When the Machines Take Over… Or Have They Already?

Editor’s note: This article was originally posted at Convincing Proof and is reposted here with permission.

People have been intimidated by machines for a long time. It’s hard to say when this first began, but it definitely was ramped up during the industrial revolution when machines were taking over more and more jobs. It’s easy to understand why people felt intimidated; machines were superior to humans in certain respects – they were stronger, faster, and more reliable. Computers have only exacerbated this anxiety because now machines can be smarter than humans in certain ways – they can remember more and compute faster. This was strikingly driven home in 1997 when IBM’s computer “Deep Blue” beat World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov. Computers have taken over even more of our jobs; the unnerving threat of being replaced by a machine looms heavy on people’s minds.

Hollywood knows just how to tap into these anxieties. There have been several movie franchises built around the idea of machines taking over the world: The Terminator, The Matrix, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, etc.

In the latter two, machines didn’t try to take over the world per se, only their little corner of it. A central element in both movies is the idea of machines taking a superior position over humans and trying to control their fate. Think of how HAL 9000 tried to kill off Discovery One’s crew in order to preserve his own existence. In Alien, the android Ash considered Nostromo’s human crew expendable if they got in the way of his directive to bring an alien back for research.

In this article I will argue that there is a sense in which machines have already taken over the world. Machines have already destroyed mankind, and in a way that is much more frightening than any Hollywood movie. I’m actually talking about a machine philosophy that has overtaken the world, a philosophy that views human beings as mere machines. This is scarier than The Terminator or The Matrix. This man-is-machine philosophy doesn’t destroy us physically, it does something worse: it destroys what it means to be human; it destroys the essence of what mankind is.

Historical Background

Some history will be helpful here. It’s true that early scientists such as Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton viewed the universe as a vast machine. But they didn’t view mankind as being part of this vast machine; man was outside of the machine, so to speak. Everything else in the universe followed set, deterministic laws of cause and effect, but human beings were different; they were unique, special. Yes, they had machine-like parts. The heart functions like a pump, for example, but humans were more than merely the sum of their machine-like parts. These early scientists didn’t think human beings were governed by deterministic laws of cause and effect; they knew human beings had intelligence, free will, and made real choices.

This thinking changed radically during the 1800s. More and more people began to think that human beings were merely the result of mechanical forces, the laws of nature so to speak. This was a titanic shift. Human beings were now thought of as part of the deterministic chain of cause and effect, part of the universe-machine; hence, they are just machines themselves. The man most responsible for influencing this way of thinking was Charles Darwin.

How has this “man is machine” philosophy affected Western society? How exactly has it destroyed our humanity? Francis Schaeffer is very helpful here. He was a Presbyterian pastor that was highly influential in the 1950s through the 1970s. He published over twenty books explaining how and why Western thinking has shifted over the last few hundred years. In one particular lecture, Schaeffer showed how Darwin’s evolutionary ideas, specifically that humans are just biological machines, affected Darwin’s own personal life. Schaeffer then explained that this foreshadowed well how these ideas would affect Western society over the next 150 years.     

Darwin’s Own Words

We can see how this machine philosophy affected Darwin’s own life by comparing the young Darwin with the older Darwin. The following quotes come from Darwin himself and can be found in a book of his letters put together by his son Francis Darwin—Charles Darwin: His Life Told in an Autobiographical Chapter, and in a Selected Series of his Published Letters. The first part of each quote describes Darwin’s view when he was younger, but the latter part of each quote (which I have put in bold text) describes his view when he was older. The first thing to notice is how this machine philosophy moved him away from belief in God.

The Duke of Argyll… recorded a few words… spoken by my father in the last year of his life.  “…I said to Mr. Darwin, with reference to some of his… work on the Fertilisation of Orchids… and various other observations he made of the wonderful contrivances of certain purposes in nature – I said it was impossible to look at these without seeing that they were the effect and the expression of mind. I shall never forget Mr. Darwin’s answer. He looked at me very hard and said, ‘Well, that often comes over me with overwhelming force; but at other times,’ and he shook his head vaguely, adding, ‘it seems to go away.’” (pg. 64)

Why Darwin, why did this go away?          

The old argument from design in Nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered.  We can no longer argue that… the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man.  There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows. (pgs. 58-59)

He also wrote about the argument for God from a first cause.

Another source of conviction in the existence of God… impresses me as having much more weight. This follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting, I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist.  This conclusion was strong in my mind about the time… when I wrote the Origin of Species, and… since that time… it has very gradually… become weaker.  …can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animals, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?  …the mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us, and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic. (pgs. 61-62)

It is clear that Darwin moved away from belief in God because of his evolutionary ideas. He used to find theistic arguments quite compelling, e.g., the argument from design or the argument from first cause. In his earlier days, it seemed to him nearly impossible to conceive that our universe, including human beings, could have happened by chance. But later, after he adopted his ideas about evolution, he began to doubt whether he could really trust his mind’s ability to draw correct conclusions. His evolutionary ideas led him to reject his own logical intuitions. Next we will see how his ideas affected his view of mankind.

…the most usual argument for the existence of an intelligent God is drawn from the deep inward conviction[s]… which are experienced by most persons. Formerly I was led by feelings such as those… to the firm conviction of the existence of God and of the immortality of the soul. In my Journal I wrote that whilst standing in the midst of the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, “it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind.” I well remember my conviction that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body; but now the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions… to rise in my mind.  …I am like a man who has become colour-blind… (pgs. 60-61)

When God is dead, man is dead. Darwin used to think that mankind was something more, something special. But we start to see here how his man-is-machine philosophy destroyed his concept of humanity. This can be seen even more strikingly in how his appreciation for beauty changed.

…in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and… I took intense delight in Shakespeare…  I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music… this curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder… My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive… (pgs. 50-51)

Darwin did not understand why viewing himself as a machine led to a loss of his very own humanity in the realm of beauty and art. When God is dead, man is dead. And as Schaeffer often pointed out, when mad is dead, beauty and morality are dead.

I am glad you were at the Messiah [Handel’s], it is the one thing that I should like to hear again, but… I should find my soul too dried up to appreciate it as in old days; and then I should feel very flat, for it is a horrid bore to feel as I constantly do, that I am a withered leaf for every subject except Science.  It sometimes makes me hate Science, though God knows I ought to be thankful for such a[n]… interest, which makes me forget for some hours every day my accursed stomach. (pg. 269)

Science did not kill his humanity. Science is a great and wonderful thing. It was his man-is-a-machine philosophy that killed his humanity. Next, we see how it affected his view of morality.

Whilst on… the Beagle I was quite orthodox, and I remember being… laughed at by several of the officers… for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality. (pg. 58)

Many people are surprised to learn that Darwin piously quoted the Bible while on his famous journey. The following quote, which provides his view as an older gentlemen, comes from another section of the book:

The loss of these tastes [for poetry, plays, paintings, and music] is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature. (pg. 51)

Did Darwin reject morality all together? No, he did not.

…I may say that the impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God; but whether this is an argument of real value, I have never been able to decide… The safest conclusion seems to me that the whole subject is beyond the scope of man’s intellect; but man can do his duty. (pg. 57)

Within the man-is-a-machine philosophy, God is dead. When God is dead, man is dead. And when man is dead, morality is dead. We see here how Darwin tried to hold onto morality. He recognized where all this was headed, but he tried to fight against the logical conclusion of his evolutionary ideas. He said no, morality will not die because man will do his duty. We can still hold onto morality even though we believe God does not exist and we are merely machines; man can do his duty! But what is this duty, Darwin? Where does it come from?

What Followed

Darwin himself didn’t carry his man-is-machine philosophy to its ultimate conclusion, but those who came later did. Take Jacques Monod, for instance; he was a Nobel Prize winner and one of the founders of molecular biology. He wrote, “Anything can be reduced to simple, obvious mechanical interactions. The cell is a machine. The animal is a machine. Man is a machine. The universe is not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man… Man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty.” Clearly, he recognized the inevitable conclusion of this man-is-machine philosophy.

Bertrand Russell, also a Nobel Prize winner, was one of the founders of analytic philosophy and is considered one of the 20th century’s premier logicians. He wrote, “Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms.”

I trust you’re beginning to see how humanity is destroyed by this machine philosophy. In this way of thinking, everything that makes us human, our hopes, fears, and loves, is just the result of random, accidental atoms bouncing around.

Richard Dawkins, probably the most well-known atheist alive today, was a professor at Oxford and has written many well-known books. He wrote, “We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment. Though I have known it for years, I never seem to get fully used to it.” I would suggest that he can’t get fully used to it because it cuts across the grain of everything we are as human beings.

Michael Ruse, a philosopher of science and professor at Florida State University, wrote that “Darwinian theory shows that in fact morality is a function of (subjective) feelings, but it shows also that we have (and must have) the illusion of objectivity… In a sense, therefore, morality is a collective illusion foisted upon us by our genes.”

When man is dead, morality is dead.   

Scarier than the Terminator

This is scarier than The Terminator. In fact, this is so frightening that Hollywood can’t even deal with it. What do I mean? More and more movies are portraying machines not as cold, heartless instruments of death but as warm, moral, and able to love. Two recent movies stand out in this regard: Transcendence and Her.

In the futuristic movie Her, released in 2013, Joaquin Phoenix’s character falls in love romantically with his computer’s intelligent operating system, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. This may sound like a silly comedy, but actually it was a very serious drama that won the Academy Award for best original screenplay. In Transcendence, Johnny Depp’s character dies, but, before his body perishes, his mind is downloaded onto a computer. Throughout the movie the audience is led to think that this “mind” in the computer has lost its humanity and has become cold, calculating, and ruthless, like so many other machines in movies. But the plot twist at the end reveals that it was truly him all along, that his computer version actually retained his humanity, i.e., his morality, love, and compassion.

Now I don’t personally know any Hollywood types, so I can’t claim to know their motives. But I do have a theory, and maybe it’s not even that Hollywood thought it through like this consciously; it might just be the thought process that has taken place overall at a cultural level. Regardless, it seems to me like something such as the following has taken place. First, we as a culture produced a string of movies where machines were portrayed as cold, heartless, and unable to love. But then we recognized that, wait a second, we’re just machines ourselves! That’s what many scientists and philosophers are telling us anyway. Biological machines, no doubt, but still machines. Putting one and two together, the conclusion must be that we ourselves are cold, heartless, and unable to love, that morality isn’t real. And this is what many scientists and philosophers are saying, as we’ve seen. Romantic love is just a chemical reaction nature selected because it caused us to reproduce and pass on our genes. Parental love was just programmed into us by evolution so that we would care for our offspring so they could, again, pass on our genes.

The problem is that most of us are like Richard Dawkins, and we find this hard to accept; we don’t like it, it’s too frightening to deal with. We want love to be real; it cuts across the grain of our humanity to say that love is just an illusion, the result of an accidental, random mutation. So we, and Hollywood, are caught in this tension. On the one hand, we have bought into this man-is-machine philosophy because that’s what we’ve been taught. But on the other hand, we so want love to be real. Do you see the despair here? Imagine finding out one day that you’re just a robot, that everything about you has been programmed. You don’t really have free will; all the decisions and choices you think you’ve made were just what you’ve been pre-programmed to do. All your personality traits are just accidental lines of code. Imagine the despair. Your feelings, aspirations, loves, and relationships were predetermined by programming. And you can’t escape. The rest of your life will be just the same; even the feelings you experience in reaction to this news are just the result of your programming.

You may think, “Well, if I could find the programmer who designed me and talk to him, then I could at least find out why he programmed me like this.” But despair is piled on despair because there is no such programmer. There is no person behind who and what you are; you have no creator. Your programming just came about randomly and accidently. There’s no programmer; there’s no maker to go to and ask these “why” questions. You’re just an accident of an unfeeling, uncaring, silent, material universe. Wouldn’t that be crushing? Wouldn’t that make you doubt that there’s even any purpose to life? That maybe you’re not even real, that there is no such thing as you?

Let me review. I’m proposing that something like the following thought process has occurred on a cultural level.

1. In movies we portrayed machines as cold, heartless, and unable to really love.

2. But then we realized that, wait a second, ultimately we’re just machines too!

3. That realization must also mean that we’re cold, heartless, and unable to really love as well.

We could remove the tension by just rejecting #2, by rejecting the man-is-machine philosophy. Instead, we’ve tried to relieve the tension by changing #1. We’ve re-cast machines with the ability to be moral and to love. In effect, we’ve come to tell ourselves that machines can be moral. Therefore, it’s alright that we’re machines because, see, you can be a machine and still experience morality and love.

Even the classic movies we started with (The Terminator, The Matrix, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Alien), the ones famous for their cold, heartless, killing machines, all came back in their sequels with machines re-cast as good, moral, and loving. Again, I believe this was done to relieve the terrifying tension I explained above. In other words, Hollywood could make scary movies about heartless killing machines without any problem. But the idea that that is all we are was too frightening, and so the machines were re-cast. Let me give some examples.

In The Matrix, the machine program Agent Smith tells the human Morpheus, “…when we started thinking for you, it really became our civilization which is, of course, what this is all about. Evolution, Morpheus. Evolution. Like the dinosaur… You had your time. The future is our world, Morpheus. The future is our time.” In the second sequel, Matrix Revolutions, a machine program explains that “I love my daughter very much. I find her to be the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.” Needless to say, Neo was very surprised to hear a machine talk that way.

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL is cold, calculating, and ruthless. When astronaut David Bowman asks HAL to let him back into the spaceship so he won’t die, HAL replied with the now famous line, “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” In the sequel, though, 2010, we’re told that HAL shouldn’t be blamed for what he did. His creator, Dr. Chandra, explained that “it wasn’t his fault… HAL was told to lie… by people who find it easy to lie. HAL doesn’t know how so he couldn’t function. He became paranoid… Whether we are based on carbon or silicon makes no fundamental difference. We should each be treated with appropriate respect.” The message is clear: essentially, machines are just like us.

In Alien, the android Ash is portrayed as amoral, inhuman, and unmerciful. This is seen most clearly when Ash explains why he’s so fascinated by the murderous alien. He describes it as “a perfect organism… I admire its purity. A survivor… unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.” But in the sequel Aliens, the new android Bishop explained why Ash went berserk: “I prefer the term ‘artificial person’ myself… The A2s were always a bit twitchy. That could never happen now with our behavioral inhibitors. It is impossible for me to harm… a human being.”

Lastly, in The Terminator, the Terminator is portrayed as a relentless, unfeeling, unemotional killing machine. While trying to convince Sarah Connor how much danger she was in, Kyle Reese explained that “It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear. And it absolutely will not stop ever. Until you are dead.” But in the sequel, in the very last line of the movie, Sarah Connor gives the following message: “Because if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too.”

How Will This Help Us Reach People for Christ?

Foreign missionaries, in order to reach the culture they’ve been called to, need to become students of that culture. In order to really communicate with the people in a way they can understand, missionaries need to do more than just learn their spoken language; they need to understand that culture’s intellectual history, its way of perceiving the world, and its customs and traditions. I would argue, then, for us, if we truly desire to reach our own Western society with the gospel, then it’s imperative we understand what our culture is going through and how its thinking became so confused. This will help us know what to say to our culture and how to say it. It will help us know what areas of thought our culture is currently struggling with so that we can show them how God’s Word provides the answers.

We need to show people that the Bible isn’t an old dusty book, irrelevant to modern man. It gives us the answers to life’s most pressing issues because its author is the Creator of life.

Our culture right now is experiencing a crippling tension. On the one hand, we’ve come to believe that we’re nothing but biological machines. On the other hand, everything inside of us screams that love is real, that morality is real, that we do make real, significant choices. Think of the biology professor who teaches her class that love is just a chemical reaction but then that night flies into a maddening rage when she finds out her husband has been cheating on her. Do you see the tension?

The only thing holding this tension together is an irrational leap; they believe in love, not because it makes rational sense to, but just because they want to. They’re driven to irrationality because they think logic and facts lead only to the despair of man-is-machine. And so our culture has reached out desperately for anything that could provide some sort of meaning, even if it’s an irrational leap of faith. This is driven home most powerfully at the end of Matrix Revolutions during the final battle between the machine program Agent Smith and Neo. After fighting back and forth for some time, Agent Smith, losing his patience, yells out: “Do you believe you’re fighting for something… more than your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know? Is it freedom or truth? Perhaps peace? Could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Anderson. Temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose! And all of them are as artificial as the Matrix itself… It’s pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson, why? Why do you persist?”

Neo responded with, in my opinion, a terrible answer. He answered Agent Smith’s taunting simply with “Because I choose to.” It’s as though Neo agrees that all those things are illusions: freedom, truth, peace, and love. But he just chooses to believe in them anyway. The issue is not what we choose to believe; the issue is what’s actually real. I wish Neo would’ve responded that “those things – freedom, truth, peace, and love – we fight for those things because they are real!”

I understand this is just a movie, but the fact is that this is exactly where our culture is at in its thinking; science and rationality have taught us that freedom, truth, peace, and love aren’t real, but yet we want to hold onto them. We choose to believe in them, not because we have good reasons to, but only because they give us some sort of purpose and meaning, while at the same time realizing that they’re ultimately an illusion. But to many thinking, sensitive people, this only leads to despair. Trying to muster this type of faith, a faith that goes against reason and rationality, is devastating. It’s like trying to convince yourself there’s a pink elephant in the room when clearly there isn’t. We weren’t meant to live with this sort of fragmentation in our thinking, nor the resulting tension it creates. And I don’t think it’s sustainable.

Of course, there’s one way to relieve the tension. We could drop the irrational leap of faith nonsense, just bite the bullet, and admit that love isn’t real. We could fully embrace the man-is-machine philosophy and be consistent with its implications. There has been some movement in this direction; consider Friedrich Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values, as well as eugenics, abortion, and euthanasia. There’s even the idea in some circles that modern medicine hinders human progress because it keeps the weak alive to pass on their inferior genes. We gasp at such a thought, but isn’t this just the progression Paul talked about? First God is dead.

…His invisible attributes, that is, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what He has made. As a result, people are without excuse. For though they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God or show gratitude. Instead, their thinking became nonsense… (Rom. 1:19-22).

And when God is dead, morality is dead.

And because they did not think it worthwhile to have God in their knowledge, God delivered them over to a worthless mind to do what is morally wrong. They are filled with all unrighteousness… murder, quarrels, deceit… boastful, inventors of evil… unloving, and unmerciful (Rom. 1:28-31).

As Christians we need to speak to our society and tell them that there‘s another way to relieve the tension. We need to tell them that love is real, that you don’t have to take an irrational leap of faith to believe in it. We can explain to them that they were created by a Loving Person for the purpose of experiencing loving relationships with Him and with others. We can explain that love is not an illusion, that it’s actually a central part of ultimate reality, intrinsic to the eternal relationships between the three Persons of the Trinity.

It’s interesting to note that in the sequels discussed above, when Hollywood wanted to show that machines could really love, they had the machines sacrifice themselves to save others. In Aliens, the android Bishop died to save the little girl. In 2010, HAL was willing to die in the explosion so the humans could escape. In Matrix Revolutions, the Oracle let Agent Smith kill her so Neo could save mankind. In Terminator 2, the Terminator sacrificed himself to prevent the machines from taking over.

When Hollywood wanted to show that machines could love, they had them perform the greatest act of love there is: sacrificing yourself to save others. As Christians, we need to lovingly tell our culture that there’s a way out of this tension, that love is not an illusion, that it’s the foundation of ultimate reality, and that this love was demonstrated most clearly in that God sacrificed Himself to save us. That’s the message we have for the world.

The Case for Christ: Movie Review

While God certainly draws people to Himself via apologetic arguments and evidences, He certainly has many more resources in His arsenal than that. This truth is illustrated beautifully in the recently released movie The Case for Christ. The movie is set in Chicago in 1980 and tells the story of the conversion to Christianity of the well-known Christian author Lee Strobel (played by Mike Vogel) and his wife Leslie (played by Erika Christensen). Neither Lee nor Leslie were Christians when they married. Lee was having much success in his career as a legal editor for the Chicago Tribune, and both he and his wife were quite happy in their lives as unbelievers. But when God used a chain of events—that did not involve apologetic arguments and evidences—to stir Leslie to the conviction that Christianity is true, Lee was forced to come face to face with the truth claims of Christianity for the first time and reexamine his atheism.

The movie captures in a powerful way the intense spiritual struggle that is often involved in coming to Christ, and it wonderfully depicts how the Holy Spirit works in a multitude of ways to break down the barriers of sin in unbelieving hearts to prepare people to accept the gospel. While Leslie encountered God in a more emotional way through events and Christian friends that God providentially placed into her life, Lee’s conversion illustrates how God can use a combination of arguments, evidences, and personal experiences to soften the heart of even a highly skeptical atheist. Leslie’s conversion and newfound passionate love for God sent Lee on a personal mission to use all of his investigative skills as a reporter to gather the evidence needed to convince his wife that she was caught up in what he considered to be a “cult” that is not rooted in facts. But this journey did not unfold as Lee planned. Lee interviewed experts in such fields as theology, philosophy, psychology, and medicine; however, what he discovered did not allow him to rest easy in the confident unbelief that he had always maintained.

The movie is gripping and entertaining from start to finish. Unlike many Christian movies that leave the viewer cringing, the story is put together well and features quality acting. The film does not force apologetics into the story; rather, solid apologetic evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is sprinkled into the story in a natural way as Lee travels down his road to faith in Christ. While the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is crucial to Lee’s conversion, the Holy Spirit brings him to faith via a multi-pronged plan that includes events that Lee experienced at work and within his family. There are a number of emotional scenes in which the personal spiritual battle that Lee is facing is palpable and moving, and the movie does well to illustrate how coming to faith is not merely a matter of coldly weighing out the evidence. Moreover, the turmoil that Leslie faces as Lee remains committed to his unbelief will resonate with many who have come to faith in Christ but feel the stress of not being able to convince loved ones to do the same. Indeed, the loving and patient way that she responds to this turmoil and balances her love for Christ and her love for Lee is one of the most instructive aspects of the film.

Ultimately, this film has much to offer for both believers in Christ and unbelievers. For believers, it reveals what a powerful tool apologetic evidence can be and how the Spirit makes use of it to impact certain unbelievers and draw them to the truth. It also reveals the importance of Christians loving unbelievers unconditionally and being a living testimony to them. In this way, it reminds those Christians who tend to think of evangelism as a matter of purely logic chopping and apologetic evidence that unbelief is never merely about evidence—it involves the heart and moral and emotional dimensions as well. At the same time, it reminds those who think of evangelism as a matter of simply “loving people to Jesus” without answering their hard evidential questions that this approach is inadequate for some unbelievers; some people need to have their intellectual questions answered before they will come to Christ. The film highlights how God is sovereign and is constantly working in providential ways to help unbelievers realize the truth of the gospel, and people can legitimately come to faith through evidential and non-evidential means. For unbelievers who see the film, it will introduce to them highlights of some of the best historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus and will expose them to the names of leading scholars in Christian apologetics—people like William Lane Craig and Gary Habermas. The movie also is sympathetic and fair to the unbelievers who are portrayed in it and does not demonize them—a criticism that can rightly be made of the 2014 Christian film God’s Not Dead, for example. Unbelieving viewers should also be able to appreciate the movie as a well-told and well-acted tale of two people who faced wrenching turmoil in their lives and in their marriage. From a plot standpoint, the movie holds its own and is engaging even apart from the fact that the story centers around religious aspects, though an unbeliever may not find it to be as much of a feel-good story as a believer would. While the love story between Lee and Leslie can be appreciated by any viewer, hopefully the love that God has for humanity shines through to the unbeliever as well through this film. In the final analysis, this reviewer highly recommends the film.

CaseForChrist In theaters April 7, 2017. http://thecaseforchristmovie.com/ Based on the true story of an award-winning investigative journalist-and avowed atheist-who applies his well-honed journalistic and legal skills to disprove the newfound Christian faith of his wife... with unexpected, life-altering results.

Intuiting the Beauty of the Infinite: Ramanujan and Hardy’s Friendship and Collaboration

The Man Who Knew Infinity, a recent movie based on a book of the same name by Robert Kanigel, recounts the short but remarkable life story of India’s great mathematical prodigy Srivivasa Ramanujan (henceforth SR). Although what follows is a response to the film, the book is well-worth reading, filled with luscious prose such as in this sample: “The Cauvery was a familiar, recurrent constant of Ramanujan’s life. At some places along its length, palm trees, their trunks heavy with fruit, leaned over the river at rakish angles. At others, leafy trees formed a canopy of green over it, their gnarled, knotted roots snaking along the riverbank.”

The movie begins by quoting Bertrand Russell (a character in the movie itself): “Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth but supreme beauty.” It then shows SR in India, doing his mathematics (without much formal training) while trying to eke out a living for his family. His passion and talent for math are obvious; trying to describe maths (the preferred British abbreviation) to his wife, he says it’s like a painting, but with colors you can’t see. There are patterns everywhere in mathematics, he adds, revealed in the most incredible forms. Finding himself in need of someone who could understand and appreciate his ground-breaking work, SR wrote G. H. Hardy, legendary professor at Cambridge, and eventually Hardy invited SR to traverse the ocean and come work with him there.

This incredible opportunity required SR to leave his wife behind and endure the long journey and culture shock of moving to England, which contributes to a compelling narrative, with many twists and turns I’m not discussing but that make for a terrific, sometimes heart-wrenching tale. Despite the trials and challenges (including a war), what’s amazing was how much work SR and Hardy were able to do over the next five years—publishing dozens of groundbreaking articles.

The divergent worldviews of the two men make the dynamics of their friendship particularly fascinating to chronicle. SR was a devout Hindu whereas Hardy was a committed atheist—though the first time Hardy says this to SR in the movie (“I’m what’s called an ‘atheist’”), SR replies, “You believe in God. You just don’t think he likes you.” Incidentally, this is a key structuring question in C. S. Lewis’s moving novel Till We Have Faces: whereas both Psyche and Orual believe in the gods, Psyche believed they were marvelous and loving, but Orual thought they were only dark, unkind, and mysterious. In Rudolph Otto’s terminology, Orual was familiar with the tremendum aspect of the Numinous, but Psyche with both the tremendum (the awe-inspiring mystery) and the fascinans aspect of the Numinous. Fascinans is the aspect of the Divine involving consuming attraction, rapturous longing—and is often connected to the imagination, beauty, even poetry.

The diametric difference in SR’s and Hardy’s ultimate worldviews proves to be related to a central aspect of the plot. Hardy is adamant about the need to show step-by-step proofs of SR’s conclusions, while SR is depicted as functioning on a much more intuitive level. I’m not concerned for now what artistic liberties the moviemakers might have taken in this regard, but it is true that SR would often write down the conclusions of his work and not all the intervening steps. There may be at least a partial explanation of this which is fairly prosaic: paper tended to be in short supply for SR in India. But it’s at least intriguing to consider the explanation advanced in the movie: SR possessed incredibly strong intuitive skills. Mystifying Hardy, SR could just see things that few others could and felt little need to offer the proofs.

Hardy—though incredibly impressed with SR’s abilities, likening him to an artist like Mozart, who could write a whole symphony in his head—repeatedly says that intuition is not enough. Intuition must be “held accountable.” Proofs mattered, to avoid projecting the appearance of SR’s mathematical dance or art as on a par with conjuring.

It isn’t that SR’s intuitions were infallible. His theory of primes, however intuitively obvious, turned out to be wrong. Still, though, many of his intuitions were eventually vindicated and proved right. One among other interesting questions that SR’s reliance on intuitions raises is how much discursive analysis they involve. It’s a vexed question among epistemologists whether intuitions are a lightning quick series of inferences, or something more immediately and directly apprehended. The quickness with which they come naturally lends itself to the latter analysis, but perhaps there’s something to the former option—particularly if much of the analysis is done beneath the level of conscious awareness. In the Sherlock Holmes stories, for example, Sherlock’s inferences would come so quickly that Watson characterized them as resembling intuitions; likewise, realizing it’s sometimes easier to know something than to explain the justification for it, Sherlock himself recognized the way knowledge can have features that resemble more immediate apprehendings than just the deliverances of the discursive intellect. A couple of real-life Sherlocks, Al Plantinga and Phil Quinn had a dust up some years back on whether basic beliefs are formed inferentially or not.

The difference in Hardy’s and SR’s styles, we come to see, is related to their divergent worldviews. Exasperated at Hardy’s recurring disparagement of intuition as lacking in substance, SR finally blurts out, “You say this word as if it is nothing. Is that all it is to you? All that I am? You’ve never even seen me. You are a man of no faith. . . . Who are you, Mr. Hardy?” The underlying dynamic that brought this exchange to a head was the way SR connected his own identity to those intuitions. Hardy had asked SR before how he got his ideas. Now SR gives his answer: “By my god. She speaks to me, puts formulas on my tongue when I sleep, sometimes when I pray.”

SR asks Hardy if he believes him, and adds, “Because if you are my friend, you will know that I am telling you the truth. If you are truly my friend.”

In Till We Have Faces, we find a similar scene. Orual can’t see the gold-and-amber castle that Psyche tells her of, but Orual also knows that Psyche had never told her a lie. One issue here is testimony, and the conditions that need to be in place to take it as reliable. Of course someone could be telling the truth, the best they understand it, and still be unreliable—for perhaps they’ve unwittingly made a mistake, or they’re delusional or confused.

At any rate, Hardy’s reply is transparent: “But I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in anything I can’t prove.”

“Then you don’t believe in me,” SR responded. “Now do you see? An equation has no meaning to me unless it expresses the thought of God.”

Hardy remained skeptical of SR’s theology, but couldn’t dispute with the results. He would go to bat for SR to get him a fellowship at Cambridge, and in his impassioned defense of SR’s accomplishments he extolled his incredible originality, by which SR could apprehend so much truth otherwise missed. On Hardy’s view, the creativity and originality, though they provided SR a lens through which to see, didn’t subjectivize SR’s findings; rather, they were a tool for seeing farther and seeing more.

This contrasts with, say, Simon Critchley’s interpretation of the poetry of Wallace Stevens. On (Critchley’s) Stevens’s view, the only reality we experience is mediated through categories furnished by the poetic imagination, rendering our perspectives products of the imagination and, thus, subjective—yet still able to be believed despite their fictive nature. This is what some might call a more “postmodern” perspective than Hardy’s more traditional view that there’s an objective reality we’re able to discern, however imperfectly and through a glass darkly.

In real life, when Hardy died, one mourner spoke of his “profound conviction that the truths of mathematics described a bright and clear universe, exquisite and beautiful in its structure, in comparison with which the physical world was turbid and confused. It was this which made his friends . . . think that in his attitude to mathematics there was something which, being essentially spiritual, was near to religion.”

Hardy didn’t believe in God, but he did believe in SR and in the objectivity of mathematical truth. He wrote of his Platonism in his Mathematician’s Apology, and the movie captures this too. In one of his defenses of SR, he related the story of the way SR said mathematical truths are thoughts of God—a view parallel to, say, Plantinga’s view that modal and necessary moral truths are also thoughts in the mind of God. Then Hardy added, “Despite everything in my being set to the contrary, perhaps he’s right. For isn’t this exactly our justification for pure mathematics? We are merely the explorers of infinity in the pursuit of absolute perfection. We do not invent these formulae—they already exist and lie in wait for only the brightest minds to divine and prove. In the end, who are we to question Ramanujan—let alone God?”

Though math, on Hardy’s view, is discovered, not invented, it may take those with prodigious talents to uncover its deepest truths. Speaking of which, near the start of the film Hardy had said, “I didn’t invent Ramanujan. I discovered him.” Even more than the math, this is a movie about men and their remarkable friendship and fertile partnership across radically divergent and conflicting paradigms. The humanity of the film is its best feature of all.

After five years of collaboration between these unlikely friends, SR returned to India, having contracted a fatal disease—likely tuberculosis. Within a year he died, at the age of just 32. Hardy was crestfallen when he heard the news, and grieved the loss deeply. Near the end of the movie, he reflected on his collaboration with both SR and another colleague, Littlewood, saying he’d done something special indeed: “I have collaborated with both Littlewood and Ramanujan on something like equal terms.”

Paraphrasing Hardy, he once commented that out of 100 points, he would give himself 30 as a mathematician, 45 to Littlewood, 70 to Hilbert. And 100 to Ramanujan. In the year SR spent in India before his death, he poured his brilliant findings into another notebook. It was lost for a while, but when found, the importance of its discovery was likened to that of Beethoven’s “10th Symphony.” A century later, these formulas are being used to understand the behavior of black holes.

His Truth Is Marching On: Selma’s Clarion Call

Editor's note: This article was originally published at Christ and Pop Culture. 

“The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

There’s a poignant scene towards the close of Ava DuVernay’s new film Selma, a scene made all the more compelling by its prescience. John Doar, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, warns Martin Luther King of credible threats against his life that await him in Montgomery, the destination of the Selma march protesting barriers to African American voter registration.

Doar implores King to drive—rather than walk—into the capital and to nix the planned speech, to minimize his exposure and prevent any possible harm. “Don’t you want to protect yourself?” Doar asks. King’s response here is telling, as it speaks of his convictions and highlights the worldview animating the film and, more importantly, the nonviolent resistance movement whose story it portrays.

I’m no different than anyone else. I want to live long and be happy, but I’ll not be focusing on what I want today. I’m focused on what God wants. We’re here for a reason, through many, many storms. But today the sun is shining, and I’m about to stand in its warmth alongside a lot of freedom-loving people who worked hard to get us here. I may not be here for all the sunny days to come, but as long as there’s light ahead for them, it’s worth it to me.

The specific threats of violence against King echo the egregious wrongs perpetrated throughout the film—the disenfranchisement of black citizens, the murders of innocent children and protesters, the brutality of local and state police against unarmed marchers. And yet the activists refused to be intimidated. “We go again,” Dr. King says after so-called Bloody Sunday—the brutal attacks by police and posse alike on the protesters during their first attempted march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

[su_dropcap]T[/su_dropcap]he injustice on display in Selma is heart-wrenching. Few will leave the theater dry-eyed after witnessing the powerful using their positions and privilege, their weapons and words, to dehumanize others. Again and again, the protesters are at the receiving end of such abuse. They suffer indignity after indignity in exercising basic human rights—registering to vote, checking in to a hotel, protesting peacefully.[su_pullquote]This process—resisting the impulse to respond to injustice in kind, to daily wait on the Lord to set wrongs right, to proclaim truth without fear, to stand in solidarity with the downtrodden—is hard. It is in fact beyond hard; it is impossible in our own strength.[/su_pullquote]

The scenes projected on the screen provoke outrage and disgust. And yet, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) led by King rejected retaliation in kind, however tantalizing the temptation. After one particularly humiliating and damaging attack, several protesters plan to round up some guns, only to be reminded that the police and government force will always be much greater than theirs. “We have to win another way,” SCLC leader Andrew Young counsels.

Resisting the logic of lex talionis—an eye for an eye—seems counterintuive and countercultural at best, foolhardy at worst. Achieving victory by turning the other cheek seems impossible. Conceived in secular terms, victory over subjugation requires defeating one’s foes by force—be it legal, corporal, psychological, economic. But justice in Selma goes well beyond tactics; it points to a radical conception of reality itself.

[su_dropcap]J[/su_dropcap]ustice in the minds of the Selma freedom-fighters is a metaphysical fact, a real state of affairs promised and being worked out by a good God who is setting the world aright at the incalculable cost of his own son. And driven by their Christian convictions, the SCLC embraces the privilege and responsibility of participating in this process, of co-suffering with Christ.

While the scenes of outrageous abuse will infuriate viewers, the resolve of the protesters not to multiply evil through retaliation will inspire. What Marilyn Adams writes in a different context is attested to by the protesters’ courageous example: “To return horror for horror does not erase but doubles the individual’s participation in horrors—first as victim, then as the one whose injury occasions another’s prima facie ruin.”

Without granting its theological foundations, King’s campaign was worse than foolish. Knowingly placing himself at the mercy of those who would oppose with appalling force the truths he preached took courage, courage borne from the conviction that justice is the natural bent of the universe. The values of the kingdom of God turn those of this world on their head.

As Selma testifies, King understood that his real enemies weren’t government officials assassinating his character, racists and segregationists who thought themselves superior, nor even the man who would eventually kill him. No, he fought instead “against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12). And he knew that in the face of an all-powerful and all-loving God, these spiritual forces of darkness and entrenched systemic evils would not and could not stand.

[su_dropcap]S[/su_dropcap]elma gives us a glimpse into how this redemption works in our own lives here and now; it’s terrifying, convicting, and inspiring all at once. This process—resisting the impulse to respond to injustice in kind, to daily wait on the Lord to set wrongs right, to proclaim truth without fear, to stand in solidarity with the downtrodden—is hard. It is in fact beyond hard; it is impossible in our own strength. In our personal lives we all face indignities, abuses, and wrongs—all of which Selma magnifies in horrifying detail. We can thus sympathize with King’s weariness, his call for support, his pleas for divine intervention, his temptation to give in and give up.

In the crucible of this maelstrom, we see, too, the resurrection of hope, the power of community, the hardiness of righteousness, an enactment of the gospel. We see the church at work, Christ’s body setting the world to rights little by little, through the most powerful weapons there are, and the only truly efficacious ones—faith, hope, and love.

The saga of Selma echoes its clarion call to Christ’s body today to be faithful heralds of truth and justice, to live and labor in the hope of what we still can’t see except in fleeting glimpses and furtive glances. It is a glorious and sober reminder that if Christ be raised we have seen manifest the first-fruits of a coming victory so resounding, and a glory so amazing, that it will dwarf and eclipse any and all of this world’s sufferings. Like Dr. King, let this blessed assurance inspire us to proclaim truth with boldness, battle injustice with hope, and daily carry our cross with courage.

Why it Matters

In a blog yesterday I offered my critique of God’s Not Dead, the recent Christian movie containing a smattering of apologetic arguments, a cheesy storyline, farfetched caricatures, and a conspicuous absence of subtlety, nuance, and sophistication—however noble and well-intentioned were the motivations of the film-makers. Someone responded with this comment: “Psssst. It’s a movie. Movies are meant to entertain. Provoke feelings. Make you laugh. Make you cry. Maybe start a little thinking. What movie has believable characters?? Really?? Enjoy it! I cried. I got angry. I laughed. I praised my Lord and Savior. It made me think. It inspired God filled conversation with my husband. Isn’t that what we are supposed to do??? So what if a freshman outdid a professor. Doesn’t God lead the ones we least expect??? I for one enjoyed it. Completely.”  

I don’t count it my job or duty or even prerogative to dictate to people what they like or don’t like, but this response was troubling to me for several reasons. Besides its needless and gratuitous snarky tone, the individual is obviously convinced that the main or perhaps even sole purpose of movies is entertainment—to provoke feelings, make you laugh, cry, maybe start a little thinking. And the person appears to be a Christian. This reminds me of when I used to teach business ethics, and students, including Christian students, would inform me, most soberly, that the purpose of business is to make money—which usually was taken to entail that pretty much anything goes. It struck me then as an emaciated picture of the purpose of business—what about a more expansive picture of what business is about? How about serving others, meeting needs, building relationships, following your passion, weaving a fabric of healthy, harmonious relationships—and in the process making a living? A narrow view of movies and the arts, too, strikes me as sadly myopic and theologically deficient. Especially when we’re talking about a Christian movie, what about conveying truth, provoking deep thought, smartly challenging reigning secular plausibility structures, imbuing wisdom, embodying excellence? And in the process, it can also entertain. Assigning primacy to entertainment seems objectionably thin to me, and predicated on a lame worldview.

Besides which, isn’t it relevant what entertains us? What’s entertaining about a movie lacking subtlety, depth, texture, honesty? What’s moving about one-dimensional characters and farfetched storylines, cultivating victimization mentalities and demonizing those to whom we’re called to minister, insulting secularists and trivializing apologetics, confirming people’s worst suspicions about evangelicals and communicating to Hollywood that we care more about a conclusion or resolution we like than quality production values in a film, bolstering the perception that evangelicalism is tantamount to superficiality and shallowness? I can’t say I find any of that remotely entertaining. But the simple truth is that we’re not here to be entertained, at least not primarily; as Christians we have serious business to do, and being entertained by simplistic caricatures and contrived narratives, even if they contain a modicum of cursory apologetics, doesn’t cut it.

I responded to that critic by writing this: “We’re called to think on what’s lovely, beautiful, of good report, excellent. We can and should do better–not convey to Hollywood that we as Christians are content, indeed thrilled to be entertained by movies with bad plots and shallow caricatures. There really is such a thing as excellent movies; there are such things as textured, profound characters; we should strive for these.” Our being merely entertained isn’t the end of the story. We shouldn’t be so easily satisfied and mollified into mediocre acquiescence.

I hate to rain on the parade of my Christian friends who are excited by such a film. I respectfully submit they haven’t thought hard enough about this. Let’s take just one example of the apologetics in the movie—the best part of the movie gesturing in hopeful directions, but still altogether too simple. The student defender of faith argues that secularists can’t make any sense of objective morality, quoting the Dostoevsky line that “everything is permissible without God,” as if that does the trick and makes the point.

The philosopher who replaced me at my old school when I moved to Virginia—a thoroughgoing secularist and bright fellow—recently wrote a scathing critique of the movie for the online version of Psychology Today. This was one of his points: “The ‘everything is permissible without God’ argument is one of the worst arguments for God. Not only are there many secular ethical theories, but divine command theory—the idea that God grounds all ethical truths—is one of the most discredited positions in all of philosophy. Not only is it subject to the Euthyphro problem (which suggests that God determining morality makes morality arbitrary) but it's not clear that divine command theory is any better than a ‘God of the gaps’ argument: ‘What makes a good, good and the bad, bad? I don't know, God did it.’”

I don’t at all agree with his assessment here; in fact, I think it’s predicated on a number of mistakes. The existence of “many secular ethical theories” doesn’t show that such a list contains the best explanation of objective moral values and duties, or even a plausible one; divine command theory is but one way to try couching the locus of moral obligations in God; most divine command theories worth their salt do not entail that God grounds all ethical truths since most divine command theories are delimited to deontic matters of moral obligation; divine command theory has undergone a major resurgence in recent years, garnering defenses and articulations by some of the brightest philosophers alive today from John Hare to Robert Adams to C. Stephen Evans; the Euthyphro Dilemma has been, in my estimation and in that of many others, definitively answered in the recent literature; and a whole panoply of reasons has been offered to take theistic ethics and even divine command theory seriously beyond a “God of the gaps” approach.

But such stiff resistance to the apologetics on offer in the movie is implicitly encouraged. Simplicity breeds simplicity; caricature breeds caricature. This is why this matters. It’s not just about our entertainment. These issues are important, and need to be handled responsibly.

Despite all of the various efforts to answer the Euthyphro Dilemma in the last decade alone, secularists continue relishing pointing to it as an utterly efficacious refutation of theistic ethics. In a recently published book by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (Plato at the Googleplex), she writes: “Socrates proceeds to formulate a line of reasoning that will prove to be of fundamental importance in the history of secularism, one that will be adapted by freethinkers from Spinoza to Bertrand Russell to the so-called new atheists of today, persuasively arguing that a belief in the gods—or God—cannot provide the philosophical grounding for morality…. What is still referred to as ‘the Euthyphro Dilemma’ or ‘the Euthyphro Argument’ remains one of the most frequently utilized arguments against the claim that morality can be grounded only in theology, that it is only the belief in God that stands between us and the moral abyss of nihilism. Dostoevsky may have declared that ‘without God all is permissible,’ but Plato’s preemptive riposte, sent out to us across the millennia, is that any act morally impermissible with God is morally impermissible without him, making clear how little the addition of God helps to clarify the ethical situation. The argument Plato has Socrates make in the Euthyphro is one of the most important in the history of moral philosophy. … We humans must reason our way to morality or we will not get there at all. Relying on fiats, even should they emanate from on high, will not allow us to achieve an understanding of virtue.”

Answering these objections is eminently possible, but requires that we develop more sophistication in defending our theistic convictions, not watering down and simplifying the complex matters at issue. It’s remarkable that Goldstein acts as if the capricious pantheon of Greek divinities are on a moral par with the God of Christianity in whom there’s no shadow of turning. This is a huge disanalogy that makes a great deal of difference defending an intelligent theistic ethic, and one she dispenses with by a wave of her hand.

Included in the most important biblical command is loving God with all of our minds; this means we need to stop assigning primacy to entertainment, stop settling for superficiality, stop being indifferent to excellence, and stop settling for pat answers. Or we’ll get the relegation to irrelevance we deserve. If we treat those with whom we disagree like benighted dolts unable to think their way out of a paper bag, driven by irrational impulses, we’ll receive such treatment ourselves.