You Probably Should Have Read the Bible | Franciscan University | EP 251

About a month and a half ago, I went to the Museum of the Bible in Washington, and that was pretty interesting—a really good museum. If you ever go to Washington, I would highly recommend it for what that's worth. It's very carefully done, very comprehensive, and it struck me while I was going through the museum that, although in one sense it was a museum of the Bible, in possibly a deeper sense— but possibly not—it was a museum of the book.

They'd set up the museum so you walk through the history of the Bible chronologically. You can walk through in a variety of different ways in the museum, but that's one of the pathways through the museum. It was a history of a technology, you know, and the technology is the technology of the book. And in some sense, one of the things I really realized that the museum brought home for me was that all books grew out of the—in some profound sense, particularly in the West—all books grew out of the Bible. And so that's interesting to me.

It's interesting to me partly because we seem to have a lot of trouble in our culture now agreeing on what might constitute a valid canon of books. I mean, part of what the humanities offered—certainly part of what religious tradition offered—was a canonical book. I mean, Judaism has a canonical book, and Christianity has a canonical book, and Islam has a canonical book, and all the major Abrahamic religions have agreed that, in some sense, the followers of those religions are people of the book. And that's quite a remarkable—it’s quite a remarkable proposition.

First of all, because it isn't obvious that you would consider a book the most fundamental element of your culture. You know, it might be more obvious that you might consider a city a more fundamental element or a dynasty or, you know, something overtly political. But that isn't what a huge portion of the world has decided. We seem to have decided that, no, we’re founded on a book, and we have some dispute about just exactly what that book is and what it means. But the fact that we've at least agreed that it's a book—that's something.

And I don’t know what it is exactly, and that's partly what I want to investigate tonight. Now, the Bible in its various forms isn't exactly a book; it's a library of books, right? It's a collection of books. But it's an interesting collection of books, to say the least, because despite the fact that it's a library—so a collection of books—it also has a narrative theme that runs through it, right? It has a beginning and a middle and an end, and it has a plot strange enough. And I say strangely because how did it get plotted exactly? You know, I mean, obviously, believers believe that it's the word of God, and fair enough, you know. But that's not a very detailed explanation, right?

It’s a religious interpretation, but it’s shallow in some sense. It lacks detail; it still doesn't explain, in any fundamentally compelling sense, how the narrative got organized across time. When you say, "Well, it's the spirit of God working through the multitude of people who aggregated the Bible and transmitted it," and fair enough, it’s still not a deep enough level of understanding to make me feel that when I, for what that's worth, encounter that explanation that it's been thoroughly explained. And you know, that's not a criticism precisely. Anything that's complex is susceptible to ever increasingly deep explanations.

You know, in some sense, if something's deep, you never get to the bottom of it, and all explanations are insufficient. But I think it's a remarkable fact, speaking psychologically and historically, that there's a book at the basis of our culture and that’s how we define the culture as based on the book, and that it's a collection of books and that the collection was aggregated so that a plot emerges from it.

Christians take that idea one step further in some sense because they assume that not only is the Old Testament a library of books that has a plot, but that implicit in that book is the New Testament. It's somehow their a priori before the events actually unfold, and that's an extremely bizarre and interesting idea, and it’s very difficult to know what to make of it.

So I was thinking these things when I was going through the museum, and I was thinking about the idea of the canon and about the idea of fiction and truth and about the idea of literary depth—all of those things, trying to make sense out of them. Partly because, as I said, we now seem to have reached an impasse in our culture about what can be validly considered canonical. And part of the way this came about—I have to take a detour through the history of ideas—is that it was discovered in a variety of different disciplines, after the Second World War, really, I would say starting in the ’60s, that the problem of perception was a much more intractable problem than anybody had heretofore suspected.

So that emerged partly in the field of artificial intelligence when the first artificial intelligence researchers, who were interested in robotics, tried to make machines that could operate in the real world, like animals could or like people could. To build robots, the idea to begin with was that the difficult part would be programming the robot to operate in the environment. The easy part would be getting the robot to perceive the environment because, after all, there it is; you just have to look, and everything’s self-evident. And it turned out that that wasn't the case at all.

And this was reflective of a philosophical problem that had been recognized by David Hume some time earlier, which is the problem of the relationship between what is and what ought to be. David Hume believed that there was an unbridgeable gap between the factual world and the ethical world in some sense—that you never had enough facts at your disposal to compute your trajectory into the future with any degree of certainty. And I think that that’s been proven true beyond a shadow of a doubt as a consequence of recent investigations, which have demonstrated, not least, that—well, one of the problems is that, and this is associated with the problem of perception—is that there's an infinite number of facts.

So how do you guide your actions in light of the facts when there are endless facts about absolutely everything, absolutely everywhere, all the time? Which facts do you attend to to guide yourself forward? Which facts do you prioritize, and which do you ignore? Because obviously, you have to ignore most of them; there’s a near infinite number of facts, and you're not going to pay attention to all of them because you can't. So how do you decide what not to pay attention to? And the answer is, you don't know. And that's the general answer: we don’t know.

And it's exactly the same as the problem of perception because when you look out at the world, or hear the world for that matter, or taste the world, any of those things—any sensory interaction with the world—there are way more things to look at than you can possibly look at. And yet, you do look at things and you see. And then the question arises: how do we do that? And the answer is, we don’t know. And it's such an intractable problem that we haven't been able to build machines that can do it. That's why we don't have general-purpose robots.

And, you know, I think the closest thing we've got to them probably so far are Elon Musk’s self-driving cars, but you still don't really see those everywhere. Right? They cracked that problem 80 percent maybe—something like that—but that last 20 is not going to be so easy. It’s partly because, for example, you know, imagine that there’s a navigation problem that having a car propagate itself down the highway is a navigation problem. And you might think that’s a technical problem; you need to know where the road is, the edges of the road, and so forth, which isn't so easy because roads don't actually have defined edges. But that's one of many problems.

And so we've had to put up a whole satellite system to map the roads in detail and to feed that information into the cars. The cars can compare where they are on the road to the satellite image. They have to have very detailed perceptual knowledge of the world to operate. But then there are additional problems that have to do with navigation that aren't so obvious. For example, let's say you're driving down the road and there's a mother and a child in a pram on one side of the road, and there are like three old women on the other side of the road, and you have to run over one set of them. And that actually turns out to be, in some real sense, a navigation problem, obviously, but just as obviously, it’s an ethical problem.

And how do you solve that? And the answer again is, well, you don’t know. If you were in that situation, I don't know what you would decide or how you decided, but I do know that you don’t know how you would decide it. And actually, our navigation problems are always ethical problems. That's at least the proposition that I want to offer you tonight: that our navigation problems are always ethical problems, and that the problem of perception and the problem of ethical endeavor are the same problem.

And this is, I think, if I’ve made any radical claims in my life—and I suppose I probably have—the most radical claim is that— and it's becoming increasingly radical, I think, in some sense—is that we can’t see the world except through an ethical framework. It’s actually technically not possible. And this is a new realization. We had Hume's observation that you can't easily get from what is to what ought to be, and that's an early statement of the same problem. Why can't you? Well, too many facts. Which facts are you going to use to guide you?

You select facts. How do you select facts? And if you're selecting facts, why are they facts? Because you’ve selected them, right? You might think if they're facts you have to sort of randomly select them because otherwise you're biased in your selection of facts, and if you're biased in the selection of your facts, then it's not facts; it's more like misinformation or disinformation or whatever the hell it is that people are accused of following now, you know. Because your bias is disturbing your interaction with the facts—well, it has to; there's no way around that.

Does that mean it’s—is it bias per se that’s determining which facts that you interact with? Is all your action merely a consequence of your bias? And I would say that’s one of the claims that the postmodern radicals make all the time—that your perception is nothing but your biases, which is a pretty bloody dismal way of looking at the world. It’s like there’s your bias and my bias, and there’s no truth and there’s no ethic; there’s just your bias and my bias, and which one should win? It’s like, well, I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?

Because there’s no—well, there’s no appreciation in that realm of philosophical inquiry for the notion that there is an ethic—like a fundamental ethic that has some basis in, let’s say, some basis in reality, a transcendent ethic that’s real. And certainly no appreciation that that ethic is something that people could mutually explore as a consequence of their goodwill and their honest discourse. Those are propositions, right? They’re deeply embedded in Western culture, and I think they're fundamental to the people of the book.

They're particularly well developed, well, both in Judaism and Christianity. I don’t know the development as well in the Islamic world, but, you know, we do believe that, as believers, that people are of divine worth and that they can exchange information honestly and the information is actually about the world, and that there is such a thing as an ethic, and that ethic is related to the integral worth of each individual.

That worth manifests itself, let’s say, in our capacity for honest speech. And that capacity for honest speech is, in some real sense, redemptive. And we do believe that, and that's part of our—the religious presuppositions in which our whole culture is embedded. I say religious in part because I think they’re first principles.

And maybe you could define what's truly religious as what is the first principle. You know, if you're thinking about it psychologically, there are quite—what would you say? There are phenomena, I suppose, that we regard as part of the realm of depth—what’s deep? What’s deep in literature? And what’s deep in philosophy? I would say, technically, that the realm of the religious is the realm of what’s deepest, and what’s deepest is first principles.

And maybe you come to those first principles, maybe in some sense you have to abide by them as a consequence of faith. You know, you choose to live a certain way. You choose to live, for example, as if other people have worth—and you do, too—and that worth is absolute in some sense. And you know, if you’re an admirer of the natural rights tradition, well, you would claim that we derive our notion of natural rights from a deeper understanding that each of us is of fundamental and intrinsic worth, which I think is pretty much akin to making the biblical claim that men and women are created in the image of God.

If God is the example emblematic of what constitutes the highest worth and we're made in that image, that means that we partake in what’s of absolute worth. And then you decide, in some sense, to base your whole society on that presupposition. And it looks to me like societies that do accept that presupposition and move forward from that first principle produce the sorts of societies that people would rather live in if they had their choice. And societies that don't accept those first principles don’t.

And I don’t know if that’s proof because when you ask a question like that, you have to ask the question of what are you willing to accept as proof. And well, that’s a very, very complicated problem. But it does seem to me that societies that presuppose intrinsic worth at the individual level—which is a very weird proposition given the radical differences in ability between people—it's much easier in some sense to see that highly successful people are much more worthwhile than people who are poverty-stricken and struggling, or that people who are highly intelligent are worthwhile in a much more fundamental way than people who aren't.

I mean, you could say that with regard to every individual difference and every talent. It’s a much more natural way of thinking—the notion that we're all of intrinsic worth despite our variability. It's like that’s a hell of an idea! It’s absolutely amazing to me that idea ever obtained any purchase anywhere under any conditions. You know, we sort of think about it in some sense as self-evident now, although it’s subject to intense questioning at the moment. But that blinds us, I think, to just exactly how miraculous that idea really is and how unlikely it is.

And yet it seems to be a fundamental necessity for the organization of the kind of social institutions that we would choose to inhabit if we had our choice. And so, you know, that’s interesting back to the problem of perception and the biblical corpus. Well, the AI types discovered, much to their chagrin, that perceiving the world was unduly complicated, and so rubber hits the road, in some sense, as a consequence of those dilemmas that I just described regarding self-driving automobiles.

It's like, well, if it’s one group of vulnerable people on one side of the road and another group of vulnerable people on the other side of the road, and you have to run over one set, what do you do? And the answer is, well, we don’t know. And we do compute that, and how do we compute that? We’re going to have to figure that out if we're going to build machines that are going to do that. They’re going to have to be able to think ethically, and that'll mean we’ll have to understand what it means to think ethically, and we don’t understand that because it’s really, really complicated.

And so the problem of perception arose to bedevil robotics, and it's certainly not a problem that we have solved, which is why we don’t have general-purpose robots. Some researchers believe that that problem won't be solved in the absence of embodiment—that a robotic intelligence has to be embodied before it can act in the world in any real sense. Because perception is dependent on embodiment, and I think that’s very interesting, especially in relationship to the particularly to the Catholic emphasis on the resurrection of the body and the valuing of the body as opposed to the mere spirit. You know, that the body is actually a necessary precondition even for perception in some way that we didn’t understand before the last 50 or 60 years.

So anyways, when this problem arose in the AI world, it simultaneously arose in, of all places, well, in psychology in relationship to the problem of perception, which psychologists are still beetling away trying to solve with some success. But more particularly, it arose in the humanities departments—especially in departments that were concentrating on literary criticism—because the literary critics, especially the French post-modernist types, came to a similar realization at some point.

I’m condensing a lot of work here, but their basic proposition was, "Well, how do you know when you've landed on the proper interpretation of a text?" And the answer is, "Well, we don’t know." So you take a text like Hamlet, and you get a hundred students to write an essay about, you know, a particular stanza, a set of stanzas, a soliloquy, and a hundred of them have a hundred different opinions.

So, like, which opinion is right? And if none of them are right, well, does the text mean anything? If there can be a hundred different interpretations of only one tiny section of the text, and you can't decide which interpretation is the right interpretation, how do you know there's any interpretation at all? And you can certainly see how that problem bedevils something like biblical criticism because biblical stories are susceptible to a very large number of interpretations, that's for sure.

So if you can't agree on the interpretation, well, how do you even know that there's anything of any meaning there at all? It's like, "Hey, we seem to have been able to manage it; we seem to have come to some consensus about what constitutes, let's say, quality high-quality literature rather than low-quality literature." We seem to remember the high-quality literature perhaps and to transmit it.

And we don’t remember the low-quality literature; at least, that’s what the humanities types would suggest. And something like that historical winnowing seems to be at work as we aggregated the stories that became the biblical corpus as well, right? These were picked out from a wider variety of other ancient stories and made canonical for all sorts of reasons that we don’t understand.

All sorts of decisions were made about which books to include, which books not to include, in what order to include them in, and that’s a mysterious process. We seem to have done it, and we've had wars about it too because it's a complicated problem. So the postmodernists then thought, "Hey, well, here's a problem: if we can't agree on what text—what a given text means—just one text or even a paragraph from a text, how can we agree on what the canonical texts are?" Because if it's problematic to interpret one fraction of a story, it's way more problematic to put a whole sequence of stories together—maybe that would be the classic books of the Western tradition, let’s say—and say those books and not others.

It’s like, well, who says and why those books exactly? And what’s your motive for putting those books together? And that’s where things got even more peculiar because I think it was perfectly reasonable of the postmodernist—in some sense—to say, "Well, how do we decide what the meaning of a text is? We don’t know." How do we decide which book should be canonical? We don’t know.

But then to take the next step—which was, "Well, your motives for aggregating these texts are suspect," and it looks to us, this is where the Marxist twist came in, extraordinarily and appropriately, in my estimation—is that it’s nothing but your will to power that aggregated those texts, right? The reason there's a Western canon is that the idea that there is a Western canon supports the domination of the West, and it was that drive to domination that was the spirit that aggregated the texts to begin with.

And that justifies their choice as canonical, and your support for that canon is either your conscious participation in that, let’s call it structure of oppression, or the manifestation of the same will to oppression operating within you. And that’s sort of where we’re at now in our culture because that’s the accusation. And I’m not very fond of that idea partly because, although I do agree that we don’t know how we make sense out of things—we don’t know—but that doesn’t—that lack of knowledge, that ignorance, is where it should have stopped in some sense.

There should have been an investigation there. It’s okay, we don’t understand this; we shouldn’t have leapt to a quasi-Marxist determination that said, "Oh, well, it’s all will to power; it’s all the desire to dominate,” right? And because that’s—well, first of all, really? You're so sure of that? What makes you so sure of that, that it’s will to power that’s the organizing principle let’s say for society as such? Do you really believe that?

Does that work in your personal relationships? Is that how you conduct yourself with your wife or your husband? It’s domination all the way, and same with your friends? It’s domination? And when you go out, you know, you have a business, and of course, if you’re radically left, you assume businesses are oppressive structures to begin with because you’re jealous and stupid. And well—because—and also because sometimes they are, you know, because structures do warp and bend and they can tilt towards oppression and tyranny, and human structures are susceptible to that.

But that’s a deviation as far as I’m concerned from the—certainly, I would say from the norm, but certainly from what's optimal. And is it your relationship between husband and wife is governed by nothing but power? That’s sort of the patriarchal oppression theory of marriage theory. It’s like, well, women have always been dominated by men; that's the historical reality. It’s like, really? That’s your story for the entire corpus of the cooperation and competition between men and women since the beginning of time? It’s essentially domination and nothing else? That’s how it works, is it?

It’s like, I don’t think there’s a bloody shred of evidence for that, by the way, because I’ve looked at the principles that appear to underlie the establishment and maintenance of stable social institutions at the micro level. So let’s say within the confines of an intimate relationship, and among friends and among business partners and, well, political entities for that matter. It looks to me like all the evidence suggests that it's something a lot more akin to reciprocal altruism and honest trade than it is akin to domination by power because it’s just not stable.

You know, if you’re around people who do nothing but exploit you, so you’re going to participate in that voluntarily? You’re going to do your best in a situation like that, or are you going to fight it in small ways and large and bring it to its knees? And I think—I really do believe—that that’s quite clear. Those systems don’t work, and it’s also the case that psychopaths, for example, who probably do operate in the world primarily on the basis of power, aren't successful, and they never get to be more than about three percent of the population. Because it’s just not a successful strategy.

You can oppress people and exploit them to some degree and that might be better, you know, in a biological sense than just laying on the floor doing nothing, you know, as a reproductive strategy. But it’s not successful enough so that it characterizes the bulk of human beings; it just doesn't work. And it doesn't even characterize animals. If you look at the principles upon which animal societies for social animals are structured, especially complex animals, mammals, it isn't obvious at all that it’s the meanest, scariest, toughest guy who climbs to the top and then hangs on by brute force. It isn’t even the case for chimpanzees.

So all right, so if it’s not power, then what is it? Well, I suggested it's something like reciprocal altruism, and that’s a biological term. But it’s something like "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" as the basis for social organization. You know, it’s something from me, something from you, something from me, something from you. And not in a zero-sum manner either. Understanding that if we treat each other as if we're both of worth and we act honestly, then we can both have more of what we want and need than we would if we were operating independently.

And isn't that the basis for your relationships fundamentally? You get married because you assume that you're better in the marriage than you would be outside the marriage. And I don’t mean things are better for you in some narrowly selfish sense, although perhaps that’s also true. I mean better in general, right? You’re wiser because you have a partner. You’re more careful; you're more attendant to the needs of others. You can think of that as, you know, finger-wagging, you should be more attendant to the needs of others. But you can think about it as proper ethical training too because if you learn to treat the person you love with a certain degree of respect and reciprocity, maybe that prepares you to do that with other people; at least, you’ve got some practice that way.

And isn’t it better to run a business under those auspices? Anybody who’s run a successful business is inclined to say yes. I mean, you have to make tough decisions, and sometimes you have to be cut-and-dried and maybe even somewhat cruel to make the proper decisions. But still, you're fundamentally looking at something that is akin to voluntary cooperation and voluntary—and the voluntary choice of the people that you associate with—voluntary association, exactly that. And the right to speak your mind, hoping that if you do speak your mind, you can keep the pathways in front of you clear.

And so, well, back to the biblical corpus and the museum. I mean, I was thinking about all these things that I’ve sort of laid out in this scattershot, impressionistic manner. I was trying to solve the problem of the canon: how do we figure out what’s canonical? It's like, well, is it merely we pick the books that justify the dominance of our culture? Well, first of all, you have to presume that we basically identify as human beings with groups to take that tack, right? Because we’re trying to support the domination of our culture.

I don’t think that way. I don’t think most people in the West think that way. I think most of us think at the level of the individual, and I think that’s more appropriate. And so the idea that we aggregated a canon to justify the domination of our, like, ethnic group, I think, no, I don’t think so. I mean, fair enough, and sometimes things go in that direction. But fundamentally, no, I don’t think that’s it. What’s canonical? How about this: the more a text influences, the more canonical it is. That’s pretty damn straightforward, and it seems straightforward enough, so I don’t even know why it would be questionable.

A text is relevant, important, vital, valued, if it has had a tremendous effect on other texts. And so maybe you write a book of genius, like right now, today, but it’s not going to be canonical because it hasn’t had the time to—when its influence through the entire corpus of text that constitutes the culture. And so we could say, well, maybe a corpus of text does constitute the culture. How do we make decisions of value? How do we see the world? Well, I think there are two ways. One is we do it in an embodied manner because we have emotions, and we have motivations, and they're built into us.

And part of the reason that we can understand each other is because we have the same motivations and emotions, and so we can make reference to them without having to explain them. I don't have to explain what anger means to you; I don't have to explain what jealousy means. I might have to specify the conditions under which they arose, and we could have an interesting discussion about whether that’s relevant or not. But I don’t have to tell you what they are. You're like me enough so that we can assume that, and so that’s part of the ground for our fundamental understanding—our shared embodiment. We’re very similar as embodied creatures, and we're even similar enough to animals that we can more or less understand complex animals for the same reason.

You know, you know when a dog wants to play, if you have any sense and you know anything about dogs. The dog bounces around in a playful way, and you think, "Dog wants to play." And the reason you know that is because you want to play, too. And so you don’t have to talk to the dog to establish that. It’s there to begin with. And so we have this biological substrate that enables us to communicate; that’s part of what enables us to solve the problem of perception. But then on top of that, we have a historical overlay.

And I think—and this is the point of this talk fundamentally—this is the idea that I’ve been wrestling with most recently—is that imagine that you had a map of all the books that there are in the West, because I’ll just stick with the West for now because that makes things easier. You have a map of all the books that there are in the West, and you could map out the relationship between every book and every other book, the dependencies. And you’d find, for example, that you should read Hamlet because a lot of other books refer to Hamlet, or you should read Shakespeare because a lot of other books refer to Shakespeare.

And if you don’t understand Shakespeare, then there’s a whole bunch of books you can’t understand. And then you might say, "Well, to understand Shakespeare, what should you have read?" And the answer to that could easily be, "Well, you probably should have read the Bible." And maybe that’s a claim that you could make about wanting to understand any book. Because if you mapped out the relationships between all the books that there are, you’d find that the most fundamental book is the biblical library.

And I think that’s even merely true historically. It’s partly why the Museum of the Bible was so interesting to me because walking through it, you see how the books were—how the book aggregated itself across time and became fundamental. The first book that was really widely available for purchasing, for printing, purchasing and reading was the Bible, and all the books that we know about now—the millions of books that we have—emerged from that base, that trunk, and they’re all related to that.

And it’s certainly possible that without an understanding of that fundamental book, you can't understand all the other books. And maybe it’s possible that without an understanding of that book, you can't understand other people. So, you know, to be people of the book means that we’re all inhabited by the same book, or—but it’s probably more complicated than that. Like, it’s not just the Bible because there are lots of books. It’s the biblical corpus, which is a library, and it’s the relationship between all the texts in that book to one another, and then it’s the whole structure of the relationship between all the texts that grew out of that.

And you could imagine a map of that. And then you could imagine that what you do as an educated person is sample that. And so there’s this structure that constitutes the sum total of the civilizat—the texts of our civilization. And then there’s you as an agent that needs to understand that structure. But you can’t read all the texts; obviously, how much time do you have? Nowhere near enough time to do that. You have to sample it in a way, though, that gives you an understanding of the, let's say, of the gist of it—something like that.

And so maybe the best way to do that, in a fundamental sense, is to become familiar with the biblical writings per se and then to move on to other literary forms from that. And so one of the ideas I’ve been wrestling with here—and you guys can think about what you think about this—you know, people of faith, Christian faith, believe that the Bible is true, but that’s never been that satisfying to me because I don't know what they mean. I don't know what people who make that claim mean when they say the Bible is true.

It’s like, well, what do you mean exactly? Is it true like it’s true, like a videotaped recording of what you did this morning is true? I would say no, it doesn’t seem to be because who cares about the videotape recording of what you did this morning? There’s nothing about it that’s relevant or interesting, you know, except peripherally. Well, really, you know, even when you talk about your day, you don’t say everything you did. Who wants to hear that? No one. And you know that—not even you. You don’t want to like watch a videotape of your morning the next morning, so—well, and so that’s an interesting thing because the videotape recording would be true in some sense, but it’s irrelevant. Who cares?

So maybe if it doesn’t matter, there’s a form of truth—it isn't because maybe there’s a form of truth that’s the truth that matters. That there’s an identity between what matters and the truth, and I think these old stories, biblical stories, are condensations of what matters. That’s what they really are. And I think they’re true not like history is true. If we think that by true history we mean something like literal or empirical history, it’s actually impossible in any case because—well, what happened in World War II? Well, you had to be there to see it. Where do you have to be? Everywhere, and that’s not even possible.

And so even when you have an accurate history of World War II, it’s obviously an unbelievably selective history. And there’s a point of some sort to the history, which the whole historical enterprise in some sense coalesces around. You don’t want to read a history book without a point. The point seems to define the investigation. The story, in some sense, appears to define the investigation. I mean, generally, the histories we have of World War II—the point around which they aggregate—is that what Hitler did was wrong. So there’s an ethic, an a priori ethical in some real sense that defines the frame within which the events are interpreted.

Even so, they can be aggregated because you might think, well, the most relevant events, the most relevant events of World War II are those that are the closest to Hitler’s evil, something like that. And you know, maybe you want to dispute that, and fair enough, dispute away. But my point is that if you’re writing a history, there’s an ethic around which the history aggregates, and that begs the question, which is otherwise it’s incoherent. It begs the question—what's the ethic? And that’s the question that confronts us, I would say, most starkly in the modern world. And that’s really, in some sense, what the entire cultural war that we’re all experiencing right now—that’s what it’s about. It’s what is the ethic, you know?

And I’m interested in the Judeo-Christian answer to that. I mean, the ethic—the post-modernist types like Derrida actually criticized Western thought for this very reason. Derrida called the West foul logo-centric—phallic. So masculine, logo-centric. It’s like, yeah, that’s right; it’s felt logo-centric. Well, he thought that was a bad thing, and my response to that is, yeah—compared to what exactly? Like, what do you got for an alternative? What’s the logos that is the source of the bias that characterizes the West?

Well, it's the speech that renews the world. That’s part of it, seems to be. It’s the speech that calls order out of chaos at the beginning of time. It’s the word that finds its embodiment in the figure of Christ, which is an extremely interesting idea, right? Is that the divine word finds embodiment and that somehow is emblematic of the relationship between the infinite and the finite. That’s a hell of an idea, you know? It’s an unbelievably profound idea—it’s a bottomless idea as far as I can tell.

And to accuse the West of prioritizing the logos doesn’t strike me as a particularly damning criticism, again, because compared to what exactly? And no, I've spoken with a lot of people who are dubious about religious claims, and fair enough, because they’re difficult to understand and can be misused in all sorts of ways. But the idea that there’s some relationship between our notion of intrinsic worth and our capacity to be the bearers of the honest speech that redeems seems to me to be a pretty bloody solid proposition.

It’s certainly what you hope for from the people that you have around you that you love and who you want to be of service to and vice versa. You hope that—they tell you the truth in some manner that combines justice and mercy in some tolerable manner that still illuminates you. You’re bloody fortunate if you’ve got that, and I think you do search for that in every relationship unless you become bitter and cynical, and you know that’s its own set of problems, and it’s not like anybody necessarily wants to go there, so I don’t think we’ll bother with that exploring that tonight.

And so I’ve been more and more thinking of this as a definition of what constitutes religious truth. So I think we have to look at the world; I think the structure we look at the world through has to be a structure of ethics. I think it has to be. And this is interesting because I would say I came to that conclusion not as a religious thinker but as a scientific thinker. I couldn’t see any other solution to the problem of perception other than the imposition of a structure of value.

And so what do I mean by that? Well, I made some allusion to it, but it’s even as simple as this: you have to prioritize your perceptions. So for example, when you use your eyes—and I mean technically, you’re pointing your eyes at something all the time—and the very central part of your vision is extremely expensive; it takes a lot of neurological territory for you to see clearly. And so you can only see a very small part of the total visual field clearly, and you move it around all the time. And where you move it to is where you want to look.

Well, where do you want to look? Well, you look where you think it's important to look. So I’ll say that again: you look where you think it’s important to look. And that means that, well, in a hierarchy of importance, it’s no different than a hierarchy of value. They’re the same thing. A hierarchy of priority is the same as a hierarchy of value. A hierarchy of priority and a hierarchy of value and an ethic are all the same thing, right? Because you're going to look at what you believe to be of cardinal importance.

Otherwise, you look—well, if you're talking to someone, and you look at their feet, that's not going to be going very well. First of all, they're not going to be very impressed with you because they actually want you to look at their eyes. And that’s because we communicate value with our eyes, and we do that directly. Our eyes have even evolved to do that—our eyes have whites around the iris so that you can see where people point them, because it’s that important to know what people think is important.

We see the world through a structure of value, and I think that a huge part of that structure of value is actually derived from the entire set of texts, the entire set of texts and their interrelationship that have the biblical corpus at their base. And so it seems to me that you—I think you can make a pretty damn strong case, maybe on scientific grounds, that you can't see the world except through the lens of the Bible. Like literally, you actually can't see it.

Now, if it’s not the Bible, it might be some other corpus of texts. But it might be—it isn’t. And if it was, well, is it going to be a corpus of texts that we share? Because if it isn’t, then we can’t share our perceptions and our values, and if we can’t share those, then we fight. Those are the options, right? We either stabilize our hierarchies of value in some way that we agree upon mutually, or we fight, or we’re unbelievably chaotic and confused, and that’ll just produce fighting in any case.

And so we have this structure of texts built from the bottom up. It's predicated on the biblical narratives, and the texts exist in relationship to those underlying narratives and derive a fair bit of their meaning from the meaning of the underlying narratives and vice versa, you know? And so then the biblical—Is it possible that biblical truth is the sort of truth that is the precondition for truth? Right?

Because you think, well, it’s religious people who make the claim, people of the Bible make the claim, the Bible is true. Well, there are all sorts of different kinds of truth. That's an interesting claim, but it's not very elaborated; it’s insufficient. And, you know, often what happens to Christians when they debate skilled atheists like Richard Dawkins is they treat the Bible like it’s a scientific theory. And Dawkins just mops the floor with them because it’s actually not a scientific theory compared to scientific theories.

And so as soon as you go there, well, it’s like a scientific theory? It’s like, no, it’s not; it’s not. And so does that mean it’s not true? Well, it means that if the only thing you think is true is a scientific theory. But I don’t think that you can practice science except within an ethical framework that’s not in itself science.

And so it's possible that there is a deeper truth than the scientific truth, which is the ethic that has to be there a priori before you can even begin to do science. I did talk to Richard Dawkins about that a little bit, you know, because he's someone who appears to believe that the truth will set you free, which is what scientists believe, because otherwise, why would they pursue the truth, right? For malevolent reasons? Well, hopefully not. They believe the truth is redeeming, but that isn't a scientific assumption; that’s a religious assumption.

And so is it possible that you can’t practice as an honest scientist without making the religious assumption that the truth will set you free? It’s certainly possible. I mean, it’s impossible to undertake the scientific enterprise in any real sense and discover anything that’s truly factual, let’s say, without abiding by the truth in an extraordinarily rigorous manner. You just don’t get anywhere. Certainly, what you do won’t be reproducible.

And so I know maybe I’ll wrap up with this; maybe I can make this a bit clearer. So I spent a lot of time studying cybernetic models of perception, and so those were models of perception that were informed by artificial intelligence theorizing, stretching all the way back to a man named Norbert Wiener, who established the field of cybernetics. And he basically claimed that you organize your perceptions in relationship to a goal. So, for example, if I want to walk across the stage, then I’ll specify my endpoint, and I’ll see that in high resolution.

And then I specify the pathway and that the observation of that untrammeled pathway produces positive emotion, because positive emotion is an index of an untrammeled pathway towards a valued goal, which is also something that’s very interesting to know because it suggests that there’s no positive emotion without a goal. And also suggests that the more noble the goal, the more complete and elevated the positive emotion, and that could be true; that could be true.

You know, and it’s the case as well that when you organize your perceptions around a goal, and that provides a container for your negative emotions. So if I want to walk across the stage because I think that getting to the other side is preferable to being here, so that’s a hierarchy of value—that place is better than this place—then when I observe myself undertaking the actions that will get me to that place, that’s comforting and provides security because it shows that the structure that I’m using to organize my perceptions and to reduce the world to a manageable—manageability—is sufficiently accurate so that I can implement it.

And so we seem to inhabit those structures all the time whenever we're looking at the world. Whenever we’re interacting, we specify a goal. And so that’s an ethical enterprise, and we organize our emotions within the specification of that goal. And then we produce hierarchies of goals. So, you know, you go to—you sit down in front of your computer so you can write a paper, and you write a paper so that you can finish an essay, and you finish an essay so that you can get a grade in the class, and you get a grade in class so that you can graduate with a degree, and you do that so that you can get a job, and you do that so that you can be, what, a good husband, a good wife, a good citizen, and you do that so you can be a good person.

There’s a hierarchy of ethic that permeates the entire enterprise right from the microcosm up to the macrocosm. And I think that’s something like the whole landscape of religious value with the outermost container—so be a good person, let’s say—that's the ultimate aim of the religious enterprise. That’s something like the imitation of Christ in the most fundamental sense, and all the things that you do within that are reflection of that or you’re confused and chaotic.

And if everyone’s doing that at the same time, then you have a society that’s integrated and aiming up and capable of telling the truth, something like that. Does that seem reasonable? And so what’s the proposition here? Well, I think when we describe these frameworks of perception, the name we give to the description of a framework of perception is a story.

And I think the reason that we like stories so much is because we need to establish frameworks of perception in order to operate in the world and to allow ourselves to be integrated peacefully with other people. And so we're extraordinarily interested in anything that has a narrative basis, and the reason we're interested in that is because we're trying to build within ourselves and collectively the structure that enables us to perceive the world without undue confusion and chaos and in a manner that provides some value to us and some sustainability. That’s the goal overall, and that seems to me to be the goal of the entire religious enterprise.

And so is it possible that—well, I guess that’s the claim I thought I’d elaborate out a little bit today is that the Bible is true in a very strange way. It’s true in that it provides the basis for truth itself. And so it’s like a meta-truth, right? Without it, there couldn’t even be the possibility of truth. And so maybe that’s the most true thing—the most true thing isn’t some truth per se; it’s that which provides the precondition for all judgments of truth.

It seems to me that I can't see any holes in that argument, and I can't see any holes in it from a scientific perspective either because I think we do know well enough now as scientists that the problem of deriving ethical direction from the collection of facts is an intractable problem. There’s too many facts; there’s an infinite number of facts. They do not provide an unerring guide for action; they can't. There are too many of them; they have to be prioritized.

And as soon as they’re prioritized, well, then you’re in the ethical domain, and then that begs the question: what’s the valid ethical domain? And the postmodern answer is, well, there isn’t one. It’s all the expression of domination and power, and I think that’s nonsense. I don’t think that’s a tenable solution. I think that we stumbled onto the proper answer in some sense in our religious enterprise, which is that we aim at what’s highest—or we don’t. We aim at what’s highest jointly, or we’re divided.

We aim at what’s highest, and that gives meaning to all the things we do that are subordinate parts of that. We aim at what’s highest, and that collects us and gives us structure—all of that, you know, singly and jointly. And that’s all what we’ve been trying to communicate all these centuries, as we've been trying to communicate the whole religious corpus generation after generation and to sort this out and to straighten it out and to try to understand it.

And I think that’s where we’re at now, you know? Maybe a little bit more conscious of what this all means and maybe a little bit more capable of being more certain as people of the book that the faith we have in the textual corpus that we inhabit is—we just haven’t done better than that. And we strive to flesh it out; we strive to understand it. But fundamentally, it seems to be true in that fundamental sense that I just described, which is not merely true but the precondition for truth itself.

And so that’s what I thought I would talk to you about tonight. Thank you very much. [Applause]