Imagining the Future, Innovation and God: N.T. Wright and Peter Thiel in San Francisco

Welcome to The Veritas Forum, engaging university students and faculty in discussions about life's hardest questions and the relevance of Jesus Christ to all of life.

Good evening, everybody. My name's Ben. I am one of the board members of The Veritas Forum. Thank you so much for sharing your evening with us. It's a delight to have these three men on stage, as I'm sure you know. Before I was a board member of The Veritas Forum, I was actually like you. I was a consumer, a customer of Veritas Forums. And the reason that it drew me in was the big topics, the big questions, like the one we have tonight. So it was an intellectual curiosity. It was theoretical. But as I started consuming more and more Veritas content, it became extremely personal and therefore very practical to my life. And I noticed that it started informing big decisions for me. What kind of job should I have?

What kind of company should I start? Who should I associate with to do these types of things? And so that's my encouragement to you tonight. Take this as an opportunity not to be theoretical, but personal and practical. That's the opportunity we have here tonight with these guys. You'll hear some radical ideas and some things that will definitely challenge us. So what's the program look like? We'll have two main sections. There's the section where these guys are up on stage and we're in the audience enjoying their conversation, and we'll have some Q&A, and then we'll do a short break where we do a survey, and then there'll be a cocktail hour, and we call that Questions and Cocktails. So you'll notice on the back of your program here, Questions and Cocktails, and you'll also notice that the strength of the drink goes with the strength of the question.

So pick your question wisely, pick your cohort wisely, and we do encourage you, I know it's a school night, but we encourage you to stick around. Please be part of the conversation that's ongoing after this. With respect to the Q&A, you will also notice there is a phone number at the bottom of the front. Please text your questions there. We won't be doing a live mic. Those questions will be beamed through the magic of technology straight to Scott here, our moderator, and he will be pulling from those questions to ask for the Q&A part. So without further ado, let me introduce Scott Sherman, who is our host tonight, and I'll let him introduce the speakers. So Scott is the executive director of the Newbigin House of Studies.

He's a member of the Newbigin faculty at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan, and he's a teaching pastor at City Church right here in San Francisco. He teaches courses in systematic theology, urban ministry, and missional liturgics, and oversees the Newbigin Fellows Leadership Program at City Church. He's a busy guy. Please join me in welcoming Scott Sherman.

Thank you, Ben. And good evening, everyone. What a treat you have tonight. You're going to hear two canonical intelligences. And then when you get to the cocktail hour, you'll find over time that you are even wiser as you share your thoughts. It will be a really stimulating evening. It's a real privilege to introduce my friends N. T. Wright, and we're going to call you Tom for the rest of the evening, and Peter Thiel. Let me tell you a little bit about each of them. First, Tom Wright. He is one of the greatest biblical scholars in the world. He has taught at McGill University, Oxford University, Cambridge University, and a leader in the church. He served as dean at Lichfield, canon theologian at Westminster Abbey, and most recently as Bishop of Durham.

Now, he serves as a professor of early Christianity and New Testament at St. Andrews University, Scotland. And I may add, he plays golf.

Badly, as he added.

And I will say, for those of you who are intrigued by his ideas tonight, he's just opened up something very interesting where it's possible to study with him and study some of his books. His most recent book, Simply Good News, for example. And that website, to find out more about that, can be found. It's a MOOC, a massive online course. It can be found at ntwrightonline.org.

ntwrightonline.org.

In this latest book, Simply Good News, he writes, "When it comes to the future, God wants to put humans right and put the world right." Please welcome Tom Wright. Thank you. If you live in the Bay Area and you do not know who Peter Thiel is, you should get out more. He is known for beginning breakout companies such as Palantir and PayPal. And he's known, of course, for being the first outside investor in Facebook. Peter provided early funding for LinkedIn, Yelp, and just dozens of other technology startups. He's a partner at the Founders Fund, a Silicon Valley venture capital fund that has funded companies such as SpaceX, Airbnb, and Lyft. And he started the Thiel Fellowship, which encourages young people to put learning before college.

And he heads the Thiel Foundation, which works to advance technological progress and long-term thinking about what else? The future. I would also add, I've never done it, but I would not encourage, I would encourage you to think twice before playing him at chess. Fortune magazine has described him as perhaps America's leading public intellectual today. You probably know that in 2012, he taught a course at Stanford in the computer science department at his alma mater, Stanford University. And it became this latest book, Zero to One: Notes on Startups on How to Build the Future, which I've just learned is the number one best-selling hardback non-fiction book in China. In Zero to One, Peter writes, "Our task today is to find singular ways to create the new things that will make the future not just different, but better."

Here now to talk about "Imagining the Future: Innovation, God," Peter Thiel, please welcome. So guys, you both have written books that challenge readers to deepen their imagination about the future. And I wonder, do you think there's a crisis of imagination that is limiting us as a society?

Well, certainly we have a pretty serious crisis of imagining the future at all in many ways. And it's generally portrayed in all these sort of rather bleak, dismal ways. Pro-technology, I think there are many ways that progress in technology is critical for a better future on many different levels. But if you want to get a sense of the zeitgeist, if you look at all the science fiction movies that are made in Hollywood, they almost all portray a future that doesn't work where technology destroys people. You have robots killing people like The Terminator. They're all plugged into The Matrix. Avatar, Elysium. I watched the Gravity movie the other day. You would never want to go into outer space.

You'd be very happy to be back on Earth, on a muddy planet somewhere, a muddy island somewhere. And so I do think there is this sort of sense that we no longer have as much confidence about the future being a better place. I'm very hopeful about the future. I'm not sort of utopian or sort of indefinitely optimistic. I think that I disagree with sort of the Ray Kurzweil formulation where the Singularity is near, and we have these exponential technological curves, and all that we need to do is sort of sit back in a movie theater, eat popcorn, and watch the movie of the future unfold. And so I think these questions about the future, I don't think the future is this thing that just exists. But I think it's something that we should always talk about in terms of human agency.

And it's always a matter of choices about what sort of a future we want to create. And I think that's always a constructive conversation to have.

Yeah, that's fascinating. I think Western society in general over the last 200 years has privileged—and there's been massive studies done on this—has privileged left-brain thinking, that is, close-up analytic reasoning, kind of chartered-accountancy thinking, if you like, rather than big-picture music, metaphor, faith, imagination thinking, which has been regarded as a kind of a leisure activity for those who fancy that sort of thing. But then we come back to reality, which is the small-scale processing. And I think that's been deeply unhealthy. One of the biggest books on this recently, Iain McGilchrist's book, The Master and His Emissary, argues that what happens when the two brain hemispheres get separated is schizophrenia.

And if somebody is running simply on the left hemisphere, there are certain signs of what happens. And he argues then at great length that that has happened and is happening in Western culture, which is precisely regarding the imagination as the leisure activity which won't actually be necessary for the real task, but it's just kind of fun if you want to use it. And he argues strongly that instead we ought to try in all ways we can to reverse that and to privilege the imagination and the arts and music and metaphor over against the rather boring, flat rationalism of the small-scale. So I think that's gone on and is going on. And I should say, by the way, I gave a lecture incorporating some of this stuff in St. Andrews two or three years ago.

There was a leading brain scientist in the audience who took me aside afterwards and said, 'It's not quite as easy as that.' So just in case there are brain scientists here, I'm well aware that there are always academic wrinkles to be had on footnotes. But this is the layman's broad-brush version of it. I wasn't going to say anything. No, of course. Thank you. It's kind of you. But I think... So it's not just that we can't imagine the future. I think that imagination has been diminished throughout our society. I think particularly because in my world, and I suspect yours, so much of our society, we've lived with these two things. Peter talks rightly about this dystopia idea of, 'Oh my goodness, things are getting bad.'

And I think that's a secular version of what was really a 19th-century worldview, which is the kind of premillennial worldview that actually the world is getting worse and worse, and Satan is taking over, and wickedness is happening, and we few, we little few who are left maybe have to be snatched away or whatever. And that's still a popular, obviously, bit of theology in some quarters. But I think what we're now seeing is the secular version of that. But that sits awkwardly with the idea of progress, which many people still embrace. Many people still will say, 'We've got to be on the right side of history,' or whatever, as though we knew where history—and both of these have inhibited the imagination, because if it's—if we know that progress is happening, then, as you say, we just sit back and watch the movie. And if we know that dystopia is happening, then we find a place to huddle and—and try and stay safe. So we need the imagination to open those horizons. Thank you. So let's talk about this idea. Why is it

In an age of technological progress, though, Peter, limited and disappointing today—no flying cars—why are so many portrayals, then, of technology dystopian? Why are you two contrarian optimists optimistic about the future?

You run the Newbigin House here. You will know the quote from Lesslie Newbigin. When somebody said, 'Are you an optimist or a pessimist?' he said, 'I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.' In other words, when I look at the future, I don't think, 'Oh, I feel good about this,' or, 'I feel bad about it.' Optimism and pessimism are states of mind and feeling, whereas a Christian point of view starts from something that we believe has happened, namely Jesus' resurrection, which wasn't simply a bizarre event within the old world, but was the foundational and paradigmatic event within the new world. And so if you believe in that, then however good or bad you feel at the time about how things actually are at the moment, we're not saying everything is getting better, and we're not saying everything is getting worse.

It's neither a crescendo nor a diminuendo. But we have seen the future in the resurrection of Jesus, and it's real, and we look to bring signs of that future to birth in our own work and world.

You know, I think one thing that both a Christian and a scientific-technological worldview have in common is that they believe that every moment in history happens only once. There's sort of a definite progress to history where, in the form of science, you have new inventions. They happen at a particular point; once something's invented, that's something new. And time is not cyclical. It's not like we're caught in some sort of never-ending cycle. And so there is a certain sense of progress to history. I think that there are also many cases where these things have become rivals with one another. And it's in part because they're actually using the same language. And they have so much in common.

Because if you say that the future is going to be very different from the present, which I think is sort of an unusual perspective—in most of history, most places, people have said the future is going to be just like the present, or in all the essential things, it'll be the same. Nothing ever changes. And so if you say it's going to look very different, then there are all these questions: Is it consonant with Christianity? Is it dissonant? But you're at least debating the same kind of thing. Marxism in politics had this sort of view, too, that the future would be very different from the present. And there are sort of ways in which these things go very wrong. But I think having the structure of the future being very different from the present is always important.

And it's sort of, when we say that it's not different from the present, the political thing that means is that we make the present all-powerful. And so in political terms, it's that the present government, whoever is currently running things, is all-powerful. It will never change. And the future is always an alternative to the present. And it means that you never have a completely closed system politically. So I think it's not just sort of technology or things. It's politically, also, a very important idea.

Yeah. And if I can jump in there, one of the things which we regard as a malaise in UK politics right now is precisely that people think, 'Well, whoever you vote for is not actually going to change that much because these governments come and go, and actually the civil service is running it, and you can tinker with this and tinker with that.' That's why there's great disillusion. But that, I think, goes back to the enormous hope that was invested in modern liberal social democracy over the last couple of hundred years with the increase in the number of people who voted, and so on, were able to vote. And people really thought that if you got this right, then Utopia might just be around the corner.

And we've now done it for so long, and it's obvious that utopia hasn't arrived on schedule. So then the idea of something radically new is, I think, actually it's a Jewish idea. That's where Marx got it from. That's where Walter Benjamin got it from. And even if they didn't believe in God, they believed still in an eschatology, a new moment, something new would happen. And that has come up at various stages over the last century. And it seems to me the fact that it then gets slapped down and crushed by the failure of revolutions or by disastrous things that happen shouldn't put us off dreaming dreams and seeing visions and saying that new things might actually be possible. But the other thing which was just fascinating in what you said was the similarity

between science and history, that once something's been invented, that's happened once and once only. You can't reinvent it—reinvent the wheel or whatever—because historians are often rebuked by scientists on the grounds that science is about what you can test in the laboratory. You can redo the experiment. But in fact, you can't redo the experiment of inventing something for the first time. And so I see a convergence there between science and history. And it makes me wonder whether, in fact, science and history both have something of a Judeo-Christian worldview, which, as you say, isn't cyclical. It is actually moving in a direction. And the question is, who's moving it? Is it random forces?

Is it individual humans? How does that work?

Well, I think there's so many different directions one can go. The single idea I'm most opposed to is always this idea of luck being all-powerful. Because I think that's ultimately this really self-defeating notion. And I've often said luck is an atheistic word for God, where you sort of just—or a pagan word for God, that's what you know. And so if you're atheist, you shouldn't believe in luck. And if you're Christian, you shouldn't believe in luck. So it's sort of an all-purpose, all-around argument. But I do think that you can sort of distinguish modern science. There was an early version where it said—there's different atheist versions of science one can distinguish. I think there was a lot of early modern science said, 'We don't need Christianity.'

We'll be able to achieve these things without God. And then I think there is sort of a—and I think that's where the optimistic atheist version—and then I think there's sort of a more pessimistic atheist version where it says that science proves that you can't achieve certain things at all. So in the area of radical life extension, optimistic atheism would be there's no limit to the relief of man's estate, to what science can do. And then the pessimistic version would be that you eventually run into sort of the heat death of the universe and it won't all work. The more pessimistic versions are ones where chance ends up playing a bigger and bigger role. And I think there is this very interesting way in which the role of chance sort of has become somewhat bigger in the history of science as you sort of look from the 17th to the 21st centuries.

When you talk about chance, it raises the question of some of the philosophical underpinnings of this crisis of imagination that we find ourselves in. And I know one of the things I've heard both of you talk about is that you think that one of the dominant philosophies at work is actually an ancient philosophy: Epicureanism. Yeah.

Yeah. And I mean, in your own fair country, Thomas Jefferson declared, "I am an Epicurean." I actually think it was a bit more complicated than that, but he was kind of nailing that particular color to the mast. Epicurus believed, so far as we know, and his great exponent Lucretius set this out in a great poem, that if the gods exist, they're a long way away. They're miles away from us, and the world makes itself because random atoms are zooming around, and sometimes they swerve in a new direction for no apparent reason, and then you get new things being formed. That's the kind of long-range antecedent of a kind of atheistic Darwinism, which says that it's all just random stuff. And actually, I think this generates the chance idea, the luck idea,

That when God is out of the picture, God or the gods are out of the picture, then stuff just happens, and you can't explain why. And of course, that was designed as an answer to a kind of very fearful paganism, which was frightened of the angry gods who were out to get you. So Epicurus said, "No, no, no. The gods are a long way. They're perfectly happy, but they do not concern themselves with us." So then, well, the low-grade version is "eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die." But there's nothing to worry about after death. It's just that's going to happen, so you may as well make yourself as comfortable as you can while the world goes on with Fortuna or luck or chance or whoever doing its own thing.

And I think I agree with Peter. As that has gone on, it's not surprising that people have looked at the randomness of the world and said, "Well, there it is, just stuff happens," with occasionally some very big character putting a hand on the tiller this way or that.

I think it's a much more complicated question whether this was always intrinsic to an atheist worldview or not. But if you look at Karl Marx's PhD thesis, it was on the difference between Epicurean and Democritean physics. He was very anti-Epicurean, because he wanted people to work towards a definite revolution. He wanted people to work on projects for the future. But he was obviously—this was sort of the specter that haunted Marx, the specter of Epicurus—because he was worried that the workers would want to eat, drink, and be merry and not do all the work needed for the revolution. And I think there's sort of a way in which that's probably the idea that's come to dominate over time. And I do think it is always somewhat deeply pessimistic.

Because when you think that at the end of the day, chance dominates in the future. I think we have more debate about how much of a role chance played in the past, but I think it's a much more important question what chance has to do with the future. When you say that it dominates, you eventually have bad luck, and eventually something bad will happen, and things go wrong in one way or another. The movie that I always think encapsulates this really well is the Coen Brothers classic, No Country for Old Men, where you eventually have bad luck, and chance is omnipotent. Modernity tries to overcome chance. The psycho killer is the Chigurh character in the movie who goes around shooting people, but then he doesn't quite succeed in overcoming chance, and at the end, chance still catches up.

And I think that's sort of the literary encapsulation of it. Yeah, it's interesting.

There's been a great debate in the last century among historians as to whether what's going on in history, what we observe, is simply the chance movement of huge blind forces rumbling this way and that, with, as I said, an occasional human hand on the tiller, or whether history is actually the history of the great leaders who mold history according to their will. And I think Marx wanted a version of people to emerge—it's a kind of a secular messianic dream, really—who would be the revolutionary leaders, and he didn't want too much change, as you say, because if the workers get more comfortable with their lot, then they won't want to revolt. Um, but the—as the historians have been wrestling, particularly in the 20th century, when so many of them were saying, "Why did the First World War happen?" and then, "For goodness' sake, why did the Second World War happen?"

And now we have, "Why did 9/11 happen?" Is this simply all sorts of forces like tectonic plates that have been building up over centuries? Or is it that there have been one or two or three or more big characters who've said, "This is what we have to do," and have, as I say, bent history to their will? I'm an Anglican, I'm a both-and person, so I'm inclined to say there's a lot of things going on, but there's also a lot of human beings who actually do do things. And that's the question then for the future. What does it mean to find yourself summoned, called, if you like, actually to do things that will make a difference? And how do you know, and how do you navigate that, granted that there are these large forces going on as well?

Well, I think this question of luck is always a very hard one to answer. So if we're talking about one-time events like the First World War or 9/11 or things like that, and you say, "Was this a freak accident, or was it some deliberate choices?" it's not like we can run the experiment 1,000 times and see if it happens every time or if it was a freak accident. And so it ends up often just being sort of a bias we have, how much we attribute to luck or not. The Silicon Valley version of this that you often encounter is always this question of business: Is it a matter of luck or not? And it's very hard to answer these questions. But I often think there are these two somewhat different attitudes one can have.

One is that it's just all a matter of luck. This is sort of a statement about the deep nature of the universe. And I found that whenever I thought that, it's been quite counterproductive, because you end up treating people as lottery tickets. And once you think you're just investing in a bunch of lottery tickets, you've already psyched yourself into losing. Because I think what often happens is that when we call things a matter of luck, we're often not willing to think that hard about them. And so I do think we can do a lot more to overcome it than people often admit in our time.

It occurs to me, as you say that, a traditional Christian doctrine of providence—that is to say, that there is a God who is in some sense or other in charge, though not immediately and instantly responsible for all the horrible things that happen in the world, but that there is a God who does actually have some supervisory role, hard though it is to define. And that's something that I think a lot of people in our world have rejected, either because they don't want God intervening in their lives, or because it really does make it quite difficult when you have earthquakes and horrible diseases and so on. If you say, "Well, God's in charge, then why are these things happening?" And so the problem of evil has pushed away a more sophisticated doctrine of providence, which used to be there, which actually people knew that bad things happened.

And they didn't automatically blame God for them. But by pushing God away, we've encouraged that Epicureanism, and chance has risen, as it were, to take the place of God. I mean, the famous Woody Allen line where he says, "Well, yeah, I sort of do believe in God, it's just that he seems to be a bit of an underachiever," you know, that he... Um, in other words, we imagine God as a celestial CEO and then blame him because the company share price fell. And actually, that—that's not a very smart way to do providence. But once you get rid of providence because it looks as though, well, we can't believe in that, then there is a vacuum, and theology, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and so you get chance or something stepping in.

Well, let's talk about the way each of you, I think in complementary ways, but in very different ways, have written about this world and where it's going. And when I say "this world," I'm not talking about, you know, some disembodied sweet hereafter. You're actually talking about this world, but you have different emphases. So, Peter, you're interested in radical life extension. Tom, you've written a lot about, to use a phrase you use, "life after life after death." Are those ideas compatible? How have those ideas shaped your broader engagement, what you do?

Well, I think the thing that's really incompatible with life is death. So let's just start with that as a baseline. And I would hope that we could agree that if we set our sights on—we say that everyone's doomed to an old age of frailty and disease and death, that we're perhaps setting our sights quite low. I do think there's something very odd about mythology, literature, philosophy, where I think so much of it ends up being a rationalization of death in one way or another. I think every myth on this planet tells us that the purpose of life is death. Religious myths tell us to worship the ancestors, the spirits of the dead, the old. Nationalist myths tell us that it's right and fitting to die for one's country.

The purpose of life is death. Ideological myths tell us you can only make an omelet if you break some eggs. And I think that—that we sort of end up rationalizing death because it's sort of a way that we hide our fear of it. I think it was Friedrich Schiller in the Enlightenment said, "There can't be anything wrong with death because anything that's universal can't be evil." And I think the one part of the Christian view that I believe more strongly than anything is this idea that death is evil, that it is wrong, and that you need to, and that we should not accept it, and we should fight it in every way we possibly can. And I think that, and then I think there's sort of many different directions one can go with it, but I think we're always in these—psychologically, we tend to be in sort of

this strange combination of acceptance, denial: "We're all going to die, nothing we can do about it." Denial: "It's not going to happen anytime soon, so we're not going to think about it." And instead, this sort of schizophrenic superposition of acceptance and denial, I think it would be healthy for us to not treat death as natural and to fight it in every way possible.

Which puts me in mind of another Woody Allen line, who said, "I'm not afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens."

Tom, as a theologian, is there any reason when you hear someone like Peter say—are there any theological reasons why we shouldn't say the sky's the limit in terms of life extension and flourishing? And I would throw in there another person such as Francis Collins, a director of the NIH, who says in a TED Talk, "Let's end disease." Are there theological reasons we should be dubious about such things?

Peter is obviously completely right from a Christian point of view that death is described in the New Testament as an enemy, as the last enemy, as the great enemy, which is obvious if you have a creational view, that is to say, a view that there is a good Creator and the world that He made is a good place. However much we've spoilt it, that's the basis. Then death is the denial of the goodness of life and the goodness and God-givenness of life, and death is kind of spitting in God's face as well as in our face. That would be a Christian point of view. But the question then is what you do about it. And I think we need to remind ourselves that 100, 200 years ago, maybe 200, 300 years ago, even in such technologically advanced Western society as there was, average life expectancy for most people was probably 40, 50, 60, that sort of age, so that people who could afford to would retire in their 40s so that they could have a few years to enjoy

before they died, assuming that might be in their 50s. So not many people lived to the age which we now regard in the West as reasonably normal. There are an awful lot of people 70, 80, 90. It's actually caused a problem in my church, the Church of England, because the pension scheme was relying on clergy dying a lot younger than they have been doing. The pension fund guy said in the Synod something cautiously about the 'improved clergy mortality experience'—and because they just hadn't reckoned on that. And that's a problem for a pension fund. A nice problem for the clergy. So already we've got to a point which our ancestors from not many centuries ago, in other words, just one or two centuries ago, would have thought, 'My goodness, if so many people are living to the 80s and 90s, is this the Kingdom of God come on earth?'

The Book of Isaiah says something about people living to be 90 or 100 and that that's a sign of God's rich blessing. So we shouldn't be sniffy about that. And if it turns out that, either through the sort of planning that we could do or some other means, that we should go on till 120 or something, then maybe. And after all, the Bible does have some great-age people, and however much you may think that that's, um, mythological, whatever, that's nevertheless a sign of something. However, however, however, in the Bible, the answer to death is not to postpone it. Um, the answer to death is to go through and out the other side. And the idea of Jesus' death and resurrection is not about 'death doesn't matter,' but death matters absolutely, and it needs to be defeated, not avoided. And the resurrection is not about—this is the point—not about life after death. So many people assume that the word 'resurrection' means dying and going to heaven, and it really, really doesn't. Resurrection means God is going to remake this world, a physical universe, more physical than the present one, if you like, more solid, and going to give us new bodies which are appropriate for that, and

And so, and that's true whether you die at one year old or 101 years old. So it seems to me it's great if we can extend life, though very important to realize there was a reason why in the ancient story at the beginning of the Bible, there's a reason why Adam and Eve are not allowed to taste of the Tree of Life once they have rebelled against God, because God will not give immortality to people who now are deeply infected with this disease called rebellion or idolatry or sin. And otherwise, if you absolutize it, if you say, 'Okay, I'll live to be 150, then I'll still be a sinner. I'll still be conflicted. I'll still have wrong emotions. Do I really want to go on having all that stuff that much longer?'

Will that be helpful to the world if I do? Maybe death is part of the way of actually keeping things moving so that there is going to be a new world, not simply an extension of the present one.

I don't—I really have to disagree with that last formulation because that's, even though there is sort of a, there's a way you can get at it, it strikes me as actually very Epicurean in a way. It's sort of, it is sort of, it's again, it's like Hamlet's evil mother, Gertrude, telling Hamlet, 'All that lives must die.' And on some level, it's a statement about nature. It's a statement about reality. But then on another level, it is a statement of just accepting the rottenness that is Denmark. And so I think that, you know, and I think it's always, you know, there certainly is a type of a Christian view in which you shouldn't think about the future, you don't need to worry about it, God will take care of absolutely everything.

And it's even a sin to think about the future. But I surely wouldn't go that far, for example.

No, of course I wouldn't. And I was just thinking as you're saying, there's a lovely example of a sort of a both-and again in John Donne, the early 17th-century poet, who actually had his own coffin made and used to sleep in it to get himself ready for it. But he also wrote that amazing poem, 'Death, Be Not Proud,' though some have called thee mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so. And he's naming death and saying, 'You're just a slave to chance and kings and desperate men, and we can do the same thing more or less by taking drugs. So you're not such a big deal, death.' And then it ends, 'One short sleep past, we wake eternally, and death shall be no more. Death, thou shalt die.' And that's a way of saying we're not just accepting it, we're kicking back at it.

And we know that you will do this to us, but actually you won't have the last laugh. And then you have, of course, a secular version of that in Dylan Thomas's 'Rage, rage against the dying of the light,' that this is not something we go gently into. So I think people have been wrestling with these things in our—in the deep roots of our culture, and so I hear what you say, and I—this wasn't—I wasn't trying to say we should therefore just roll over and accept it. It is something to fight against, and—

You know, I think this was sort of, if you look at the charter of the Royal Society of Science when it was founded in the sort of early 17th century, it said sort of the most important goal was the prolongation of life. And there certainly are, we can certainly come up with scenarios where that goes badly wrong or that's misleading. But I still tend to think that this happened in a Christian context. This was not in ancient Greece. It would have been all about nature, timeless and eternal things. And the word nature does not occur once, I believe, in the entire Old Testament. And the fact that death may be natural is not the baseline. Even the atheist forms of modern science felt that they had to—

They had to compete with Christianity and say they were going to do something about this problem. And then I think, just to make this a little bit less abstract, I think that in practice, it's not as though it's going to be a matter of having a single pill that makes you live forever. And then we get into these sort of extreme questions of what that would mean. Would you just be hopelessly bored? Or would something go terribly wrong if you did this? 'Everyone else would be bored with having you around forever.' 'Yeah, or something like that.' In practice, it's much more: we have another cure for cancer. We have a cure for Alzheimer's. Should we do something about this? Should we do something about that?

And I think that if you think about it, not in the general sense, but in the particular sense, I think every single particular instance, it seems that the only moral case is to be in favor of it.

I like the way you asked the question in Zero to One: 'How can the future get better if no one plans for it?' And so one of the questions I have for both of you is, as you think about your respective vocations and the way you're both sort of writing about, to vast audiences, about the future, what is the relevance of God in planning the future?

The relevance of God in planning the future.

In terms of both human agency—in other words, the providence of God and human agency—it seems to me that part of this discussion is about the place of human agency in the right now and what happens.

Yeah, and the central thing there, from a Christian point of view, is the doctrine of the image of God, that humans are made in God's image. And I see that in a vocational sense, and actually, I think most biblical scholars would now take it like this: that is to say, it isn't there's a bit of us which is rather like God or something like that, but that we are created as angled mirrors to reflect God into the world, and that actually, humans know in their bones that they are to engage in relationship, and they are to build cities, and that they are to dig gardens. You don't have to sort of laboriously teach people to do these things; there's a sense that we all know that we are to be being fruitful and multiplying and looking after the earth and doing that stuff.

And it seems to me that's an authentic thing, that that is how God chooses to work. It's very difficult for us to grasp this because our political systems have rather swept that out of sight. But in the Bible, God wants the world to be run by wise human beings whom he will call to account and hold to account for what they've done. We've got God out of the political system. We just have Vox Populi instead of Vox Populi, Vox Dei. It's just Vox Pop now. And we're suffering from it. And as a result, we've forgotten that if we're to plan for the future, this is not something that's human beings being arrogant over against God, because God ought to do the future rather than us. That, a Christian view, I think, would say no.

Wise humans have to think, pray, study, and make appropriate, generous, imaginative innovations, recognizing we might get things wrong, but not being satisfied just to sit back and say, 'We've got nothing to do.' But that isn't humans arrogating themselves against God. That is how God would have it done. Of course, it's possible for humans to distort their vocation to be image-bearers into arrogating themselves—hence the Tower of Babel and so on, that you can do that. But that doesn't mean that every human project is a Tower of Babel. Far from it. God wants there to be new projects.

So I would again just stress all these questions about human agency as being really critical in this. And I think that there's always sort of this archaic religious systems where you sort of get a sense that people were just in this never-ending ritual. I'm not sure you'd call it demonic, but you could say they were sort of permanently hypnotized, and it was like they were sleepwalking through things. And I think breaking that is very important. And again, you have a history question which is broken by Christianity or the Enlightenment or whatever broke that. But we live in a world in which our lives are no longer ritual. We're no longer in this never-ending cyclical ritual. And so we have to make choices.

There's room for intentionality. And I think that—I think that's always something to come back to. I think, I think that, and then again, I think it's—it again loops back to this question about, about the future as a place, a time that's very different from the present and that has a certain reality, and that's why it makes sense to, to make plans for it. And if you, if you don't believe in that sort of conception, I think it gets a lot harder. And I think there are a lot of different ways people describe these things. I think the psychology is quite tricky. There certainly is a version where you'll work harder and make more plans if you think your life is short, that you're going to run out of time.

The famous Steve Jobs commencement speech at Stanford in 2005, where he said he was working really hard because he was going to die pretty soon, it was all going to come to an end. I tend to think the psychology is more demotivating when you have that view. One of my granduncles I was talking to when he was 83 years old, and he said, 'I could have gotten four PhDs in retirement, but I didn't think I was going to live this long, so I didn't bother working at this.' So I do think having a bigger horizon on the future, my view is that it's generally—that generally leads to more agency, more intentionality, more ability to do things, even though I think people can certainly disagree with that description.

You can imagine why many people would find it odd to find a group of Christians sitting around and talking about this challenge. I just caught an episode of Silicon Valley on HBO. You probably don't watch it, in which one character's being pitched a Christian app and he says, 'You know, Christianity is almost illegal in Northern California.' Well, and I think part of that is there's a sense that religion in general—among many people, they perceive that religion in general, Christianity in particular, have actually been, shall we say, not helpful in envisioning and certainly bringing about a better future.

There's undoubtedly been all kinds of cases where that has been the case, where clergy and theological leaders have put the lid on everything and said, 'Sit down, shut up. We will teach you the truth. Don't get out of line.' That's always a temptation in any system, actually. It's a temptation in the military and the legal professions, et cetera, et cetera. And it's certainly a temptation in the church. However, if you go back through history, it is quite extraordinary. Several of you here, I suspect, know John Ortberg and his book, Who Is This Man?, which runs through Christian history saying, 'Look at the medical innovations, look at the educational innovations, look at what people were doing in looking after the poor in ways that nobody had imagined doing before.'

I was trained as an ancient historian before I was a theologian. And if you look at the Roman world of the first century, there were some people who had a bit of a social conscience and thought that maybe slavery wasn't a good idea. But mostly, they got on with it. They looked after their own family. They looked after number one. And any idea of helping or bringing medical aid to or bringing education to people who couldn't afford it but who are part of your community—just not on the radar at all. These things all come through the agency of the church. And it goes culturally as well. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, in his extraordinary little book, The Time That Remains, argues that the notion of rhyme in European poetry grows straight out of an early Christian worldview.

Nobody was rhyming in the days of Virgil. By the time you get to the High Medieval period, they are rhyming. And he says it's because they're trying to encapsulate this idea of creation and new creation and a new sense of time, and so, you know, there are all sorts of things like this which I think we've screened out, by and large. And in music as well, the way in which the full flowering of Western music grew out of the Christian tradition—the—this is not an accident. There are—there were things going on right through church history which were re-humanizing at the educational, medical, and particularly looking after the poor levels, but also in the worlds of the arts as well. And we in the modern world have

forgot that, you know, Christianity's got that kitsch rubbish down the road. 'Oh, no, we're the real artists.' And I think we need to think again about that, about the contribution that the church at its best has made, while recognizing that the church at its worst is just as bad as anybody else.

I always think probably the biggest problem with religion is always the history of religion. It's always why I'm quite uncomfortable identifying as Christian, because it feels like you have to somehow have an explanation for all these terrible things that have been done in the name of Christianity historically. I do think the problem of history is perhaps the greatest single problem that one has. I think that you would say—what I would say is that there is, of course, always a sense in Christianity where it predicted it would fail. It predicted that people would get it wrong in many ways. And so it is somehow different from Marxism, which did not predict its own failure. And so the history is at least very, very complicated in that way.

And because I think you always had this element of saying that we'd try to make the world better over time. This was a big part of, historically, what animated the West. We can have a complicated debate how much was the Enlightenment or Christianity. But this idea that you would try to make the world better over time—it is natural for us now to look back on the past and say how bad things were, even though it was, in part, because people were working hard to make things better. And so, for example, if you come back to the Epicurean theme, if we imagined that people don't work towards the future and the world in the year 2115 doesn't look that much different from today in 2015, if we were having a conversation in 2115...

Which, if you get your way, we might just be. I mean...

Yeah, well, actually, then we'd have some really big progress, though, so that wouldn't be this hypothetical. But yes, that's true. That would have answered its own question. So it wouldn't be we; it would be other people having a conversation. They would say, 'Yeah, those people in 1915, they were really backwards. 2015, they were actually pretty advanced, because they were just like us.' It's paradoxically because we've progressed that we are able to judge the past a lot more harshly. And so I think that's always a perspective worth keeping in mind.

Yeah. But what Lewis was aiming at with his chronological snobbery in his inaugural lecture in Cambridge was against precisely the Enlightenment arrogance that says everything that came before roughly 1760 or sometime was sort of backward and they didn't know the laws of nature, whereas we now have grown up. And you find that certainly in my country; every day on the radio you hear it: 'Now that we live in the 21st century...' or 'Now that we live in the modern world...' implying that we're all signed up to a steady, evolutionary, progressive view—what some people call the Whig interpretation of history—that history is automatically moving in a liberalizing direction. It's what Hillary Clinton meant when she talked about people in the Arab Spring getting on the wrong side of history, that we know where history is going.

So I think I want to say that the Christian vision isn't a steady linear development, a steady, smooth progress up to the light, and anyone that thought that would just have to look at the last 20 centuries and say, "Well, think again," because, as you say, Christian history is an embarrassment. It's one of the reasons why in the Lord's Prayer we still say every day, "Forgive us our trespasses," because Jesus gave us that prayer because he knew we would need to say that line among others, um, and we do. But, uh, the danger then is that in rejecting that idea of a smooth, sort of Hegelian progress, we reject the idea that you can do anything. And I know Christians who say, "Well, one day Jesus will come again and sort it all out, and it'd be very arrogant of us to think that we can do anything before he comes back, so we really shouldn't try because that's a sort of Pelagianism." And I just think that is rubbish. The point about life after life after death

is that God is going to make a new world, but that has already begun with the resurrection of Jesus. And the gift of the Spirit is to enable Jesus' followers to be new creation people already, and to do things which, when God makes his final new world, will somehow, in ways we can't imagine, be part of that new world. Paul says what you do in the Lord is not wasted. I have no idea how every random act of kindness, every bit of justice and mercy and beauty that we do now will be part of God's new world. But I take that very seriously. There'll be continuity as well as discontinuity. And therefore, things that we do now, they are not part of a steady Hegelian progress, but they are genuine foretastes and signposts towards and of the new world.

Does that make sense to you?

It does, although I think I'd be happy with a little bit more Hegelianism and a little bit less pessimism about the future. And so when I hear people say that we live in the modern world, what I hear is not a progressive conception, but I hear an end of history. Because when I hear people say we're in the modern world, or that we're living in a developed country, that strikes me not as a statement of advancement; it strikes me as a statement of pessimism. It says that everything happened in the past. We are developed, we're done, we're finished, nothing new is going to happen.

It may be that it means something different, quite literally, on either side of the Atlantic.

So it could both be true. But certainly that's the part I would stress. And so I think it's always deeply pessimistic to call the United States a developed country because it means that everything's happened. Everything's done, finished. Nothing new is going to happen. The younger generation should resign itself to reduced expectations from their parents and grandparents. And that is a conception that I'd always want to push against.

It's not just that it means something different. If that's what it means over here, then it means something almost opposite. Because with us, when people say it on the radio and in the newspapers, it's like we had this debate about whether women should be ordained as bishops. And that was a debate in the Church, but then it came into the House of Commons 18 months, two years ago. And David Cameron said that the Church should, quote, "get with the program," which was an extraordinary thing to say from a secular government, you know, that we know that there is a program for the steady advancement of women in all professions. Therefore, the Church should do this as well. Now, I happen to believe that it's a good thing that we have all...

He was right. No, no, no. It wasn't—we did it, we've done it, not because there was an inexorable program that ought to be followed in all respects, but for quite different reasons. And any idea that secular commentators can see which way, as I say, which way history is going and say, 'Let's just get on board,' that is what many theologians like Karl Barth in the last century objected against, because that led to the rise of totalitarianism, that this is where history is going. So our time is just flying by.

Many of you have already picked up that there's a number you can text if you have questions, and a bunch of them are flowing in. This is not my personal number, by the way, just a number that's being forwarded to me. But your questions are coming in. So the number is, just to see here again, 757-279-7224. And I'd actually like to move to audience questions now. And there are just far too many, but I'm going to try to, to select some ones that are interesting. This is actually a question to both of you. Poverty is perhaps one of the most common topics in the Bible. According to The Economist, the global poverty rate has been halved in the last 20 years. Can you imagine the poverty rate going to zero?

Or I would add, should we imagine that?

Well, again, I think there's no reason that one could not have a lot more progress on all these fronts. The economic manifestation of poverty is scarcity. And I do think that if you have a lot more technological progress, you can overcome it. I'm always a little bit hesitant about talking about poverty in the abstract. And so I think it's always best to frame in terms of much more specific context. So if we, you know, if we talk about city of San Francisco, you know, why, you know, what poverty, why is there poverty? What drives it? You know, I would say it's all sorts of different factors, but it's, you know, it's a—it's the coalition of urban slumlords that prevents any new housing from being built because this is the thing that's an incredibly scarce supply and you have to overcome.

So I think it's always good for us to try to concretize these things very, very precisely and think about them. And I'm always hesitant about describing it on the abstract level of the world as a whole.

I think that's absolutely fair enough. But in my previous job, I worked in what was probably the poorest part of England, certainly. Some major deprivation, both in urban and in rural societies. And classic things which I thought had gone out 100 years ago: a family with five children, only one can go to school at a time because there's only one pair of shoes. Now, that family may have a television, they may have a washing machine, which wouldn't have been the case before, but real, horrible poverty of a sort that I was not prepared to, was not expecting to see. So it happens in the First World as well as in the wider world. But the thing that—and it comes back to imagination and it comes back to people thinking creatively about the future.

We all basically know, if we know anything about global macroeconomics, that large swathes of the world have been paying compound interest on huge unpayable debts to banks and institutions in the First World, usually loans taken out by tyrants from two generations ago, and the interest has been building up because a country can't go bankrupt. An individual can, but a country can't. And whenever we in the churches—and we in the UK, the churches have been in the forefront of this—have protested and said, 'This debt must be stopped, it must be relieved, it's unjust, people are growing the wrong crops to sell at the wrong price rather than developing their own proper economies,' we've been told, 'Oh no, this is the way the world works. We can't alter this. Nothing can be done. No imagination. This, this is how the system is.' Then in 2007, 2008...

Suddenly, some of the big banks found that they were a bit short of cash, and some of the big businesses likewise, and they went in their private jets to Washington and to London, and they said, 'Um, we've got some trouble here. Can you sort of see us through?' And the very rich did for the very rich what they had refused to do for the very poor, namely cancel debts so they could start again. And you don't actually have to be a macroeconomist to say, what's wrong with this picture? And so it seems to be imagination, something fresh. We did it for Tanzania. We've done it for some countries. And as a result, the Tanzanian economy has absolutely stormed ahead from where it was, say, 20 years ago. It's time to do it for other countries as well.

As with Francis Collins and disease, I am a sort of a cautious Newbigin-esque optimist. I think we can do it. I think it's a failure of imagination, a failure of political and economic will. And I think we should go for it. Absolutely. I think that's a central Christian imperative.

I don't disagree with that. I think there's always—the thing I would always stress is that I think there are many different political perspectives one can have on this. And simple—there are ways we can push back and ask a lot of questions whether simple redistribution is actually the precise right way to go. And so I think the deep problem is that we live in a world where if you redistributed everything, the whole world would be actually quite poor.

I'm not an advocate of redistribution because I know that often what that does is it prevents entrepreneurship, et cetera, in other economies.

Sure, but that's why I think the stress cannot simply be on sort of fixing certain things or annulling certain current arrangements. But I don't think we will ever solve the problem of poverty unless you actually do some very new things, too. Well, that may well be. So it's at least an 'and.'

Here's an irresistible question: If science allowed us to live forever, would you stay in this world forever or take a chance and voluntarily pull a plug to see what's on the other side? And if so, at what point would you go?

Well, I suspect there's something really tricky about super-hypothetical questions. People often say that you should live as though this is your last day. And I always think that it's much healthier to live as though your life's going to go on forever. And so I would aim to make my life such that I would never want it to end and that I would not actually want to pull the plug. Wow.

I mean, obviously, there are questions about aging and questions about health. And there's that scary old myth, which Eliot picks up in one of his poems, the Sibyl from Cumae, who was given by Apollo the gift of everlasting life, but she had forgotten to ask for the gift of everlasting youth. So she was just getting older and older and older and older and shriveled. And it's a very horrible image. It's in Petronius, first-century Roman author. And people go up to her and say, 'Sibyl, what do you want?' And she says, 'Apothanein thelo'—'I want to die.' And she can't. And that, I think, is an ancient response to the imagination of what might it be like if you just went on and on and couldn't die and couldn't die and just got older.

But it's a pagan response. Yeah, okay, okay. But I think the Christian response and the Jewish response is not to say, therefore, let's just keep it going and keep pumped up and keep youthful and... What age would one like to stay? Would one like to stay sort of 41 or 35 or 25 like you are, Scott? It would just be not quite clear. It's like the patristic debates as to what age we will be in the resurrection. And some people said, well, Jesus was 33, so we'll all be 33. [laughter] But I think there's also the question of evil, that the more you know your own heart, the more you realize that however much you pray and fast and study and practice the Christian faith or other faiths, there are still things which are cross-grained and which are going wrong and things that

you wish you didn't do what you do do, and things that you wish you did do, which somehow you never get around to doing. And the thought of that going on and on and on forever is pretty scary, actually. I was talking two years ago to an old lady who had just celebrated her 101st birthday, and she said to me, she said, "I'm quite ready to go. It can't be any worse than this, can it?" She was my father's older sister. She was my aunt. And bless her, she died at 101 and a half. A happy old lady.

I really disagree. I so much disagree with all of this. I don't even know where to start. I'm going to just go on a very abstract meta-level. And I think, isn't there something odd about how you're able to articulate this rhetorically far more effectively than I am? And isn't there something odd about how we find it so reassuring that your aunt wanted to die at age 101? And doesn't this really tell us something about our fears about death and that we paradoxically end up embracing it or saying that it's the point of life or that it's not that bad or something like that?

She wasn't going there. She was old and frail, quite happy but old and frail.

It may do and I take the warning and I'm going to think more about that and I'm grateful for that sort of pushback. However, it seems to me that as a priest you do find yourself sitting beside people's bedsides as they're dying and quite often there's a sense, sometimes there's a deep sense of horror and shock and anger and rebellion, other times it's like when somebody is really tired, jet-lagged as you and I both are at the moment, and you just know, "No, this party is going on, but it's actually time for me to go to bed." And I think the desire to go on partying, actually, no, there is a time when human beings wisely think it's time to go to sleep now. And that doesn't mean that death is a friend.

It doesn't mean that death is good. It just means that this is how we are. And I think that, as I said, I think that morally as well as physically.

But I think that if you're... Look, it's obviously like if you are exhausted and really sick, there is perhaps a point where you don't want it to go on, but we should hardly... And maybe that even makes sense and that's understandable, but that doesn't mean that that sort of a state is desirable or what we're meant for or anything like that.

That's why, when we've had the debates in the UK about so-called assisted dying, which is basically... legalized euthanasia, I have spoken very strongly against that. Because if somebody says, 'Actually, I want out of here,' if I was just to put a, a piece of paper in front of them and say, 'Okay, sign here, we'll sort it out,' I think still you'd have to be very stony-hearted to say that that's a good thing and we ought to allow it. I know there are some states in this union which do schemes like that. We so far haven't got there in Britain, and I hope we don't, precisely because I think that attitude to death that, 'Oh, well, let's just organize it, that's fine'—I find that very chilling for, I think, the same reasons that you do.

But I think we should not even be complacent about it. So there certainly is an important difference between euthanasia and suicide versus resigned hopelessness or something. But I think even the sense of exhaustion or resignation is not desirable. And it's something that I think we should never be complacent about.

I would love for my doctor to have your passion. Here's a question for Tom. So, this person is saying, 'So, does a person really have to be a Christian to bring forth progress, to quote, quoting you, "reflect God into the world" from a few moments ago? Aren't there a large number of innovators and revolutionaries who have planned for the future successfully without professing any kind of faith?'

Absolutely. Yes. Because I believe that God made all humans in God's image. This is not something which only Christians have; it's a universal human thing, and that all humans have that capacity. There's some wonderful stuff in the New Testament which is affirming of the goodness that is out there in wider society. St. Paul says in Philippians at one point, 'Whatever is true and honest and noble and lovely and a good report, if there's any virtue and any praise, think about these things.' And he certainly doesn't mean just within the Christian community. In other words, there's all sorts of good stuff which happens. And if you do community work, as I've done, you find people doing creative and innovative things all over the place.

Society is a very odd thing because humans are very odd beings. And things can go horribly wrong. And things can go horribly wrong when Christians are in charge, quite easily. And so, how much more, from my point of view, can they just go wrong anyway? So, it's not a matter of, 'Christians can do this and no one else can,' because God is good and has not left Himself without witness across all societies. However, that doesn't mean there isn't any point in being a Christian, because there is a sense then of working not just with the grain of the universe, but with the grain of the new creation, which is renewing that. And so much of the major debates in our world, I think, come back to understanding creation and new creation and how they relate to one another, which, of course, comes back to Jesus and his resurrection.

Here's a question that really gets at the issue of the place of cultivating virtue and moral wisdom within human society. Because the person said—this is a long question, but is dealing with how big personalities like Marx and Musk, they have the power to sway the imagination of the general populace for good and for bad—there has to be something about the character behind imagination, because you can—that vision can sway us in very dark directions.

You know, I always, I always quibble with the terminology, but the thing I don't like that much about imagination as a term is it pushes things a little bit too much towards interiority, where it's subjective, it's just in your mind. And I think it's always the combination of that with the broader reality. So there's always this question of what people should do. And I think there's something to be said for following a calling, in a sort of archaic way of putting it in some ways, but as being much better than just doing something you're passionate about. Passionate is sort of, again, much more this interior mental state. You'll be passionate about fly fishing or rock climbing or passionate about customer acquisition or...

Accounting, maybe. But I think the better question is, what can you do that's not being done? What's an important, good thing you can do? What people can you help that nobody's helping? What can you work on that nobody is working on? And that sort of a framing of the question always happens in this larger context of our world. And I think that's always worth thinking about. So I don't like the sort of, I don't know, the Oprah Secret where it's good enough to sit on a couch and think some profound thought. You have to actually—you want to sort of think about how it fits into the story of a larger world. The Secret is better than the Singularity, where you're just sitting on the couch and watching it.

So in The Secret, you at least have something you think, but I think you also want to do something with it.

That's interesting. I hadn't thought of imagination as being that private, but obviously it can be and often is. But I thought of imagination in terms of the arts—that what artists, musicians, dancers, etc., poets do is to dream something into reality, and then when other people step inside that reality, they look at everything else with different eyes. You know, when you've read a great novel, or whether, when you were sat for half an hour in front of a great painting, you then look at what you're doing, at the world, at the bus that's going by, everything in quite a different way. And it gives you permission and possibility then to do things and believe things and hope things which you mightn't have done otherwise. And from that point of view, I'm assuming you would be very happy with saying, 'Yeah, the creative imagination that creates new worlds for people to think differently in.'

I always like putting the stress a little bit more on the context, on this context we're in. And we don't want to simply escape to an imaginary world. Again, so this is again where it has sort of a... Where imaginary just means fantasy.

Yes, yes, yes. But I mean, I'll give you an example. I used to... This is a specifically theological one, but it makes the point. I used to have regular debates with my old friend Marcus Borg, who died, sadly, just earlier this year. And there would be one certain point in our debates, because we did them several times, we were talking about the Resurrection. And Marcus would say, 'I just can't imagine that.' And I would say to Marcus, 'You need to work on your imagination.' And actually, there are artists, musicians, poets who could help you do that. And if you avoid that, you are living in this smaller world when there might be a larger one which your imagination might be able to open up to. And that's so, I think, for technological innovation—

what we should be doing over the next hundred years to eliminate war, disease, poverty, etc., and we need to imagine a world in which these things are possible. And I think it's often the artists and the painters and the musicians who can help us do that. Here's another question that is on that sort of moral imagination trajectory. Uh, someone says—and I think this is to you, Peter—

How do you speak to the seeming trend that the future and tech seems to be dominated by problems generally confronting 20-somethings? Meaning, do you think that there's greater soul-searching and reflecting is needed in the tech world?

Well, I've been a critic in the sense that I think that we should be doing a lot more. Very often when these criticisms are made, though, it's always in this context of technology as a scapegoat, something that gets blamed for all of our problems. And the suggestion is that we have—so, I think one can be a critic of Silicon Valley, and there's a form of the critique where it's too much, it's too fast, it's changing things too much. And I find that to be just a very preposterous critique. I think the iPhones that distract us from our environment also distract us from the ways in which our environment is strangely old. If you look around San Francisco, most of the buildings are 50, 60 years old.

You know, the Star Trek episode where you had sort of Star Trek, these futuristic buildings, that was far in the future, you know? You know, that's really far in the future. And so, I think the criticism of Silicon Valley is always, that I always have, is that, you know, it's a place where we're trying to—I wouldn't say imagine—build a better future, and there's a degree to which we're not doing enough of it. We have a tagline on our website where we said, 'They promised us flying cars and all we got was 140 characters.' But I want to be very clear, it's not meant as a critique of Twitter, because Twitter is actually a very successful company, it's a very good product, and you shouldn't criticize Twitter for building the business they built.

And it's not their fault that they haven't done anything else. And so, if there are people in Silicon Valley who are working too much on problems that are problems of 20-year-olds, then perhaps you should do something else. Yeah, that's good.

You mentioned earlier that you had this Lesslie Newbigin-inspired perspective of the idea that you weren't an optimist or a pessimist, but hopeful because of your belief that Jesus had been raised from the dead. And this person was saying, essentially, that can be somewhat triumphalist. How do you think the future is shaped by the fact that Jesus died?

Well, I was going to say, it is possible to articulate a resurrection-based hope in a triumphalist fashion. But the minute you do that, you have forgotten that the Jesus who was raised is the Jesus who was crucified. And that he is—I mean, very interesting in the texts—that he is recognized, not least, by the mark of the nails. And that's always been seen theologically as really important, that the resurrected one is not somebody who, 'Oh, well, we've left all that stuff behind,' but somebody who bears the marks, which in very early Christian tradition are seen as the wounds of love. You know, these are the wounds that he bore because of his love and his self-giving. So, in a sense, it can be—I'm not sure the question is—but it can be a cheap shot just to say, 'Oh, Christian triumphalism,' because of course there is such a thing as Christian triumphalism.

There's a thing of triumphalism in every possible walk of life, and Christians are not exempt from that temptation. But if it is true that Jesus is raised from the dead, it isn't Christian triumphalism, it's kind of cosmic celebration in which Christians are simply bearing witness to something that's happened and therefore called to a tough vocation to be witnesses for that. And there are people bearing witness to the resurrection today who are facing death, in some cases certain death, at the hands of Islamic militants and so on in North Africa. So saying, 'I believe that Jesus is raised from the dead and therefore a new world has been born,' may, in some parts of the world at some times of history, be a very quick passport to a very early death.

So it isn't triumphalism, it's about—and this is the difference between hope and optimism—that it's, if I feel really good, yeah, I'm cheerful, it's gonna be a nice day today, good things are gonna happen to me. No, that's optimism. But hope says, even though things look really bleak, even though, even though, even though, this has happened, therefore the world is a different place. Some of the places where in the New Testament St. Paul says that most sharply are in letters written from prison. In other words, he is in a tough spot, but he says the Gospel has already been announced to the whole creation when Jesus was raised from the dead.

This is a somewhat disjointed thought. There's a line in the New Testament: 'What will profit a man if he gains the entire world and loses his soul?' And I think it's often framed as a general statement, but I've often wondered whether it had an actual specific referent. And the specific classical referent of the person who conquered the whole world was Alexander the Great. And there is something numerological about the number 33. I think it was the 33rd chapter of the 33rd book of Livy where Livy talks about the 33-year-old conqueror enters this triumphant city. It's Alexander entering Babylon just before he dies. Sort of these cheering crowds. So there is sort of this very deep parallel between the sort of Alexander versus Christ parallel.

And I do think... I do think Christianity somehow says that the life of Alexander ended in failure. And that's like an incredible indictment that it makes. It's like, well, he might have conquered the world, but then he still died. And to some extent, that is the world we all live in.

That's fascinating. And I confess, I'd completely forgotten that stuff about Livy, and I want to go back home and look it up. It's really interesting. But the Alexander story still dominated over the next 300 years until the time of Jesus, so that all the little Hellenistic princelings who came in his wake were still telling their own story as though they might have a chance of being at least a small version of Alexander. And what Paul does in Philippians is to take the way they told that story of arriving at imperial power, and retell that with Jesus as the hero, but instead of conquering the world, dying on a cross as being the central thing. And it's as though Paul is saying specifically, yeah, okay, we now have a Roman emperor rather than a Greek one, Alexander.

But it's the same truth, that Jesus is Lord and Caesar isn't. And that's a whole strand in the New Testament which does precisely pick up the Alexander thing, and which I think many Christians have not come to terms with.

Sadly, we are coming to the end of our time here. And as we wrap up here, I actually wanted to quote something from Peter that I just loved in a recent interview you gave, where you say, 'I don't think the future is this fixed thing that just exists. I don't think there's something automatic about the Great Stagnation ending or not ending. I think I always believe in human agency. And so I think it matters a great deal whether people end it or not.' So I think everyone here has come out, I'm guessing, fairly, fair amount of certainty because they care about the future. So what parting counsel would you give on how we go about creating a just and flourishing society? What do you wanna challenge people with?

I would say expect God to do new things which are pointing towards the Kingdom and expect that He may nudge you to be part of those new things here and now.

My answers are always very anti-formulaic. And so if I could tell you precisely what to do, that would again be counterproductive to human agency or anything like that. So I think work on some very important problems that people aren't working on and try to find your calling in the larger context of our world. Let's give our thanks to both of these guys.

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