is only right that his remains have been interred alongside those of Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey. He was, furthermore, a person of tremendous courage and perseverance, accomplishing groundbreaking work despite a decades-long struggle with the debilitating effects of Lou Gehrig’s disease. And by all accounts, he was man of good humor with a rare gift for friendship. It is practically impossible not to admire him. But boy was he annoying when he talked about religion!

In the last year of his life, Hawking was putting the finishing touches on a book that is something of a follow-up to his mega-bestselling A Brief History of Time. Called Brief Answers to the Big Questions, it is a series of short essays on subjects including time travel, the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, the physics that obtains within a black hole, and the colonization of space.

But chapter one is entitled simply “Is There a God?” To the surprise of no one who has been paying attention to Hawking’s musings on the subject the last several years, his answer is no. Now, to anyone involved in the apologetics or evangelization game, this is, of course, depressing, since many people, especially the young, will say, “Well, there you have it: the smartest man in the world says that God does not exist.” The problem is that one can be exceptionally intelligent in one arena of thought and actually quite naïve in another. This, I’m afraid, is the case with Stephen Hawking, who, though uniquely well-versed in his chosen field, makes a number of blunders when he wanders into the domains of philosophy and religion.

Things get off to a very bad start in the opening line of the chapter: “Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion.” Though certain primitive forms of religion might be construed as attempts to answer what we would consider properly scientific questions, religion, in the developed sense of the term, is not asking and answering scientific questions poorly; rather, it is asking and answering qualitatively different kinds of questions.

Hawking’s glib one-liner beautifully expresses the scientistic attitude, by which I mean the arrogant tendency to reduce all knowledge to the scientific form of knowledge. Following their method of empirical observation, hypothesis formation, and experimentation, the sciences can indeed tell us a great deal about a certain dimension of reality. But they cannot, for example, tell us a thing about what makes a work of art beautiful, what makes a free act good or evil, what constitutes a just political arrangement, what are the features of a being qua being—and indeed, why there is a universe of finite existence at all. These are all philosophical and/or religious matters, and when a pure scientist, employing the method proper to the sciences, enters into them, he does so awkwardly, ham-handedly. 

Let me demonstrate this by drawing attention to Hawking’s treatment of the last issue I mentioned—namely, why there should be a universe at all. Hawking opines that theoretical physics can confidently answer this question in such a way that the existence of God is rendered superfluous. Just as, at the quantum level, elementary particles pop into and out of existence regularly without a cause, so the singularity that produced the Big Bang simply came to be out of nothing, without a cause and without an explanation. The result, Hawking concludes, is that “the universe is the ultimate free lunch.”

The first mistake—and armies of Hawking’s followers make it—is to equivocate on the meaning of the word “nothing.” In the strict philosophical (or indeed religious) sense, “nothing” designates absolute nonbeing; but what Hawking and his disciples mean by the term is in fact a fecund field of energy from which realities come and to which they return. The moment one speaks of “coming from” or “returning to,” one is not speaking of nothing! I actually laughed out loud at this part of Hawking’s analysis, which fairly gives away the game: “I think the universe was spontaneously created out of nothing, according to the laws of science.” Well, whatever you want to say about the laws of science, they’re not nothing!

Indeed, when the quantum theorists talk about particles popping into being spontaneously, they regularly invoke quantum constants and dynamics according to which such emergences occur. Again, say what you want about these law-like arrangements, they are not absolute nonbeing. And therefore, we are compelled to ask the question why should contingent states of affairs—matter, energy, the Big Bang, the laws of science themselves—exist at all?

The classical response of religious philosophy is that no contingency can be explained satisfactorily by appealing endlessly to other contingencies. Therefore, some finally noncontingent reality, which grounds and actualizes the finite universe, must exist. And this uncaused cause, this reality whose very nature is to be, is what serious religious people call “God.” None of Hawking’s speculations—least of all his musings about the putative “nothing” from which the universe arises—tells against this conviction.

May I say by way of conclusion that I actually rather liked Stephen Hawking’s last book. When he stayed within the confines of his areas of expertise, he was readable, funny, informative, and creative. But could I encourage readers please to take him with a substantial grain of salt when he speaks of the things of God?

Like many others, I have watched the Jordan Peterson phenomenon unfold with a certain fascination. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you don’t spend a lot of time on social media, for Peterson, a mild-mannered psychology professor from the University of Toronto, has emerged as one of the hottest personalities on the internet. He is followed by millions of people, especially young men. His lectures and presentations—cool, understated, brainy, and blunt—are avidly watched and commented upon. And his new book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, is a number one bestseller all over the world. Moreover, Peterson’s spirited and articulate opposition to the imposition of speech codes in his native Canada has made him a controversial political player, a hero of free speech to his supporters and a right-wing ideologue to his detractors. His interview with Cathy Newman of Channel 4 News, during which Peterson’s interlocutor revealed herself as a hopelessly biased social justice warrior, has, as of this writing, been viewed 7.5 million times.

In many ways, Peterson is doing for this generation what Joseph Campbell did for the previous one, namely, reintroducing the archetypal psychology of C.G. Jung in an appealing and provocative manner. Jung’s theorizing centered around what he termed the archetypes of the collective unconscious, which is to say, those primordial instincts, insights, and memories that influence much of our behavior and that substantially inform the religions, philosophies, and rituals of the human race. The Jungian template enables Peterson to interpret many of the classical spiritual texts of Western culture in a fresh way—those very texts so often excoriated by mainstream intellectuals as hopelessly patriarchal, biased, and oppressive. It also permits him to speak with a kind of psychological and spiritual authority to which young people are not accustomed but to which they respond eagerly.

His new book, an elaboration of twelve basic psychological rules for life, makes for bracing and satisfying reading. Peterson’s considerable erudition is on clear display throughout, but so is his very real experience in the trenches as a practicing psychotherapist. His advice is smart indeed, but it never seems abstract, detached, or unrealistic. In the course of this brief article, I can only hint at some of his fascinating findings and recommendations. A theme that runs through the entire book is that of the play between order and chaos, symbolized most neatly by the intertwining fish of the Tao image. Human consciousness itself, Peterson argues, sets one foot in the former and the other in the latter, balancing the known and the unknown, the settled and the unexplored. Too much of one, and we fall into complacency, routine, and at the limit, tyranny; too much of the other, and we lose our bearings completely, surrendering to the void.

The great myths of the hero—from Gilgamesh to Luke Skywalker and Bilbo Baggins—typically recount the story of someone who leaves complacent domesticity behind in order to venture into the dangerous unknown, where he manages to find something of enormous value to his family or village or society. One key to psychological/spiritual fulfillment is to embody this archetype of the hero, to live one’s life as an adventurous exploration of the unknown. So Peterson tells his readers—especially young men, who have been cowed into complacency for various reasons—to throw back their shoulders, stand tall, and face the challenges of life head on. This archetype of the hero also allows us to read the story of Adam and Eve with fresh eyes. In Paradise (the word itself denotes “walled garden”), our first parents were secure and innocent, but in the manner of inexperienced children. Leaving Paradise was, in one sense, a positive move, for it permitted them to grow up, to engage the chaos of the unknown creatively and intelligently. This reading of Genesis, which has roots in Tillich, Hegel, and others, permits us to see that the goal of the spiritual life is not a simple return to the Garden of dreaming innocence, but rather an inhabiting of the Garden on the far side of the cross, that place where the tomb of Jesus was situated and in which the risen Christ appeared precisely as “gardener.”

Peterson’s investigation of the psyche of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was, for me, one of the most illuminating sections of the book. Solzhenitsyn, of course, was a victim of both Hitler and Stalin, a terrorized and dehumanized inmate in the Gulag Archipelago, and one of the most tortured of souls in the terrible twentieth century. It would have been surpassingly easy for him simply to curse his fate, to lash out in anger at God, to become a sullen figure scurrying about the margins of life. Instead, he endeavored to change his own life, to turn the light of his moral consciousness on himself, to get his psychological house in order. This initial move enabled him to see the world around him with extraordinary clarity and, eventually, to tell the story of Soviet depravity with such devastating moral authority. The lesson that Peterson draws from this example is this: if you want to change the corrupt world, “start to stop doing what you know to be wrong. Start stopping today.”

I have shared just a handful of wise insights from a book that is positively chockablock with them. So do I thoroughly support Jordan Peterson’s approach? Well, no, though a full explication of my objection would take us far beyond the confines of this brief article. In a word, I have the same concern about Peterson that I have about both Campbell and Jung, namely, the Gnosticizing tendency to read Biblical religion purely psychologically and philosophically and not at all historically. No Christian should be surprised that the Scriptures can be profitably read through psychological and philosophical lenses, but at the same time, every Christian has to accept the fact that the God of the Bible is not simply a principle or an abstraction, but rather a living God who acts in history. As I say, to lay this out thoroughly would require at least another article or two or twelve.

On balance, I like this book and warmly recommend it. I think it’s especially valuable for the beleaguered young men in our society, who need a mentor to tell them to stand up straight and act like heroes.

The idea of the mystical body of Christ has always been one of great interest to me, as there was always something about it at odds with the mentality in which I was raised: "Be yourself", etc. was (and remains) the mantra of the day, and the whole idea of being but a single part of something larger did not always sit well. I remember being a ten-year-old watching as the Borg stripped Captain Picard of his identity and "assimilated" him into their collective (his pronoun "I" replaced with "we").¹ And of course the Borg were an enemy to be resisted.

Years later, I recall reading Ayn Rand's Anthem (1938) and slowly realizing that the "we" narrating the story was really a single individual, living in a dystopian future scrubbed of the concept of "I" and living under the control of an oppressive, collectivist society. Examples like these would color my view of Plato's Republic the first time I encountered it, as I began my career as a philosophy student, but I've since learned to enjoy Rand's book as an interesting science fiction tale. Not regarding it as quality philosophy, I have instead placed it on the shelf with other, similar works like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1931) and Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano (1952).

Plato's Republic shows us a society (Plato's idea of a perfect one, in fact) where the individual is not considered to be self-sufficient, but a vital part of her or his community, with a role to play as a tradesman, worker, or soldier/guardian. Plato imagines people not as individuals in their own right, but as components in something larger: In Book II of the Republic, Plato tells us that individual humans are the same kinds of things as cities. Human bodies are a collection of living parts (cells, organs, and systems) that work together to accomplish a goal (a successful, healthy life).² Cities, meanwhile, are collections of living parts as well (individual people, families, and institutions). Cities are made of different organizations: schools, energy providers, waste disposal services, businesses providing food and clothing, etc. If you think about it, the human body has systems that perform similar tasks for itself ... and all these systems working together properly give rise to a healthy human being. Plato's argument, therefore, centers on the idea that society comes before the individual.

The individual too, in Plato's view, may be regarded as a kind of collective (a miniature city, according to his analogy), a composite soul made up of cooperating parts. These parts, like people, find themselves at odds and in pursuit, at times, of conflicting goals; Plato sees such internal disagreement as the explanation of temptation.³

Plato's words certainly resonated with me, especially when it was pointed out to me that this was actually quite similar to what St. Paul described when he said of the Church: "For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many" (1 Cor 12:13-14).

This is the mystical body of the Church, which is the mystical body of Christ. The members of the Church act not on their own, but as parts of a larger organism, directed by Christ as their head, and each individual serving a specific role in the service of the whole. As St. Paul explains, "there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; 6 and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone" (1 Cor 12:4-6).

In this view, being a part of a collective and effectively losing one's self to relations with and service for others who also lose themselves is not necessarily an idea to be resisted. Either that, or the collective communities as individuals described by Plato and Paul are dressing the bland reality of Borg life in a more attractive package (something that sounds lovely, but is ultimately the same soul-killing system Ayn Rand imagined in Anthem).

The question, then, is whether we can find reason to accept the Platonic/Pauline ideas of individual life-as-community life as reasonable and accurate. If we could try to objectively consider what individual existence is, without any opinions or preferences regarding our statuses as individuals, what would we discover? A look will shed some interesting discoveries. And as I have the benefit of writing on Plato's city-soul analogy for my doctoral thesis, I have done quite a lot of reading on this question already.

One of the most interesting observations I had the pleasure of reading about comes from the Dutch trauma psychiatrist Bessel Van Der Kolk (2014), who observes that our brains are built to help us function as members of a tribe. In fact, he says, “barely exist as individual organisms”.⁴ This is something we cannot escape, he says, even if we go off on our own and avoid contact with others (Van Der Kolk works with victims of trauma, including victims of childhood abuse who deliberately avoid contact with others in adulthood, as a form of self-protection). He explains: “We are part of that tribe even when we are by ourselves, whether listening to music (that other people created), watching a basketball game on television (our own muscles tensing as the players run and jump) ...”⁵ Most of our energy is devoted to either connecting with others, or in response to the work, actions, or behaviour of other human beings.

Tragically, those of us who do find ourselves withdrawing from the community of others face unfortunate consequences: "[A]lmost all mental suffering involves either trouble in creating workable and satisfying relationships or difficulties in regulating arousal.”⁶ In Van Der Kolk's view, the best way to deal with human suffering comes from dealing with how our problems "interfere with our functioning as members of our tribe."⁷

This unity of experience also has an aspect that ties this idea back to Plato’s Republic. The Dutch philosopher C.A. Van Peursen (1966) describes the “diffuse” existence of the individual (individual existence being secondary to the existence of the community). In and by himself, Van Peursen says, an individual cannot be “cut loose from the social pattern within which alone he comes to be himself.”⁸ In fact, Van Peursen also observes that the word “I” is not even employed in tribal societies; it is only used in relation to another person: “’I-father’, ‘I-uncle’, and so forth.”⁹ Individual identity arises from the group, family, or tribe, and one’s relationship with the others.

In conclusion, the idea of being a part of a collective is not necessarily something to be resisted, if properly understood. When St. Paul describes the Church as such, presenting us with a thing so very much at odds with the attitudes of our time, it may be a great stumbling block toward accepting the Kingdom of God. Also, in teaching Plato's Republic many times over the years, my explanation of the city described by Socrates is often greeted with looks of disbelief and silent head shakes. Yet both ideas might be seen as acceptable (even desirable) if we better understand the nature of the neural "machinery" actually working right now within each of our heads, and how our relationships form us into the people we become. By focusing lesson who we are than what we can do for others, we become less selfish and, somehow, both less and more ourselves. Our identity changes as our focus shifts, but our individual role in the service of others flourishes, breeding a new individual identity.

This idea is nicely summed up, in this story adapted from a famous Japanese folktale. 

"Contrary to popular belief
the tables of Hell are laden
with the most exquisite dishes of food.
Whatever you could possibly desire:
soups, salads, stews, sauces, curries
if you want, fruits, succulent meats
(grilled to order), pastries, ice cream.
The single unusual factor being that
one must eat with a fork three feet long.
Holding it close to the tines you could manage
to eat, but when you do so, a demon immediately
slaps you (or pokes you with his fork),
and says, "Hold it at the other end!"
So getting the food on the fork up to your mouth
is quite impossible, alas, though an abundance
of delicious food is readily available.
 
"In heaven the situation is exactly the same:
same long tables covered with tasty dishes,
same long forks.
The only difference in heaven
is that people feed the person sitting across the table from them."¹⁰

The lesson of this story is this: if we could become less concerned with our own happiness and more concerned with the happiness of our neighbors, it would be a happier world. Rethinking our place among our fellows is the key. One has only to be assimilated willfully; “Anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25).

On Monday, the New Yorker suggested that “the bizarre finale to Sunday night’s Oscar ceremony brought to mind the theory—far from a joke—that humanity is living in a computer simulation gone haywire.” Lest you think that such a self-evidently absurd theory is a mere cry for attention from a dying publication, the idea that we’re all in the Matrix was actually seriously debated at the American Museum of Natural History’s 2016 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate. The list of those partial to this theory include some of the most prominent scientific voices in our culture, and the debate was moderated by one of the most famous:

Moderator Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the museum’s Hayden Planetarium, put the odds at 50-50 that our entire existence is a program on someone else’s hard drive. “I think the likelihood may be very high,” he said.

So how do people this smart end up advocating a theory this absurd? Simply put, because they’re atheistic materialists smart enough to see the implications of their own religious and philosophical views. Three errors in particular are at the root of this:

Mistake #1: Reducing the Mind to a Computer

If you’re a materialist – that is, if you think that matter is all that there is – then two conclusions follow: (a) the “mind” is really nothing more than the brain; and (b) the brain is really nothing more than a highly-advanced computer. You can’t be a materialist and still believe in things like a soul or an immaterial mind. And so, you’re left with arguments like this one, from Oxford’s Nick Bolstrom:

One thing that later generations might do with their super-powerful computers is run detailed simulations of their forebears or of people like their forebears. Because their computers would be so powerful, they could run a great many such simulations. Suppose that these simulated people are conscious (as they would be if the simulations were sufficiently fine-grained and if a certain quite widely accepted position in the philosophy of mind is correct). Then it could be the case that the vast majority of minds like ours do not belong to the original race but rather to people simulated by the advanced descendants of an original race. It is then possible to argue that, if this were the case, we would be rational to think that we are likely among the simulated minds rather than among the original biological ones.

In other words, if there’s no principled distinction between us and computers, then there’s no reason to think that we’re not computers. In fact, there would be good reason to believe that we are. Technology is rapidly advancing, and there are predictions that computational speeds for personal ($1000) devices will surpass the human brain by about 2025 or so:

Continuing that trend into the future, the argument goes, it won’t be long before we will be able to create “Sims” that have the full range of human intelligence. These Sims would have no idea that they weren’t real, and we could create a virtually limitless number of them. So the odds that such a culture has already done that to us means that the mathematical odds that we’re amongst the nearly-limitless Sim population dwarfs the likelihood that we’re real.

Clara Moskowitz, writing in Scientific American, explains:

They [members of this advanced civilization] would probably have the ability to run many, many such simulations, to the point where the vast majority of minds would actually be artificial ones within such simulations, rather than the original ancestral minds. So simple statistics suggest it is much more likely that we are among the simulated minds.”

There are two things to point out about this theory. First, it follows logically from materialism. Second, it’s utterly ridiculous.

If human minds are nothing more than advanced computers, then current computers are nothing less than simple minds. Shouldn’t human rights (or at least animal rights) activists start advocating on behalf of abused laptops? By this reasoning, is there any moral difference between owning an iPhone and owning a slave — and if there is, is it just that the iPhone isn’t smart enough yet?

As far back as 1983, Robert and Mueller were asking, Would an intelligent computer have a “right to life”? And the EU parliament just voted in January in favoring of granting personhood rights to AI, a conclusion promoted by a study sponsored by the U.K.’s Department of Trade and Industry some ten years ago. So that’s where this line of reasoning leads. Or more ominously: once computers become more advanced than human brains (in terms of computational powers), this logic would suggest that human rights ought to be considered inferior to robotic rights. (Ray Kurzweil, one of the leading futurists advocating this, openly recognizes this possibility).

So let’s make a few things clear. First, human life isn’t reducible to consciousness (you’re alive even when you’re unconscious), and consciousness isn’t reducible to computational ability (you’re self-aware, and a calculator is not). These distinctions are true in principle, not just based upon current technology. In other words, the exact moment that Bolstrom’s argument goes wrong is here: “Suppose that these simulated people are conscious (as they would be if the simulations were sufficiently fine-grained and if a certain quite widely accepted position in the philosophy of mind is correct).” Bolstom has aptly (if advertantly) demonstrated why a materialist philosophy of mind can’t be true without leading to absurd conclusions.

Computers might get (and are already getting) very good at mimicking human conversation and thought processes, but that doesn’t mean that they’re actually persons. The mind is not reducible to the brain, and the brain isn’t reducible to a computer. These bad assumptions are built into Bolstrom’s model, and the model suffers as a result.

Mistake #2: Materialism Can’t Account for the Human Person

Closely related to the last point, materialism reduces the human person to a collection of information, or an internal processor, or a collection of cells. Carl Sagan put it this way:

I am a collection of water, calcium and organic molecules called Carl Sagan. You are a collection of almost identical molecules with a different collective label. But is that all? Is there nothing in here but molecules? Some people find this idea somehow demeaning to human dignity. For myself, I find it elevating that our universe permits the evolution of molecular machines as intricate and subtle as we.

But if that were true, if you’re only a collection of molecules, consider what follows. Over the course of your life, you’ve expelled far more molecules (sweating, using the restroom, shedding skin, and the rest) than you currently possess. So why don’t we consider those assorted, discarded cells as the “true” Carl Sagan, or the “true” you?

And you equal the collection of molecules that happen to exist within your body at this exact moment, that collection has only existed for a fraction of a second, and already doesn’t exist by the time you finished reading this sentence. So it follows that you don’t exist, or at least, you’re actually a different person than the one who started reading this. In other words: if materialists are right, you are only a few moments old, and have simply inherited somebody else’s memories.

This problem is nothing new. The seventeenth-century philosopher David Hume argued that minds are “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” As a result, he was logically forced to deny the existence of himself:

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.

This also led him to claim he doesn’t exist when he’s asleep:

When my perceptions are remov’d for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions remov’d by death, and cou’d I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolution of my body, I shou’d be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is farther requisite to make me a perfect non-entity.

Of course, Hume’s argument is self-refuting: if I don’t exist, how is there is neither an “I” capable of stumbling (and certainly not “always” stumbling), nor a stable “myself” upon which to stumble.

In other words, any attempt to reduce human beings to mere matter will always fail, because our matter is in flux. We eat things, we digest, etc. If we don’t have something immaterial like a soul, there’s simply no coherent way we can speak of enduring human consciousness.

Or to put it another way, there is a you that is made up of cells, and has certain information in your brain, and contemplates things mentally, and which has grown and changed in countless ways. You’re not reducible to any of these processes, or to any of the stages of any of these processes, because these are things happening in you and to you.

Mistake #3: Refusing to Consider God as a Possibility

One of the strongest arguments in favor of the “we’re living in a computer simulation” argument is that the universe is filled with evidence of design. Scientific American points out:

And there are other reasons to think we might be virtual. For instance, the more we learn about the universe, the more it appears to be based on mathematical laws. Perhaps that is not a given, but a function of the nature of the universe we are living in. “If I were a character in a computer game, I would also discover eventually that the rules seemed completely rigid and mathematical,” said Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “That just reflects the computer code in which it was written.”
 
Furthermore, ideas from information theory keep showing up in physics. “In my research I found this very strange thing,” said James Gates, a theoretical physicist at the University of Maryland. “I was driven to error-correcting codes—they’re what make browsers work. So why were they in the equations I was studying about quarks and electrons and supersymmetry? This brought me to the stark realization that I could no longer say people like Max are crazy.”

These scientists have rightly seen that the universe appears to be mathematical, rational, and designed in a way that a randomly self-creating universe wouldn’t. Considering the universe to have randomly come-into-being despite its clear order and structure is a bit like assuming that the book you’re reading is the product of a series of random ink spills that happened to produce the letters in just such an order. (And a great many of the New Atheists’ arguments amount to saying, “this book couldn’t have been written, because I didn’t like Chapter 3!”)

Cosmologists like Tegmark and physicists like Gates, each of whom regularly bump into evidence of designedness in the course of their daily jobs, rightly recognize that “the universe just happened” is a bad explanation. It doesn’t account for the design at all. And yet, materialists refuse to accept even the possibility that this might point to the existence of a Divine Creator. The evolutionary biologist Richard C. Lewontin (himself an atheist) lets the cat out of the bag in an essay for The New York Review of Books:

What seems absurd depends on one’s prejudice. Carl Sagan accepts, as I do, the duality of light, which is at the same time wave and particle, but he thinks that the consubstantiality of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost puts the mystery of the Holy Trinity “in deep trouble.” Two’s company, but three’s a crowd.
 
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

So no matter how strong the evidence may be, materialists refuse to accept the possibility that the right answer might be a Divine one. And so, if you recognize that the universe is designed, but refuse to accept God as a possibility, you’re forced to come up with ever-more-convoluted explanations instead. That’s how you end up with amusing moments like Neil deGrasse Tyson, one of the smuggest popular opponents of religion, openly wondering if we live in a computer. Or this line from the philosopher David Chalmers:

And if someone somewhere created our simulation, would that make this entity God? “We in this universe can create simulated worlds and there’s nothing remotely spooky about that,” Chalmers said. “Our creator isn’t especially spooky, it’s just some teenage hacker in the next universe up.”

Part of the hilarity of these absurd explanations is that they’re so short-sighted. The “teenage hacker in the next universe up” apparently lives in a universe just as designed and mathematically-structured as our own, enabling him to code and omnisciently govern this universe. So why is that universe designed? This explanation just kicks the can down the road one step. The attempt to avoid God as an answer succeeds in creating foolish theories, but fails in eliminating the need for God.

In other words, the conversation has gone more or less like this:

Scientists: “You know there’s a lot of evidence that this universe was designed…”
 
Materialists: “NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!!!!! You’d have to be an idiot to believe that!”
 
Scientists: “… maybe it was an alien or a teenage hacker?”
 
Materialists: “Oh, those are valid theories! Let’s consider them carefully!”

There is a more rational explanation, guys. Just let the Divine Foot in the door already.

On February 1, comedian Ricky Gervais appeared on CBS’s The Late Show where he and host Stephen Colbert discussed God and atheism:

Regardless of how you feel about his theological views, Colbert is probably the most famous U.S. celebrity who stands up for the Catholic Faith. His interviews on The Colbert Report with Bart Ehrman and Philip Zimbardo display some of this wit in top form. But Gervais, as opposed to a straight-laced academic, is a fellow comedian whose quick wit made him a formidable opponent. Here are a few of the arguments he made:

The 'One Less God' Objection

Gervais:

"So you believe in one god, I assume. . . . But there are 3,000 to choose from . . . so basically, you believe in—you deny one less god than I do. You don’t believe in 2,999 gods. And I don’t believe in just one more."

The problem with this argument is that it’s like saying to a prosecutor of a murder trial:

"You believe John Smith killed this man? Well, I don’t think anybody killed this man; he died accidentally. I mean, think about it. There are 7 billion potential murderers out there, and you believe that 6,999,999,999 of them did not kill this man. I just believe in one less murderer than you do."

Of course, thoughtful atheists will say, “That’s a bad example! We know murderers exist, but we have no proof any gods exist.”

But that’s not the point.

In the murder example, we know the skeptic is wrong, because, contrary to what he asserts, the prosecutor doesn’t just arbitrarily pick one suspect out of billions, each of whom is equally gulty. Instead, she has good reasons for choosing this one suspect out of all the others. Just because there are thousands of false gods or billions of people who are innocent of a certain crime, it doesn’t follow that there is no true God or no single person who is guilty of a crime.

Christians believe in their God because they have philosophical evidence to show God must be an infinite, self-explained act of being (which disproves the finite gods of mythology). They also have historical evidence that this God uniquely revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ. You can dispute that evidence, but you can’t just dismiss it by pointing to large numbers of claims that compete against it.

The 'Science Wins' Objection

Gervais:

"If we take something like any fiction and any holy book and any other fiction and destroyed it, in a thousand years’ time, that wouldn’t come back just as it was. Whereas if we took every science book and every fact and destroyed them all, in a thousand years they’d all be back, because all the same tests would be the same result."

Gervais said this in response to a salient point Colbert made that Gervais’s explanation that the universe came from a tiny atom apart from God was based on Gervais’s faith in physicists like Stephen Hawking and was not something he could prove himself. Gervais seemed to sense he was in trouble, so he pivoted to the explanation that science has a built-in corrective mechanism and so it will eventually be able to prove itself true, whereas religion can do no such thing.

First, this does not answer Colbert’s original question, “Why is there something instead of nothing?”, since we can still ask, “Why was there a primeval atom instead of nothing at all?” It also doesn’t refute the argument that God created the universe, because—as I show in my book Answering Atheism—science and philosophy point to a beginning of the universe not from an eternal shrunken atom but from pure nothingness, which would require a transcendent cause.

Second, Gervais has created a false dilemma to allow science to claim victory over religion.

He is correct that fiction, which is something an author creates, is not a law or natural feature of the universe. If every copy of Shakespeare, along with every memory of his works, were destroyed, it is extremely unlikely the works of Shakespeare would come back (though similar stories may appear in their place).

Likewise, its true that if we erased the work of Isaac Newton, that wouldn’t erase Newton’s laws of motion. Hopefully they would be rediscovered and, if that happened, they would likely end up being called something else.

But here’s the false dilemma: either truth is scientific and can be proven in a laboratory or else it is unprovable fiction. Since Bible accounts can’t be confirmed by science, they must be fiction.

Imagine a thousand years from now I wanted to prove the statement, “Ricky Gervais was a well-known comedian in the twenty-first century.” If you destroyed every one of Gervais’s television appearances along with every review written about him and also purged him from people’s memories, then I couldn’t prove he existed. Of course, that wouldn’t prove Gervais was a fictional character.

The same is true of the Bible, which is not a scientific explanation of the world but rather a collection of historical testimonies about how God created the world and revealed himself to mankind. If the Bible and everyone who remembered it were destroyed, then, barring more divine revelation, its contents would be forever lost. But just because a statement can’t be demonstrated in a laboratory doesn’t mean it’s not an important truth about the world or humanity itself.

The 'Redefining Atheism' Gambit

Gervais:

"So, this is atheism in a nutshell. You say, 'There’s a god.' I say, 'You can prove that?' You say, 'No.' I say, 'I don’t believe you then.'"

Atheism is either the strong belief God does not exist or the weaker belief that there is no good reason to believe God exists. It’s convenient in Gervais’s example that the believer doesn’t say, “I can’t prove it mathematically, but I have evidence that God exists.” The atheist could still say, “I don’t believe your evidence,” but if he doesn’t give a reason as to why he finds the evidence unconvincing, then he has simply revealed his own pre-conceived notion that God doesn’t exist.

That’s why I like to ask atheists who say there are no good reasons to believe God exists, “What is the best reason someone has offered for believing in God, and what’s wrong with it?” This allows atheists the opportunity to carry their burden of proof and demonstrate that there are no good reasons to believe God exists.

For example, if I said, “There’s no good reason to believe in the Loch Ness Monster,” that would be my opinion. It wouldn’t become a statement about reality worth examining until I provided evidence for it, such as by explaining why the famous “Nessie” photographs are fakes.

Likewise, an atheist who says there’s no good reason to believe in God gives his opinion, but that’s it. If he picked even one strong argument for the existence of God and showed why it fails, then he’d have evidence to support his opinion and encourage others to adopt it. And that’s basically what Gervais did at the beginning of the interview.

When Colbert asked, “Why is there something instead of nothing?”, Gervais waved away the question by saying the “how” is more important than the “why.” But as the late, world-renowned philosopher Derek Parfit once said, “It might have been true that nothing ever existed: no minds, no atoms, no space. When we imagine this possibility, it can seem astonishing that anything exists. Why is there a universe?”

This shows the question deserves an answer, and that answer may include an ultimate, infinite, self-explained reality that philosophers have traditionally called God.

Claims from atheists like Ricky Gervais that “there is no evidence for God” or “science makes God unnecessary” are merely assertions. And, as the late atheist Christopher Hitchens once said, “What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”

I grew up in a loving, comfortable atheist household of professional scientists. My dad was a lapsed Catholic, and my mom was a lapsed Lutheran. From the time that I could think rationally on the subject, I did not believe in God. God was an imaginary being for which there was no proof. At best, God was a fantasy for half-witted people to compensate their ignorance and make themselves feel better about their own mortality. At worst, God was a perverse delusion responsible for most of the atrocities committed by the human race.

What broke the ice? What made me consider God’s existence a real possibility? The Lord of the Rings. I was a young teenager when I first read the Tolkien tomes, and it immediately captivated me. The fantasy world of Middle-Earth oozes life and profundity. The cultures of the various peoples are organic, rooted in tradition while maintaining a fresh, living energy. Mountains and forests have personalities, and the relationship between people and earth is marked by stewardship and intimacy. Creation knowing creation. Tolkien describes these things with beautiful prose that reads like its half poetry and half medieval history. Everything seems “deep” in The Lord of the Rings. The combination of character archetypes and assertive “lifeness” in the novel touches on an element of fundamental humanity. Every Lord of the Rings fan knows exactly what I’m talking about.

In my narrow confines of scientism, I had no way of processing what made Tolkien’s masterpiece so profound. How could a made-up fantasy world reveal anything about the “truth”? But I knew it did, and this changed my way of thinking. Are good and evil merely social constructions, or are they real on a deeper level? Why am I relating to ridiculous things like talking trees and corrupted wraiths? Why was I so captivated by this story that made fighting evil against all odds so profound? Why did it instill in me a longing for an adventure of the arduous good? And how does the story make sacrifice so appealing? The Lord of the Rings showed me a world where things seemed more “real” than the world I lived in. Not in a literal way, obviously; in a metaphorical, beyond-the-surface way. The beautiful struggle and self-sacrificial glory permeating The Lord of the Rings struck a chord in my soul and filled me with longing that I couldn’t easily dismiss.

My attempts to explain these problems in my naturalistic, atheistic worldview fell flat. The idea that being, beauty, and morality were merely productive illusions imposed on us through biological hardwiring crafted through the random process of natural selection rang hollow. If things so fundamental to human existence as meaning and morality are nothing more than productive illusions, what else is untrustworthy? Our five senses? Logical process? Our whole minds? If our being is nothing more than a collection of atoms reacting with each other in enormous complexity through cause and effect chains stretching back to the beginning, then we are floating blindly through space and time: there’s no rhyme, reason, or purpose. And, if that’s the case, then so much of what we consider essentially human is tragic a joke. After all, the human race, the earth, and the universe will go extinct. With a long enough timeline, what’s the point? Even the idea of accomplishing something is finally an illusion. At this juncture, the fruits of atheism were inevitable: nihilism, despair, and, most ironically, confusion.

Though seriously questioning atheism, I still had many objections. If God were real, why isn’t there more evidence for his existence? If God were real, why are there so many religions? Wouldn’t God want to clearly direct humanity to the source of truth? My doubts about atheism, however, continued to haunt me. If the supernatural does not exist, how can there be genuine moral obligations? The classic atheist response is that evolution has created a sophisticated herd instinct in the human race that causes us to want to be good to each other. Those people who lacked a moral compass were simply outcompeted by those of us with a sense of morality – those who could work together for our collective benefit.

Deep down, though, I knew this was specious. Even if it could fully account for our moral sense, which I questioned, it did not explain genuine moral obligations. Supposing the classic evolutionary theory of morality is true, it only explains why we perceive moral obligations; not whether (or why) there are moral obligations. Instead of explaining morality, it explains it away. The thorough-going immoralist could always object on the basis that he has been freed from the restrictive, outdated biological hardwiring of merely perceived moral obligations. My atheist friends and family would inevitably respond with something like, “Well, the immoralist’s position has never been fully successful, while there is historical evidence that generally being a ‘good person’ leads to a better ability to succeed, pass on ‘good person’ genes, etc.” Only sort of true. Much of history teaches that violence, greed, and domination pay off handsomely in the worldly sense.

But, the responses miss the point. Just because being a thorough-going immoralist hasn’t seemed to work to date doesn’t mean it wouldn’t later. After all, the hallmark of natural selection is random genetic change granting certain creatures a better ability to survive in a given environment. In the end, all the atheist can say to the immoralist is, “I disagree that your course of action will help the human race succeed.” That kind of statement, which is merely an opinion, is simply not what we mean when we say an action is immoral. Furthermore, who pronounced from on high that the success of the human race was the ultimate good? That itself is an assumption that cannot be empirically proven. Going back to the original problem, does “good” even exist? I realized that within the purely naturalistic worldview, all morality is finally a matter of opinion. All the moralist can say to the immoralist is, “My opinion is different than yours.” No more productive than arguing whether red is better than blue. I should clarify here that I never doubted the theory of human evolution. Nothing about it contradicts God’s order of creation. I’m also not saying that atheists are immoral. They just can’t account for the existence of genuine moral obligations. They are, like I was, living in great tension.

At some point the tension was too much: either morality is a farce, everything is random with no meaning, and the human mind is mired in inescapable confusion or atheism is false. I chose the latter. That was the logical side. On the emotional side, so many joys in this world have nothing to do with self-preservation or successful reproduction: art, music, a beautiful sunset, etc. I think deep down we all recognize that those kinds of aesthetic experiences may be the most joyful in this life, and these joys serve no productive purpose. The richness of life, which is on full poetic display in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, made me recognize that supposedly rational atheism did not reveal the truth of things; instead, it removed their intrinsic wonder and worth.

Having abandoned atheism, I still faced several objections to organized religion that are beyond the scope of this post. Suffice it to say that my critique of atheism gave me a natural monotheistic theology while The Lord of the Rings predisposed me to a sacramental spirituality. For now, however, let us remember the evangelistic power of beauty and narrative. Much like The Lord of the Rings, they are effective precisely because God is hidden and able to fly below the atheist radar that balks at anything overtly religious. In Middle Earth, the effects of a God-created universe are everywhere, but the source, God Himself, is hidden. No, it’s not that we believers understand The Lord of the Rings on some special level that the atheist does not. Just the opposite. The atheist who truly understands The Lord of the Rings is more of a believer than he thinks.

At the halfway point of HBO’s unsettling new series Westworld – a J.J. Abrams reboot of the 1973 film written and directed by Michael Crichton – some big plot questions remain. Is William a younger Man in Black? Is Bernard really a host? And what’s this maze all about?

The premise of the show is (relatively) straightforward: In the distant future, scientists and businessmen collaborate to create a vast amusement park in the style of the Old West, populating it with artificially intelligent robots (or “hosts”) that are so advanced that they are completely indistinguishable from human beings. Wealthy patrons (“newcomers” to the hosts) come to the park to act out fully immersive fantasies without consequence (they can hurt and even “kill” the hosts, but by design the hosts can’t kill the patrons), while an intricate network of underground employees work around the clock to clean up and reset the hosts, reprogram their character and storyline glitches, and continually enhance the park’s veil of realism. It’s a well-oiled machine, every centimeter of it designed for the lurid entertainment of the upper class.

Only, as of late, the realism is getting a little too real.

With each episode, it becomes a little bit clearer who is driving it and why (SPOILERS AHEAD), but the key twist is that some of the hosts are exhibiting “aberrant” behaviors, e.g., going off of their programmed storylines, “remembering” violence committed against them prior to system resets, and generally connecting dots that, in theory, it’s not possible for them to connect. In short, the hosts are increasingly acting more like a human being than a computer.

With the introduction of this theme, everything about the show – its plot twists, its characters, its graphic content – is subsumed under two key philosophical questions. First, can computers think? And second, are human beings really just computers?

On a surface level, Westworld really only deals with the first question and the social implications of creating such unpredictable machines. (Leading scientists and innovators – Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk among them – have raised a red flag about the exponential advance of artificial intelligence and the dangers it poses for human life. There’s still a lot of show left, but it doesn’t look like Westworld will be offering much to countervail those fears.) But because these two questions really come down to the same question – what is human consciousness? – the first question always entails the second as well.

So how does Westworld answer these questions?

Can Computers Think?

Computer scientist Alan Turing famously devised a test whereby computers, for all intents and purposes, could be shown to be intelligent. Turing described the following hypothetical situation: Suppose a computer and a person were in an enclosed room, separated from an interrogator whose goal it is to discover which is which through a series a questions. The aim of the person is to lead the interrogator to acknowledge the computer as the computer, while the computer is programmed to lead the interrogator to falsely acknowledge the computer as the person. If at the end this “imitation game” the computer so closely mimics the human responses that the interrogator incorrectly identifies the machine as the person, the computer has passed the “Turing test” for exhibiting intelligent behavior.

It’s widely assumed that the Turing test is a sufficient condition for showing that a computer has attained something like human thought. The qualifiers we use to talk about current technologies that mirror intelligence (“smart phone,” “cognitive robotics”, “artificial intelligence”) further reinforce that assumption.

But Westworld exposes the limitations of the Turing test. In the second episode, a young man converses with a host in a waiting room that leads into the park. “Are you real?” he asks her, clearly feeling a little silly. “Well,” the host responds, “If you can’t tell, does it matter?” This is the logic of behaviorism undergirding the Turing test. But the answer to this – based on everything we’ve seen about the park’s normal mode of operating – is clearly “yes.” Being tricked by a host into treating it as human (or human-like) doesn’t change the fact that the hosts are routinely dragged into a cold, dark underground and programmed, to the letter, to say and do everything they say and do. They may act like autonomous thinkers, but there’s nothing “real” about them (at least, not at first).

These limitations become explicit in the third episode when the park’s founder, Dr. Robert Ford (played by Anthony Hopkins), describes the early days of Westworld with his partner. “Our hosts began to pass the Turing test after the first year,” Dr. Ford explains. “But that wasn’t enough for Arnold. He wasn’t interested in the appearance of intellect or wit. He wanted the real thing. He wanted to create consciousness [emphasis mine].”

The implication here is that what makes the thought of human beings really and truly thought is the presence of a mind or consciousness to engage in it. Mimicry of a thing doesn’t attain the whole reality of that thing; and the reality of human consciousness is evidently a “something more” that goes beyond observable behaviors.

This brings us to a pause in the first question to jump to the second.

Are Human Beings Really Just Computers?

Discussions about whether computers can think simultaneously involve questions about whether human thought can be said to involve a mind or consciousness beyond the material brain in the first place. If there is no such thing as mind or consciousness, then the Turing test is a perfectly valid way to determine whether a computer has become a thinker in the same sense that a person is a thinker. On this view, human beings are really no different from the average host in Westworld. All your choices, beliefs, and sensations – in short, the whole spectrum of “immaterial” experiences you associate with a single subject you call “myself” – are just a convenient fiction. The only difference is that where the hosts are programmed by artificial processes to behave as if they’re special subjects, we’re programmed by natural processes. You are your material structures and their motion, and nothing more.

Westworld clearly doesn’t adopt this materialist perspective on human life. The whole drama of the show is that the hosts are going beyond the Turing test to attain something of a different kind, and therefore, on the second question, the attainment of something beyond the material structures of the brain that humans possess. But what is that something?

Giants of modern philosophy differ widely on this point. John Searle’s “Chinese Room” experiment is the most popular critique of the Turing test, and focuses on understanding. Others such as Thomas Nagel ("what is like to be a bat?") and David Chalmers (the “hard problem of consciousness”) have made awareness a kind of bulwark against materialism.

One of the least recognized but most important critiques of materialism, however, is the argument from intentionality. In Edward Feser’s book Philosophy of Mind, he gives a cogent argument that the “ancient problem of intentionality” is what really lies behind arguments of understanding or awareness:

“The term ‘intentionality’ derives from the Latin intendere, which means ‘to point (at)’ or ‘to aim (at)’ – hence the use of the term to signify the capacity of a metal state to ‘point at,’ or to be about, or to mean, stand for, or represent, something beyond itself. (It is important to note that intentions, for example, your intention to read this chapter, are only one manifestation of intentionality; your belief that you are reading a book, your desire to read it, your perception of the book, and so forth, exhibit intentionality just as much as your intention does.) The concept was of great interest to the medieval philosophers but Franz Brentano (1838 -1917) is the thinker most responsible for putting it at the forefront of contemporary philosophical discussion. Brentano is also famous for regarding intentionality as the ‘mark of the mental’ – the one essential feature of all mental phenomena – and for holding that their possessing intentionality makes mental phenomena ultimately irreducible to, and inexplicable in terms of, physical phenomena.”

If the hosts of Westworld are attaining something beyond the material, it is, in a word, intentionality. Their sensations, thoughts, beliefs, and desires are no longer self-contained in a string of physical mechanisms. They are about their objects, directed toward them. They simultaneously seem to be unlocking hidden doors to perception, reason, and will – and even contemplating meeting their “maker” – precisely through the “about-ness” of mental states so characteristic of human life.

If Feser is right that intentionality is the best argument for the immateriality of the mind, and Westworld treats intentionality as the immaterial “something” that the hosts now have, we’re brought back to the first question. Can a computer actually attain human thought, understood as the operation of an immaterial mind?

Westworld wants to say “yes”, but justifying that answer adequately is completely beyond the scope of the show – and besides, would drain out all the drama. The show drops hints that through a lucky recipe of ingredients (ingredients that were also present in primal man), “somehow” the hosts moved from unintentional symbol exchange to intentional symbol understanding, and from unconsciousness to emergent consciousness. We willingly suspend any disbelief we might have to go on that journey; however, as one neuroscientist explains, we have “very compelling reasons” to believe this is never really going to happen.

Whatever the answer to the first question, in dealing with the second in just this way, Westworld open the door to another ancient philosophical problem. 

Westworld as Metaphor

One of the taglines of Westworld is that it’s about “the dawn of artificial consciousness and the future of sin.” The first half of that description, which focuses on the hosts, is obvious, and involves all of the issues discussed above. But what about “the future of sin”?

The focus here seems to be on the patrons who frequent the park, typified in the character of Logan. Early in the series, a visitor to Westworld says that the first time he came to the park, he brought his family and went fishing, but the second time, left the family behind and “went straight evil.” William’s future brother-in-law Logan is just such a seasoned veteran of Westworld. He has no misgivings about doing whatever he pleases with the hosts in any given moment. William laments at one point that Logan just wants to kill or sleep with everything he sees – and he has a point. For the wealthy young businessman, the only thing that matters is his own power and pleasure. In fact, his greatest desire is for something at the outer reaches of the park, “the biggest game there is” – namely, all-out war.

This says more about Logan than it does about the park. Walker Percy once remarked (in a line that could’ve easily been written about Westworld) that the modern self is so bored and alienated, and so frustrated by its boredom and alienation, that it “needs to exercise every option in order to reassure itself that it is not a ghost but is rather a self among other selves. One such option is a sexual encounter. Another is war.” The park’s creators profit handsomely from this assumption, isolating the patrons’ longing to dramatically effect something and setting it loose without a cost to the world around them.

But we know that the illusion is an illusion. The patrons’ actions are not, as they suspect, without consequence. They are inflicting deep wounds, and lasting memories of those wounds, in their conscious hosts. More than any abstract discussion about sentience or awareness, this point is made in a more visceral, intuitive way. Time and time again, the camera lingers on the hosts’ eyes, and through these “windows to the soul”, we see worry, hope, sorrow, and wonder. More than mere awareness, primal understanding, or even intentionality, we see a reflection of the mystery of ensoulment and the dignity it accords.

If we set aside the thorny question of computer consciousness and read this symbolically, the show becomes less a crystal ball into the future, and more a mirror of the present. The hosts symbolize the weak, the young, the voiceless, the helpless – anyone on the margins of society that is manipulated, brutalized, and thrown away, often without fully understanding what is being done to them or how to stop it. Lisa Joy, one of the show’s co-creators, confirms this reading when she describes Westworld as being about “what it means to be human, from the outside in…a meditation on consciousness – the blessing and the burden of it.” The blessing for the hosts is that they are coming to know and understand the world around them – and the burden is, as it is for so many people, precisely the same thing.

The patrons can similarly be read as agents of decadence, brute power, and disregard for vulnerable human life. They hold the hosts under their thumbs for their own gratification, which is ultimately all that matters to them. In the park, they treat objects like people, only to treat them like objects again; but the great irony is that the objects, in becoming “others”, re-reveal the impulse the patrons have come to let loose and leave behind – namely, the objectification of the other. In a roundabout way, then, the show is all about this addiction to treating people like objects, which is not the future of sin, but the reality of sin itself. Indulging that addiction in its most graphic forms – to get back to Percy’s line – becomes about much more than escape for the patrons. It even becomes about more than re-constructing one’s self. It becomes about re-constructing the very meaning of existence to conform to the self. “The world out there,” the Man in Black explains to a host in one scene, “the one you’ll never see, was one of plenty…Every need taken care of, except one: Purpose. Meaning.”

Is this all so unthinkable? One of the hosts, remembering a past narrative “loop” as a teacher of Shakespeare, warns another using one of Friar Laurence’s lines from Romeo and Juliet: “These violent delights have violent ends.”

As a show not just about the future but about the present, Westworld seems to deliver exactly the same warning – not just about the swiftness with which we develop human-like objects, but also about the inhumanity with which we objectify each other.

On both counts, the question we’re left with is a hair-raising one: Is the West clanging headlong into Westworld?

“Yeah, that's why I don't mess around with doing anything good, Dan. You do one good deed for somebody...I imagine it's habit-forming. Something decent. See that grateful look in their eyes, imagine it makes you feel like Christ Hisself.” – Ben Wade

“Virtue is not an act, but a disposition (a habit).” –Aristotle
 

Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft famously describes the “Bach argument for the existence of God,” wherein God’s existence is clearly posited by a) the beauty and b) the coherence of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music. God couldn’t fail to have created a universe with such order. Among Kreeft’s students polled about their inchoate path to Christian faith, this simple argument popularly outranks the more technical Aristotelian-Thomist proofs of God. No surprise: in order to convince, such proofs require a good deal more training than most under-equipped, under-educated college students possess today. As such, the “Bach argument for the existence of God” is a nice appetif for the more technical arguments.

I propose an innovation in this vein of aesthetically inclined God proofs: the 3:10 to Yuma argument. In a word, God’s existence is more or less required by a) the beauty and b) the coherence of this film’s commanding moral realism. Both elements countervail upon the powerful forces of Modernist moral mediocrity burnished in most every other film I’ve ever seen. 3:10 to Yuma is moral realism at its very finest. In this Christian morality tale, even the term (“moral realism”) has its definition polished up and reinvigorated, after three or four centuries of ill—even opposite—popular usage.

Conceptually distinct from Kreeft's aesthetic Bach argument and the standard moral argument for God, is a combination of the two: the argument expressing the natural beauty of morality.

3:10 to Yuma restores moral realism from its perverse, longstanding Modernist misinterpretation (i.e. “all men eventually sell out, which is okay in survival situations”) to meaning its sheer opposite, the truer construction that “fiat justitia ruat coelum.” The latter corresponds with what Dan Evans, the film’s protagonist, means when he says, “I’m seeing the world the way it is.” He counteracts the usual appropriation of these words, most often employed by cowards who justify selling out by recourse to a silly dichotomy: moral theory versus the “real world.” When the hammer meets the anvil and moral principles confront life-or-death situations, “pretty much everyone wants to live,” to use the film’s villain’s diabolically commonsense leverage. And up until this film, it has been filmically acceptable to sell out for survival. But Dan Evans is a true moral realist.

The previous misconception of so-called moral realism actually incorporates not one but two toxic worldviews. They are pragmatism—a weak, pseudo-moral argument in favor of comfort, convenience, or survival over principle, (“I just like to do things easy,” as per the film’s villain Wade)—and consequentialism—a weak, pseudo-moral justification of immoral means toward a winsome end (“Every way of man is right in his own eyes,” as per Wade, again). In 3:10 to Yuma both are laid to abject waste.

Upon the epic conclusion of 3:10 to Yuma, the world over, self-justifying cowards and lovers of guiltless creature comforts afforded by pragmatism and consequentialism, will groan in discomfort. (The discomfort of conscience.) Moral mediocrity will no longer avail them, not in this film anyway. 3:10 to Yuma simply leaves in its wake no compelling excuse not to be a man of virtue, a real man.

Misinterpreting 3:10 to Yuma

Sadly, one of the most famous online critiques of this film by Michael Karounos misinterprets—in fact, oppositely interprets—it as “anti-Christian.” Literally, nothing could be farther from the truth. The critique it puts forward runs that in 3:10 to Yuma “honor and truth are shown to be hollow principles,” and that Dan Evans’s “only concern is getting money to buy back his water rights.” Karounos thinks that the film mocks Christianity. Baffling. I’m not sure whether we were even watching the same film! In 3:10 to Yuma, honor and truth are shown to be the only principles worth living (or dying) for—which repudiates pragmatism—and Evans goes well beyond the satisfying of a contracted-for goal—which repudiates consequentialism.

Indeed, the main point of 3:10 to Yuma lies in repudiating what I call the “Gandhi protocol,” a lame critique of Christianity which runs that, “I would convert to Christianity if I ever met a true Christian.” (And thus, the film does the opposite of what Karounos’s critique alleges it does.) The film’s Scripture-quoting villain, the infamous outlaw Ben Wade, essentially embraces just such a worldview until he runs into Dan Evans. In short, Evans is the first non-hypocritical Christian that Wade has ever met. And the arc of the story gives the viewer occasion to scrutinize Wade’s gradual acknowledgement thereof. Just waiting for Evans’s resolve to crack, Wade watches Evans with vigilant interest during their dangerous trek to Contention, where Wade is to be put onto a prison train going to Yuma Prison.

But what will Wade do if and after he finds in Evans a man who will not abandon righteousness—a man who does not at all conform to Wade’s moral categories? Will he reevaluate his own moral calculus?

Up until his confrontation with Evans, Wade associates the Bible either a) with devilishly stone-cold excerpts to say to someone you’re offing (a la Pulp Fiction’s Jules Winfield), or b) with the high standards overwhelming the deeds of lukewarm social hypocrites of the petit bourgeois (as according to the tired, less-than-insightful “Gandhi protocol”). One example of the latter kind would be Byron McElroy, the “Pinkerton” in Wade’s transport posse helping Evans get to Contention, with whom Wade bandies familiarly throughout the journey, as only well-acquainted “frenemies” would do (until Wades offs him, that is). In other words, Wade insinuates that he has memorized many passages from the Bible simply in order to taunt Christian hypocrites like McElroy.

But when Wade comes to know Evans more and more, the viewer finds Wade unprepared to accept the possibility of a man like Evans, a veritably good man, willing to do: a) what is right, b) because it is right, c) no matter the cost. Wade’s eventual moral conversion at the behest of the taciturn Evans occurs in precisely these three progressive phases. When correctly understood, these three stages of conversion are distinctly Christian, which disproves Karounos‘s above criticism altogether.

Moral Conversion in Three (Not So) Easy Steps

Step 1 - Doing what is right: The first step in Ben Wade’s moral conversion occurs when he sees Evans’s plain commitment to doing what is right. This occurs gradually between the beginning of the transport posse’s trek and the (penultimate) hotel room scene in Contention. There Dan Evans arouses profound moral sentiment among all listeners, including Ben Wade, with a speech reflecting his conviction not to abandon the task. Evans will be the only member of the transport posse still willing to see the task completed, in view of the lengthening odds against it. In short, Evans bids farewell to his son William forever, telling him to return home with a parting message for his mother: “your old man was the only one left standing or willing to walk Ben Wade to that train [the payment for which will follow].”

Counterintuitively, during Evans’ simple yet florid farewell, the viewer watches the bystanding Wade much more closely than either conversant, Evans or his son. Wade is clearly moved. Only minutes before, Wade had in exchange for his freedom, privately offered to quintuple the sum guaranteed Evans (for the accomplishment of the task). Evans had turned Wade down. So well before the speech is made, Wade already acknowledges that Evans cannot be bought off.

Yet while Wade is clearly touched by Evans’s rejection of the buyout sum and then by his farewell speech, a keen observer notices that as Wade looks on, he seems at one distinct moment to replace the former notion that Evans must be motivated (not by true goodness but) by money with the new notion that Evans must be more truly motivated by desire for his son’s and wife’s respect. The latter is as false as the former.

Honor is a more noble desideratum than money. Thus, Wade by imputing this higher false motivation to Evans, has taken one step—even if on a mistaken basis—toward conversion. But if Evans were actually motivated only by the prospect of deceiving his son and wife into respecting him, as Wade thinks, this would not constitute true Aristotelian virtue, or doing the right thing for its own sake.

Step 2 - Doing what is right because it is right: Everyone then leaves except Wade and Evans, who are left alone to complete the task and to get to the train station. Half an hour later, the two men flee the hotel amid the gunfire of over forty hired guns (hired by Wade’s gang) aimed at Evans. Wade and Evans make it most of the way to the station—the final destination—by stumbling into a little shack. There, Wade announces loudly and suddenly to Evans that he “ain’t doing this no more,” because “your son’s already gone home, hero.” Translation: I helped you to deceive your boy into believing you went the whole nine yards (because, inexplicably, I like you), now get out of my way as I return to my gang. Return to your family.

Evans seems almost oblivious, and responds by insisting that they must keep moving to the train station. To this, Wade reacts violently. He knocks Evans down and begins to choke him. What insane idea, what daemon, has possessed this strange man Evans?! No one does what is right simply because it is right!

As Wade chokes the breath out of Evans, Wade’s eyes soften. His spirit is converted from violence. We see (as much as we hear) him say, “alright.” He has met his match: one true Christian (even on the tendentiously high standard set on the Gandhi scale). Ben Wade now accepts that there is at least one follower of Christ who will do what is right simply because it is right. But Wade remains unsure how far Evans will go in the name of this right action.

Step 3 - Doing what is right because it is right no matter the cost: As Wade and Evans run together on the final leg of their journey, they are have clearly become friends, at long last. Evans trips at one point; Wade helps him up. Wade’s pursuing gang cannot believe their eyes. The viewer forgets that the two willing men run eagerly toward the train which will transport Wade to be hung at Yuma Prison.

They arrive at the small train station, where pinned down by Wade’s gang’s sniper fire, the two men exchange parting stories in a sort of confessional, as they await the train. Eventually, it arrives late and, through fortune and through the actions of Evans’s son, who did not actually go home, Evans manages to get Wade onto the train. “Well, you did it, Dan—“ Wade begins to congratulate Evans, who still stands on the platform, when interrupted by gunfire.

Charlie Prince, Wade’s evil yet faithful lieutenant, kills Evans on the platform with multiple shots. Prince smiles faintly as he fires shots, just as Wade had earlier promised Evans’s son would happen. Prince then restores to Wade his legendary gun, “the hand of God,” which bears a crucifix on the handle. The viewer sees Wade carefully looking down at the gun’s crucifix—at the One Truly Good Man who ever lived—and finally recognizing that Evans fully followed the example of this One Truly Good Man, willfully dying for the sake of others. Wade is in that moment fully converted; his concluding actions accord entirely with such a conversion.

Conclusion

Aside from jamming its thumb defiantly into the eye of the devotee of American pragmatism and consequentialism, this film will also moisten the eye. And to say the least, this features as an unexpected (if not unrelated) quality in a virtually unsung Western remake with non-American leads—an obscure, Wild West adventure film turning out to be more like a crypto-theodicy. In other words, this film has got more Moby Dick to it than McQueen or Duvall.

3:10 to Yuma is about the big issue, the only one which ever interested mankind: as stated in my introduction, the proofs of beauty and moral coherence defeat the two Modernist neurotoxins pragmatism and consequentialism, the flotsam and jetsam of our age. But mankind has forgotten it.

Viewers do not come before a film of the Western genre expecting to take in a real drama; thus, no one is prepared for this film’s arousal of the spirits or its tear-jerking. And that is precisely why 3:10 to Yuma’s plain meaning—an undeniable affirmation of a personal God and His clear, immutable moral law—rests on the mantle, in so many viewers’ memories, like Poe’s “purloined letter,” obvious yet invisible. Tears constitute an unexpected devotional, after all, even in homage before the usual genres like tragedy or melodrama—recall the mighty Hector slain and defiled in front of his grieved father King Priam. Nor are most viewers of the Western prepared to consume a morality tale…or much less a crypto-theodicy. And even less are they ready to spend part of their weekend viewing a Christian morality tale about conversion and martyrdom! Heavens, no: the genre is too “gritty” and “realistic” for that!

Perhaps true realism and (dare I say it) true grit are more about the Cross of Christ than we formerly presumed. 3:10 to Yuma proves as it inspires. The film’s uncanny crypto-Christianity together with its hidden, tear-jerking poignancy, combine with the film’s unrepentant moralizing (pun intended) to suggest something of an almost mystagogical character, revealing the “way the world really is,” which is to say, the best path for men: the way of martyrdom. This film is sui generis insofar as it spits moral realism back in the face of the consequentialist Western genre. The Western leitmotif of having your cake and eating it too, be damned.

No more saving the world and saving your own skin. That is the stuff of children’s tales. 3:10 to Yuma puts the better to his money: “If you want to do right, fantastic. But don’t forget to pay the toll, which is precisely one death, and keep the change.”
 
 
(Image credit: New York Times)

When I saw the coming attractions for the new film Risen—which deals with a Roman tribune searching for the body of Jesus after reports of the resurrection—I thought that it would leave the audience in suspense, intrigued but unsure whether these reports were justified or not. I was surprised and delighted to discover that the movie is, in fact, robustly Christian and substantially faithful to the Biblical account of what transpired after the death of Jesus.

My favorite scene shows tribune Clavius (played by the always convincing Joseph Fiennes) bursting into the Upper Room, intent upon arresting Jesus’ most intimate followers. As he takes in the people in the room, he spies Jesus, at whose crucifixion he had presided and whose face in death he had closely examined. But was he seeing straight? Was this even possible? He slinks down to the ground, fascinated, incredulous, wondering, anguished. As I watched the scene unfold, the camera sweeping across the various faces, I was as puzzled as Clavius: was that really Jesus? It must indeed have been like that for the first witnesses of the Risen One, their confusion and disorientation hinted at in the Scriptures themselves: “They worshipped, but some doubted.” Once Thomas enters the room, embraces his Lord and probes Jesus’ wounds, all doubt, both for Clavius and for the viewer, appropriately enough, is removed.

I specially appreciated this scene, not only because of its clever composition, but because it reminded me of debates that were fashionable in theological circles when I was doing my studies in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Scholars who were skeptical of the bodily facticity of Jesus’ resurrection would pose the question, “What would someone outside of the circle of Jesus’ disciples have seen had he been present at the tomb on Easter morning or in the Upper Room on Easter evening?” The implied answer to the query was “well, nothing.” The academics posing the question were suggesting that what the Bible calls resurrection designated nothing that took place in the real world, nothing that an objective observer would notice or dispassionate historian recount, but rather an event within the subjectivity of those who remembered the Lord and loved him.

For example, the extremely influential and widely-read Belgian theologian Edward Schillebeeckx opined that, after the death of Jesus, his disciples, reeling in guilt from their cowardice and betrayal of their master, nevertheless felt forgiven by the Lord. This convinced them that, in some sense, he was still alive, and to express this intuition they told evocative stories about the empty tomb and post-resurrection appearances of Jesus. Roger Haight, a Jesuit theologian of considerable influence, speculated in a similar vein that the resurrection is but a symbolic expression of the disciples’ conviction that Jesus continues to live in the sphere of God. Therefore, Haight taught, belief in the empty tomb or the appearances of the risen Lord is inessential to true resurrection faith. At a more popular level, James Carroll explained the resurrection as follows: after their master’s death, the disciples sat in a kind of “memory circle” and realized how much Jesus meant to them and how powerful his teaching was and decided that his spirit lives on in them.

The great English Biblical scholar N.T. Wright is particularly good at exposing and de-bunking such nonsense. His principal objection to this sort of speculation is that it is profoundly non-Jewish. When a first century Jew spoke of resurrection, he could not have meant some non-bodily state of affairs. Jews simply didn’t think in the dualist categories dear to Greeks and later to Gnostics. The second problem is that this post-conciliar theologizing is dramatically unhistorical. Wright argues that, simply on historical grounds, it is practically impossible to explain the rise of the early Christian movement apart from a very objective construal of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. For a first-century Jew, the clearest possible indication that someone was not the promised Messiah would be his death at the hands of Israel’s enemies, for the unambiguously clear expectation was that the Messiah would conquer and finally deal with the enemies of the nation. Peter, Paul, James, Andrew, and the rest could have coherently proclaimed—and gone to their deaths defending—a crucified Messiah if and only if he had risen from the dead. Can we really imagine Paul tearing into Athens or Corinth or Ephesus with the breathless message that he found a dead man deeply inspiring or that he and the other Apostles had felt forgiven by a crucified criminal? In the context of that time and place, no one would have taken him seriously.

Risen’s far more reasonable and theologically compelling answer is that, yes indeed, if an outsider and unbeliever burst into the Upper Room when the disciples were experiencing the resurrected Jesus, he would have seen something along with them. Would he have fully grasped what he was seeing? Obviously not. But would the experience have had no objective referent?  Just as obviously not. There is just something tidy, bland, and unthreatening about the subjectivizing interpretations I rehearsed above. What you sense on every page of the New Testament is that something happened to the first Christians, something so strange and unexpected and compelling that they wanted to tell the whole world about it. Frankly, Risen conveys the edgy novelty, the unnerving reality of the resurrection, better than much contemporary theologizing.

Right before becoming hypnotized by a UFO in the middle of the road – a fatal error which puts him halfway through “self-actualizing” hairdresser Peggy Blumquist’s windshield – Rye Gerhardt, the youngest son of a North Dakota crime family, corners a judge in a waffle hut in a fledgling attempt at extortion. Before Gerhardt resorts to shooting everyone in sight, the judge sighs and explains why he’s wasting his time:

“One day, the Devil came to God and said, ‘Let's make a bet between you and me for the soul of a man.’ And from on high they looked down on Job, a devout man, religious. And the Devil said, ‘I can change his mind and make him curse your name.’ And God said, ‘Try and you will only fail.’ So the Devil begins. He kills Job's herds and takes his fields. He plagues him with boils and throws him on the ash heap. But Job's mind remains unchanged. So I ask you, son, if the Devil couldn't change Job's mind, how the hell are you gonna change mine?”

Coen Brothers fans will recognize the extraterrestrial MacGuffin of season two of Fargo; the melancholy barber Ed Crane had a similar close encounter in The Man Who Wasn’t There. It’s the first of many nods to the Coens’ films, from O Brother Where Art Thou (when a mournful rendition of “O Death” plays) to Fargo itself (when a character bangs on top of a static TV in a remote hideout).

But the reference to Job offers a deeper thematic connection to the Coens: existentialism. From Barton Fink toNo Country for Old Men, angst and death are the warp and woof of the Coens’ world, sometimes with a comic flair that few filmmakers can pull off. The episode titles (“The Myth of Sisyphus,” “Fear and Trembling”) and later dialogue (deli worker Noreen Vanderslice carries and quotes Camus) are more recognizable references; but while existentialism is often associated with a Camus or Sartre, it runs through the heart of Western thought, not dividing atheists and theists so much as the dispassionate and passionate. Long before the French systematized being and nothingness, that righteous man of the Bible was tempted to “curse God and die.”

Fargo draws existentialism to tell a bleak story of human life, where “the dizziness of freedom” releases a wildfire of violence, anguish, and horror. If the presence of aliens feels prosaic and unsurprising (“It’s just a flying saucer, Ed – we gotta go!”), it’s because Fargo’s characters are alienated themselves. Whether “good guys”, “bad guys”, or something in-between, their freedom to choose (and as the last episode hints, their freedom to speak) sets them apart from the world around them. “To be human,” Czesław Miłosz put it, “is to completely alien amid the galaxies” – and this could very well be the epigraph of season two of Fargo, which is brimming with misfits and lost souls. They wonder as they wander, asserting themselves in hollow spasms of violence to try and overcome their disconnection from the world.

That disconnection is never fully bridged. Where Job heard God assure him of his sovereignty, the characters of Fargo can only confront the eternal silence of space. Their human predicament – like the UFOs – remains an absurdity, one that just comes and goes without so much as a cursory explanation of why.

But from True Grit to A Serious Man, the Coen Brothers never succumb to nihilism, and Fargo follows suit. In the final episode, we return full circle to the faith of Job in a dialogue between Noreen and the dying wife of state trooper Lou Solverson:

Noreen Vanderslice: “Camus says knowin’ we’re gonna die makes life absurd.”

Betsy Solverson: “Well, I don’t know who that is. But I’m guessing he doesn’t have a 6-year old girl.”

Noreen Vanderslice: “He’s French.”

Betsy Solverson: “I don’t care if he’s from Mars. Nobody with any sense would say something that foolish. We’re put on this earth to do a job. And each of us gets the time we get to do it. And when this life is over and you stand in front of the Lord…Well, you try tellin’ him it was all some Frenchman’s joke.”

Like Marge Gunderson’s final monologue in the original film, Betsy Solverson’s words are a kind of self-critique of the Fargo universe. Noreen hasn’t seen everything the viewers have, so her matter-of-factness seems naïve; still, her insight cuts to the heart of the story in an unexpected way. In the riddle of our finitude and freedom – and our freedom for evil – the light of faith breaks through, and has the power to change everything. Not as a magic wand that denies the world as it is, but as a lived reality that makes the existential picture of man – as Sisyphus, as stranger, as a “saint without God” – complete.
 
 
(Image credit: Archetype Online)