What is the Hope for Humanity? A discussion of technology, politics, and theology

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.

Well, thank you so much for that kind introduction and thanks to you all for being here. And I just hope that you're all as excited to be here tonight as I am. Some people are fanboys when it comes to Star Wars or Game of Thrones and, you know, whatever, whatever other show or movie you might be fond of. I am actually a fanboy when it comes to the two gentlemen who I will be moderating a conversation between tonight. And so I have flown all the way from the East Coast for what I actually think is a kind of world-historical meeting of the minds. I told these two gentlemen this over dinner and they sort of looked askance and shifted a little bit in their seats and tried to move a little further away from me.

But actually, there was a cartoon series that maybe some of you remember that The New Yorker used to run called Brief Encounters or something, about sort of fascinating historical moments when Marcel Proust was in the same room with Winston Churchill. That didn't actually happen, but something along those lines. And I actually think that we're in for that kind of moment here tonight. You all have Peter's biography and Tom's biography in front of you. I'm just going to give you sort of the brief highlights. Peter, I'm sure you're probably more familiar with—I shouldn't say I'm sure, but it's possible that as inhabitants of Northern California and habitués of Silicon Valley, you're a little more familiar with Peter's reputation.

But Peter is, of course, the co-founder of PayPal, one of the early investors in Facebook, a man who is involved in all kinds of activities across a range of science, technology, investment, and so on. But I would say he's here tonight in his capacity as a kind of combination futurist and social critic, if that might be a fair way of putting it. Somebody who has really interesting, fascinating things to say about the intersection of technology, economic growth, society, and religion and theology, which connects him in a sort of fascinating web filament flung out across the United States and then across the Atlantic Ocean to N.T. Wright, who is the former Bishop of Durham, which means that he was, in fact, a sitting member of the House of Lords, which we had a fascinating conversation about over dinner, which is why I'll be addressing him as Your Grace for the remainder of the evening.

No, but... My Lord is quite... My Lord is excellent, so My Lord... But my Lord Wright has the distinction, I would say, of being probably the most serious, rigorous, searching, and fascinating biblical scholar working out of a small-o orthodox Christian viewpoint, I'd say, of the last 30 or 40 years. And his work ranges from the popular to the scholarly. He's written many short books and many long books. He's going to be best known and remembered, I would suspect, for his long series of extremely long books, some of which I have on my bookshelf and have pretended to have read in full, which are listed in your bio. But it's essentially that it's a series of sort of scholarly takes on early Christianity, running from the beginnings of Christianity itself through his latest book, which is on Paul or Saint Paul, as we Christians like to call him.

The best anecdote that I can come up with to capture Tom's importance is that some of you are probably familiar with the work of the late Christopher Hitchens, the great atheist, scourge of Christianity, scourge of God, and so on. And what you may not know about Christopher Hitchens was that, in addition to being a scourge of God, he was also an incorrigible flirt where Christianity was concerned. So all kinds of my Christian friends who had had many long, booze-drenched evenings drinking with Christopher were convinced that they were just one extra conversation away from converting, converting him completely and bringing him into the fold. And so one of my close friends had been so convinced that he had given all of your books, and the thick ones, to Hitchens as the best possible case for the literal truth of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

And he said, 'Well, you know, of course nothing came of that, and I didn't expect that anything would.' But the reality is that the last time that I saw Christopher Hitchens, we were at some horrible Washington party of the kind that, you know, you can only imagine, where Larry Summers had cornered my poor wife in the other room—and we won't even get into what happened there. But Hitchens cornered me in the kitchen, and we had this sort of long and kind of peculiar conversation, the upshot of which was Hitchens saying to me, 'Well, suppose that Jesus did rise from the dead. What would that prove, really?' And that, I think, could possibly be chalked up either to your influence or the influence of the seven glasses of wine that he had drunk in the ten minutes previous.

That's an exaggeration. But anyway, so that hopefully gives you some further background on why this should be such a fascinating conversation. And basically what we're gonna try and talk about, I think that the theme for the evening is going to be, in a way, complicating what I think is one of the sort of clichés and caricatures of modern life, which is an idea that sort of pits, sort of, an accelerating pace of technological progress on the one hand, and a sort of largely secular, technologically driven, possibly utopian vision for human society against a kind of reactive, technophobic, techno-skeptic, religious rump on the other hand. And I think that both Peter and Tom in different ways in their work have sort of suggested very different ways of approaching that

caricature and have suggested ways in which it doesn't really hold up at all. And I think Peter has come at it in part from a sort of two-part point of view: one, that actually, contrary to popular perception, technological progress is not accelerating nearly as fast as we think it is, and actually we might be in more of an age of stagnation than an age of radical innovation; and secondly, that that might be connected, in fact, that stagnation, to precisely the loss of certain, possibly even metaphysical, perspectives on the world. And then Tom, I think, has come at it from the opposite direction—not the opposite direction, but in sort of looking at the way Christian and religious ideas about modernity have developed and played out, especially in the 20th century, especially maybe in reaction to Marxist utopianism and Nazi reaction and so on, and to say that actually

Part of the problem we have is that religious people have lost their sense that part of religion, and particularly part of Christianity, is a focus on this world, and not only this world in the here and now is something to be reformed, but this world is something that is actually what our ultimate destiny is involved with, that actually we're not, as religious believers, hoping for some immaterial afterlife where we're sitting on harps and sitting on clouds and playing harps. Sitting on harps would be a little uncomfortable. And that actually what we've lost is a sense that, you know, at least the Christian hope is of a bodily resurrection, a New Heaven and a New Earth, a New Jerusalem that looks a lot in certain ways like the world we live in now and that that has implications for the way we live.

That's my extremely long-winded and rambling introduction, and now I'm gonna sort of throw it open briefly to both of you to just sort of say something brief to the audience about sort of how you come at these questions, anything in your background that you think maybe gives you a distinctive perspective on these issues. And I'll start with you, My Lord.

I come at these questions as not a technophobe, but reasonably ignorant about the details of technology, and I'm one of those who's enormously benefited from technological innovation without actually knowing very much about how or why it happens. It's just that certain things that I've had to do in my work over the last 30 years have been enormously eased, facilitated, smoothed, and accelerated by stuff that other people have done. So I've benefited from that and have seen, actually, all sorts of spin-off benefits to other bits of the world. But as a theologian, I come at all sorts of things from the point of view of Christian faith and of a Christian faith which, inevitably, in Britain as well as in America, is extremely contested.

If you look back over the last 60 years, the enormous waves of modernist skepticism and then postmodern relativism have made it much harder, culturally, socially, to say, 'Yes, I'm a Christian, and here's why.' Because so many people in my world certainly assume that Christianity means checking in your brain at the door of the church or checking in your faith at the door of your workplace. And so any attempt to connect religion and everyday life is really contested, really difficult in my culture. Of course, in America, you all believe that since we in Britain have an established church, life is very different from how it is for you. Actually, that is not so. It just gives us certain bits and pieces, like bishops in the House of Lords, which are different.

But so many of the social attitudes and not least attitudes in the media and those who are forming cultural opinions, it's pretty similar in terms of an implicit split between religion and politics, religion and reality, religion and society, and certainly, I think, for many people, religion and technology. And religion becomes a nostalgia for a golden age in the past when all this funny, fancy stuff that's allowing people to do wicked things on the Internet, et cetera, that didn't exist and it was so much simpler and cleaner. So I have not reacted against that. I've just struggled to hold together what it seems to me should never have been separated. But that's a brief miniature sketch of where some of it comes from.

Well, I come at it from the perspective that I grew up as an evangelical Christian. I think the question of the relation of reason and revelation or faith and science or Christianity and technology are extremely important questions for us to talk about. We don't get a chance to do it very often, so I want to thank The Veritas Forum for convening this evening and give us a chance to do it. There certainly is a sense in which the sort of materialist, scientific, technological utopia seems quite at odds with a Judeo-Christian worldview. But I think there are some commonalities that it's worth also stressing. One very important commonality is that both have this view that the future will look very different from the present or the past.

And this is certainly the view that's presented in science fiction. It's presented in—the New Jerusalem is not, you're not going back to the Garden of Eden. And so there sort of is a sense that the future looks very different from the past. I think that we are living in a society that I think is—people who are Christian often like to complain that it's sort of vaguely anti-Christian in different ways. I would submit that it is at least as anti-scientific and anti-technological. And so if you look at the movies that Hollywood makes, you would be hard-pressed to come up with a single movie in which science and technology are portrayed in a positive light. And they basically show science and technology that kills people, it doesn't work, and you have a menu of dystopias you can choose from.

The future will look like Avatar, or The Terminator, or The Matrix, or Elysium. And if you look at the Gravity movie that came out a year ago, you basically want to go back on a muddy island and never go into outer space. And so I think this notion that we're living this extraordinary—and I think Hollywood, as it often does, it both creates and reflects the popular consensus that science and technology are dangerous things that should be stopped. And so I come at it from the perspective that we have somehow lost our way. We no longer believe in a future that looks very different from the present. I think it's an interesting intellectual history question why we've lost this hope in a better future.

But I do think it's a very severe loss because there are an awful lot of problems that science and technology could help solve, but they will not be solved if we do not try to work at them.

Could I just push on that? Because it's a very interesting way of looking at it, and it was occurring to me as you were speaking that it's something about the modern world—i.e., what we call modernism, starting broadly in the late 18th century with a sudden upsurge of science and technology which made people think, quite rightly, we can do things that no generation of humankind has ever done before. And from then, right through to the invention of plane travel in the early 20th century, was making people think every few years something new is happening which is enabling us to do more. And that got bundled up, I think, with a notion of progress, that it was sort of automatic. And from the continent, you get philosophers like Hegel.

There is this immanent system. It's just moving forward. And actually, it gets more traction because in the same movement, you get rid of God. God is upstairs or out of sight. And even if he exists, he doesn't intervene down here. So we can see a sort of steady progress. We're making new and better machines. We can do more things. It's all quite extraordinary. And I suspect that part of what you describe as the loss of that could map onto what we loosely call postmodernity. That is to say, after the war, after the Holocaust, after the first atom bomb, et cetera, people say, 'Wait a minute, our big stories have let us down.' And often those big stories were stories about political progress. And people say, 'No, that's let us down.'

And certainly those who pinned their hopes on Marxist utopias and so on, that's let them down. But maybe it's part of that same thing as a sort of cultural weariness that we thought the sky was the limit. And actually, literally, we did all that space travel. And then actually we've stopped doing that now because what's the point and isn't it a waste of money and so on. And so I just wonder if you would see that as part of that same cultural shift from the modernist progress to the postmodern saying, well, we've just got all these little stories and those big ones are just self-serving power grabs anyway. Because if that's so, it puts us actually on the same page, because I wrestle with those issues, with that cultural story in my own work as a theologian, because I don't think that Christian hope has to do either with modernist progress or with this real denial of all the significant stories in postmodernity.

So we'd both be looking for new ways of doing hope and of how that could happen, which might actually be quite a significant convergence. I don't know. Well, I think, you know, I do look—I think, I think that, uh, I think, uh, there's the question of why, um, why there's been this loss of hope and faith in, in science and technology is a complicated one. I certainly think, uh, when you put scientists—scientists were never more in charge than they were at Los Alamos, and people sort of have some questions about how well that worked out. And then the Apollo program fizzled out in the '70s, which was in some sense the successor to the Manhattan Project. There is a sense in which the optimism around science in the 17th and 18th century, that it was almost limitless in what could be done, gradually gave way to this idea that it was a trap or it didn't work, or that there were just sort of random things that would go wrong, that would happen.

So one intellectual history thing I would stress is the early modernity did not attribute a large role of chance to science. And so in the 17th and 18th century, people thought it was very deterministic. And you could figure out, look at Francis Bacon's New Atlantis. You were going to control the weather. And all these sort of random things would be, and chance would be sort of relegated to the margins. There would be no accidents. And you wouldn't die because nothing would happen. You could sort of get rid of all accidents in the world. And I think the 19th and 20th century, sort of the role of chance became bigger and bigger. Friedrich Engels could still say that dialectical materialism promised never-ending progress, but then in a footnote add that the second law of thermodynamics implied that eventually you'd have the heat death of this world and everybody would die, but people could ignore that because it was still far in the future.

And there was certainly a way in which actuarial science sort of suggested you eventually hit this probabilistic wall. And so, and so we're now in a world that's not Marxist or Hegelian, but it's more Epicurean, where the dominant mode is that there are atoms, and they randomly move through a void. And no matter what you do, your projects gradually come to naught. You will hit this probabilistic wall. And that's why the dominant mode in our society is not this optimistic view about the future, but it's Stoic, you know, it's eat, drink, be merry, because everything's gonna sort of fall apart eventually anyway, and that's not a scientific attitude.

Yeah, yeah. I think the eat, drink, and be merry is actually more Epicurean than Stoic, but we could... We could give about 20 minutes now for the Epicurean-Stoic.

Well, they're very different, but they both... But I think sort of the contrasting view that's very hard to articulate is, if you were to say something prophetic about the future, this would be unthinkable. A political leader who portrays a picture of the future as very different from the present would never get a hearing. So if Martin Luther King, 'I have a dream' of a nation not divided, you have a concrete view of a very different world. Or the last version I can think of would be Reagan, 'Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall.' And anyone who tried to give a speech like that today, it would be implausible. It would not poll-test well. People would sense you shouldn't do it because...

But how much is that because the cynicism in culture at large, reflected by at least some in the media, saving your presence, sir, then there would be a sort of sense that actually we all know. We've tried that. We've been there, done that. We had these great projects. And I mean, part of the problem is that people say, 'Well, yeah, I really like modern science when it cures me of some disease that otherwise I would have died of.' But the same modern science—and people don't differentiate—built the gas chambers at Auschwitz and dropped the atom bomb and all the rest of it. And so people say, 'Wait a minute, is that really where we're going?' And hence the mood of cynicism, and hence, if somebody actually says, 'There is a glorious future, and there are ways in which we can anticipate it here and now,' that's perhaps the conversation we need to get into.

But perhaps, let me just actually, I guess, push back a little bit on this thesis, because I think there are sort of some complications, right? Like, if you look at Barack Obama's campaign for the presidency in 2007 and 2008, yes, there was, let's say, a certain vagueness to the kind of promised land that he was promising people. The appeal of his candidacy was, I think, in certain ways, a reflection of, at least temporarily, a kind of burst of idealism and the entire sort of 'Yes, we can,' Shepard Fairey posters, sort of this vision of a generational wheel turning of a sort of new multiracial America that Obama embodied and so on. I mean, I don't think I'm wrong to see at least a temporary sort of return of at least mild utopianism there and also...

I mean, maybe this can be sort of folded into the Epicurean analysis, but as an outsider to Silicon Valley and as someone who works in mass media, what strikes me is that while it may not go ultimately in sort of a utopian direction, there is still a persistent valorization of your sector of innovation in a way that isn't true. Like, an oil company executive is always going to be a bad guy, right, in the movies and so on, but Steve Jobs gets not one but two, I, I believe, right? There's a second one forthcoming, sort of heroic biopic movies, right? I mean, there is still that sense around the tech industry that there's something different about you guys.

But Silicon Valley is an unusual exception to this. It's not the dominant ethos. The first Steve Jobs movie was an unusually bad movie. I'm not defending the Ashton Kutcher. And basically, the question you had to raise, it was just sort of like, there were all these people who read the Jobs biography and they sort of thought, 'Well, what are the lessons we learn?' And lessons are you should be really mean to your employees. And there was one manager I know sort of gave the biographies to all his employees as a warning that he was going to be less nice to them in the future, and he's going to be more like Steve Jobs. And the lesson that was not drawn was there was something inspiring about Jobs, about portraying a picture of the future that actually motivated his employees.

That's the real lesson of Apple that has not been conveyed, where it's just he was this very weird and extraordinarily mean, mercurial, crazy person. That's the way he's portrayed. I would say, I think on the Obama campaign, one of the things—and if you want the Marxist critique of Obama, it would be, what sort of a progressive has substituted the word 'change' for the word 'progress'? And does not the substitution of the word 'change' for the word 'progress' represent an objective decline? And then in the course of the 2008 campaign, change did not poll-test well. And so the slogan by the end of the campaign had been narrowed to 'the change we need,' the absolute minimum amount of change that is absolutely necessary.

All these things, I think, can be interpreted in quite different ways.

It's very British. A recent sociological book—this is a sidebar, but just to show you where it's coming from—the revolutionaries would march and chant, 'What do we want? Revolution! When do we want it?' And somebody said that the characteristic British thing is, 'What do we want? Gradual change. When do we want it? In due course.' By contrast, in 1997, we were all fed up with the Conservatives of John Major. We had our Obama moment—was our Tony Blair moment. And indeed, one of the London columnists described Obama as 'Tony Blair with brains.' And there was something to that. It was the same sort of, 'Phew, here's somebody new. Maybe things are going to get better.' And very quickly, that faded and things went wrong.

Because politicians can't actually produce what they have to. They have to make promises, otherwise they get massacred. People would say they're hopeless. 'What are they going to do? They don't have an agenda. They don't have a program.' But just like science and technology used to be, at least, they have to promise all this stuff. But as you're saying, Peter, that they're not actually producing the utopia which people might have imagined they would.

And maybe it's a mistake to blame the politicians or the Hollywood movie producers, because I do think it reflects this broader consensus of what can be done, what's realistic, what's possible.

But I think we're speaking into a world which still, in its bones, believes in the 18th-century doctrine that the world has turned its key corner. Now that we are the enlightened ones, we are the modern, grown-up nations, we have democracy, we have science and technology, we can do what we want, therefore we ought to be making utopia. And I've often said to people—and maybe this is the moment when I stopped saying it—that the two nations which were born in the end of the 18th century, namely America and France, born in a new way, both really did believe in the myth of the Enlightenment: 'We've had our revolution, we are now the new society.' And the reason why so many French people look miserable is they know that that hasn't happened. The reason why so many American people look happy is that they think—they still think—it has.

But maybe this is where—and we British sit in the middle saying, 'What was all that about?'—but what you're saying is that that's dying a death, actually, that there is a sort of sense of, 'Hmm, hasn't really worked like that.'

Well, this is what—I have a French friend who argues that that is actually literally what has happened or is happening in the United States, effectively, and this is something I think you might be inclined to agree with, that the American upper class has become more like the traditional French sort of bureaucratic managerial elite, where people go to the same schools and gradually ascend into sort of expected positions of sort of corporate-governmental partnerships that are supposed to manage the economy and so on. And the American model, of course, was supposed to be and has been very different, but maybe becoming less different.

Yeah, it's always hard to know exactly where we are as a culture. And we have to be careful not to paint with too broad a brush stroke here. But I do think there's a way in which things have become super-tracked. There's a sense a lot of these tracks don't work that well, but nevertheless, people don't know what else to do. And so the push to get into the top universities in the U.S. gets more intense every single year, even though there's nothing in particular that people are learning there that they would apply in any particular way.

But so why, just to continue, just to... Just to continue playing, I suppose, devil's advocate on the cliches, people, or maybe it isn't people, maybe it's just people in my profession who write about these things, but there is a sense, still, if you went through 100 media stories about technology, 95 of them would begin, "In this age of rapidly accelerating technological change," right? I feel like that is sort of the default Internet-era mode with which at least the media—and the media responds to popular cues, so it can't just be something we're dreaming up—that people respond to the Internet, the iPhone, the iPad. People feel like things are in flux to a much greater extent, I think, than certainly you think they actually are.

Well, it's always very hard to get a handle on exactly how much technological progress is taking place. So this is sort of an incredibly complicated debate to fully unpack. Let me just focus on one terminological aspect. So if we define technology as that which is changing very quickly, then however technology gets defined, when you look at technology, it will be progressive. So there's something circular in the argument. Now today, when people in 2014 use the word "technology," it normally refers to information technology because we are in a world where there has been a lot of progress in computers and bits. There has not been a lot of progress in other things. So if we had used the word "technology" in 1964, 50 years ago, it would have referred to aerospace and rockets and faster cars and underwater cities,

and turning deserts into farmland and desalination plants and nuclear power, and technology had a much, much broader scope. And certainly the narrative is always on the side that the only thing we have to fear is enormous and accelerating technological progress. And there certainly are some things to fear about. I will not say that I'm worried about proliferation of nuclear weapons. I'm worried about all these scenarios where things could go badly wrong. But the alternatives are not neutral. In a world without technological progress, you have a zero-sum society in which there has to be a loser for every winner. It's not clear whether capitalism could work in that sort of society. I certainly do not think

a democratic representative government could work because it works by having a growing pie in which you forge compromises, in which you sort of divvy up the pie and everyone gets a little bit more, and they will get it as long as the pie is growing. When the pie stops growing, politics gets polarized and people are really angry at each other, even when there are no objective differences at all between them, which I think is a pretty accurate description of politics in 2014.

Yeah, and in my country as well, which is why suddenly you get odd new parties emerging on the right, because the rest of them, wriggling around for some center ground somewhere... I just am interested, then, in the idea of making the world a better place and how that could be conceived from within this very complexified picture of technology that you've raised. Sorry, you're supposed to be asking the questions.

No, no, no. Anyone can ask anything.

I just, having heard what Peter's just said, I suppose the question for me is: many Christians have imagined that whatever happens with this world, one day God is going to take us away somewhere else and then it'll all be way beyond the blue and we'll be sitting, whether on angels or on clouds or on harps or something. We may not even be sitting, but it'll be different. And instead of that, I have come to the position as a New Testament reader that actually the New Testament isn't terribly interested in heaven in the way we've traditionally perceived it. In fact, not really interested at all. It's interested in what Jesus said, God's Kingdom coming on earth as in heaven. And the New Testament really does seem to think that in some strange sense that began with Jesus.

It isn't postponed. It began with Jesus and will be climaxed at some point in the future. The question then comes: what can we do in the present? And is technology part of that, which will actually be, in my shorthand, Kingdom work? Or will it just be Frankenstein work? I mean, the Frankenstein image is behind some of what you were saying before, isn't it? The sort of sense that we've invented these monsters and they're terrible and they'll take us over and it'll all be horrible. And so how can we tell which bits of the stuff that we find we can do now might be part of that sort of vision of God doing God's Kingdom in God's way, but us doing things which in some way instantiate it in the present, for instance, in doing things which would help the poorest of the poor, which was always part of the Jesus vision of the Kingdom?

I don't know if that reframes the question helpfully, but it might sort of say, okay, if there is to be a future, how does the God-dream of that and the what-we-do dream of that, how might they work together, or can't they?

Well, and one thing that you, Peter, were saying in our conversation before the event was that you feel like you've seen a shift just over the last 30 years or so in how Christians relate to that kind of work. And that may be a result of sort of the focus shifting from aerospace and rockets to biotechnology that raises a different set of ethical issues or something for Christians, but that there's less appetite maybe than there was 30 or 40 years ago among religious believers for precisely that idea that that sort of technology is part of sort of a cooperative progress and technology now seems more like a threat.

I think it's not limited to people who call themselves Christians. I think it's the dominant motif in our society. And people will always say that they are in favor of science and technology in theory. But then in practice, they're against this and this and this. And the things they are against, they're always against in a far more intense way than anything they are in favor of in the abstract, but there are all sorts of specific things that they're very strongly against. I would say that, again, I think the problem of poverty, for example, is on some level a problem of scarcity. And the alternative to technological progress is this sort of Malthusian type of a prospect. There was a famous debate between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon in the 1980s where they had a bet on sort of a basket of commodities.

Would they go down in price or up in price? And Simon was sort of the Christian optimistic economist who accurately predicted they would go down. But if you rerun that 10-year bet since 1993, Ehrlich has been winning every decade, every year on a rolling decade basis. And so in rural India, people are consuming fewer calories than they were in 1970. In China, you have a lot of pollution problems, but it requires coal because we can't get the nuclear power plants to work properly. And even in the United States, you could argue that there's a hidden sort of Malthusianism in which we have an obesity—it's sort of, perversely, people aren't eating real food, and it sort of shows up as an obesity epidemic.

Or in a place like San Francisco, we have an extreme scarcity of real estate because we have no technologies to build taller skyscrapers or to innovate on transportation or things like that. And it always gets, of course, this Malthusian scarcity gets dressed up in a positive way. It gets dressed up aesthetically. It benefits urban slumlords at the expense of everyone else, but it gets dressed up as "we really like Victorian houses," which of course is not exactly a scientific technological aesthetic.

But from the perspective of a lot of, I think, especially religious conservatives, right, the argument that opposition to science is an incredibly powerful force, I think sort of rings hollow. Because to a lot of Christians, especially if you go back to 1970, to the 1970s and look at the debates over, for instance, what were then called test-tube babies, right? And we now just think of as in vitro fertilization. And you read the arguments that people had over bioethics in that case. The arguments made by supporters of the research were always that, well, of course we would not want to move to a world where people were buying and selling their eggs and you had a huge market in reproductive services and so on.

And of course, in fact, that's exactly the world we've moved into. And then you move ahead and you talk about sort of abortion genetic testing and abortion and people say, "Well, of course we're doing this, but we don't want to move to a world where most fetuses with Down syndrome are aborted." And in fact, that's the world we move to. And so it seems like from the religious perspective, a lot of the opposition that you're feeling that I think is real is rooted in a sense that nobody is actually calling a halt, that the things that religious believers in particular are most concerned about just progress sort of on autopilot. And you end up at the bottom of the slippery slope, and people say, "Well, that wasn't so bad, and we'll do another slippery slope," and so on.

And so that's sort of, I think, the root of at least some of what you're seeing.

Well, I would argue the FDA has called a halt to it. There's something called Eroom's Law that's Moore's Law backwards, which is that the cost of every new drug doubles every nine years. And so we're sort of getting into this thing where it's costing more and more. And in 1970, to use your date, Nixon could still declare war on cancer and declare that we would defeat cancer by the Bicentennial, by 1976. Now today, 44 years later, by definition we're 44 years closer to curing cancer. People don't think it's six years away. And it would be unthinkable for Obama to go on television and declare war on Alzheimer's even though one-third of the people in this country at age 85 are suffering from some form of dementia.

And so I do think, you know, I know it always gets dressed up as we're having all this progress and how scary it is, but the thing that I find scary is all the ways in which it's not happening and how there's not even a sense of outrage about the things that are not being done.

Yeah, it seems to me that part of the problem was a failure of expectations. That in, again, in the 18th and 19th century, they thought, as then, still, Reagan and people were thinking, or Nixon was thinking, things are getting better so much faster that we just have to keep on this train and we'll get to Utopia remarkably quickly. And we now realize that that ain't necessarily so, which actually is a good phrase, thinking about it in terms of what people normally say in my business, as in the things you're liable to read in the Bible and so on. But I think the opposite of that was a Christian negativity towards progress, which said, "Yeah, the world's a mess, but there's nothing we can do about it till Jesus returns, so we're just going to sit back, say our prayers, and wait for a Big Bang, an Armageddon, or whatever."

And a lot of Christians still take exactly that view, that it's actually wrong to try to make improvements in the world. It's not just that they don't like this or that or the other scientific innovations. They say we shouldn't be making any improvements in the world because Jesus is gonna do all that when he comes back and it would be arrogant of us to try and preempt that, which is rather like the old Marxist argument that you shouldn't put up the workers' wages because it'll only delay the revolution. That actually, let's bring it on, bring on the Second Coming by not doing anything now. And it seems to me a proper vision of Christian hope would be considerably more modest on the one hand

than the optimism of the Enlightenment. In other words, actually, the Kingdom of God has been launched, but the way it happens is not by our arrogant technology, but through our service to one another, through our service to the poor, through our medicine—and that's where the two systems might actually overlap a bit—through our teaching, through our education, and those have always been great Christian dreams. And not that we can create utopia here, so that's the pulling back from the arrogance of the Enlightenment to a more modest thing, but to say that there is stuff we can do. For instance, the people who abolished the slave trade—Wilberforce in my country. Who was it in your country? I just... That Lincoln fellow.

Well, I'm thinking earlier than that, actually, early 19th century, the people who campaigned... late 18th, early 19th. But the key thing is they were people who were told, 'Sit down, shut up, God will change the world when he wants to.' And they were saying, 'No, actually we are going to do stuff.' And they campaigned and they really did make radical transformations of the world. And it seems to me that if we lose hope, because we're losing hope in scientific advance, a lot of Christians may just slide back into saying, 'There you are, told you so, nothing we can do till Jesus comes back.' And I want to say, no, absolutely wrong. That's not how the New Testament hope works. And some elements of the scientific advances that we have had, particularly in medicine, actually have been and should be seen as part of serious Kingdom work.

Which really does anticipate what Christians believe God is going to do in the end. So it isn't that we can do nothing, it isn't that we can do everything, it's that we have to have a differently modulated sense both of the ultimate hope and of how we get there. But how do—but how do you get there? I guess that's the—I mean, this has been a sort of

pessimistically drifting conversation, right? And so the question is where does—I mean, let's stipulate for the sake of argument that in some sense our culture is in a decadent phase, right, that has something to do with the loss of ultimate hope, something to do with the loss of more immediate hope. Do societies break out of those ruts?

Well, I certainly don't think it's like an absolute thing. And I spend a lot of time working in a variety of these areas. So even though I find some of the larger trends to be ones of deceleration, I think that there is still a lot that one can and should try to do. Certainly, the pro-Silicon Valley version would be that in a society that's generally hostile to progress, it's hard to get it done on a political level because you can't convince 51% of the people. But maybe you can do it on the level of a small company where you have to only convince a much smaller number of people. And so that's sort of why I think there is such a role for innovation around technology businesses at this point.

It's certainly not the only way it theoretically should happen. I mean, you could have it happen in large corporations, it could probably happen in a governmental context, in a political—there are all sorts of ways it could happen.

But to the extent that it's an issue with—well, I guess you can tell me what you think. Is the fundamental issue more structural, that we have sort of sclerotic bureaucracies and the FDA standing in people's way and all of that, or is there a more fundamental failure of imagination that's related to sort of where we've ended up because of how the religion and secularism dynamic has played out, how the 20th century played out, and so on?

I would say it's both. I think the structure reflects the—you know, we tolerate the FDA because we don't really think we can have a cure for Alzheimer's, so what does it matter if the FDA stops every drug? We're not going to get a cure anyway, so it's okay. And then I think these things are both cause and effect. They sort of work on all these different levels. I agree with everything that Wright has said. One nuance: I think it is an open question how optimistic one could be. I certainly think it is possible that one could be a lot more optimistic. There are ways in which this is somewhat self-fulfilling. If you think something can't be done, it won't be done. If you think it can be done, maybe you will help bring it about.

There's this incredible self-fulfilling aspect to—

to so much of this. Just a nuance, and maybe this is the scholar's nervous twitch. I wouldn't myself use the word optimism because that, it seems to me, describes an attitude that some people are optimistic and some people are pessimistic. I would distinguish between optimism and hope, and hope is not simply an attitude that this is how I feel. Hope is something that says something has happened in history which gives me hope of something else that can happen and will happen, and the thing that's happened in history is to do with Jesus, to do with his resurrection, a new world that's been launched, as a result of which, even when I'm feeling pessimistic, I still say I actually choose to believe that there is an ultimate hope, and because we live between those two, I choose to believe, even if I don't feel particularly optimistic about it, that there are things that I can do, that we can do right now to make the world a better place, to feed the hungry, to deal with diseases as best we can, although it's part of the deal then that part of the optimism of the—

ultra-Enlightenment, sort of uber-Enlightenment might be, have we got a cure for death itself? Can we actually move beyond that? And that's where the Enlightenment, I think, gets to the point of real arrogance of saying, 'Well, the Christians had this myth about resurrection, whatever. We don't need that. We're going to make us live longer and longer and possibly forever.' And it's an interesting sort of alternative: longevity as an alternative to a Christian hope.

This, I think, gets to—you know, one of the implicit themes of this conversation is that you could put back together, in some sense, the kind of scientific, questing, optimistic spirit and this, you know, or sort of reroute it in a kind of metaphysics of ultimate hope. But do you think—I mean, I think that, you know, I imagine you have some thoughts on this, because the question of life extension—

I don't think there's anything incompatible with indefinite life extension and Christianity. I think that—I think in practice the question will never get framed that way. It will always be framed, 'Do you want to cure cancer? Do you want to cure this type of disease or that sort of disease?' It's not like you're going to take this pill and you will live forever. It's always going to be framed—

I'm pretty sure Ray Kurzweil was on my flight out here, so I don't know if—well, he thinks it will just happen automatically without people doing anything at all.

So the Singularity is near, just sit back and eat the popcorn. So that's not going to happen. But in practice, it will always get framed in terms of very specific questions. And I do think that both the hopeful and Christian and, and ethically correct answer is to always side on the side of, almost always on the side of, yeah, it would be good to have a cure for cancer or this other disease and so on. And this is sort of a complicated intellectual history question. I think this would be very hard to sort out. But I do think this sort of idea of finding, radically extending people's lives was part of the very early modern science project from the 17th and 18th century onwards. I cannot help but wonder whether that was in part because of Christianity having said that that was a possibility.

And so if you lived in a world where people said, 'You know, death is natural, it's just what happens to everybody,' then that would not have been a realistic goal. And this was certainly not part of, say, Greek science in the fifth century BC. There was no Francis Bacon who wrote as though something like this was conceivable.

Yeah, it's very interesting. I'm not sure that it was ever part of a Christian agenda because the Christian agenda always was resurrection, and which, if properly understood, would be resurrection not into some fluffy non-spatiotemporal heaven but into actually a new world, a God making new heavens and new earth. It seems to me if people are saying that this is something which is now possible, something which is now conceivable, it seems to me more likely that what they're saying is we Christians have had a tradition of curing diseases as best we can and of working medically. And, of course, we have to remind ourselves that until the middle of the late 19th century, the average life expectancy for a reasonably healthy adult man or woman was in the 40s or 50s rather than 60s, 70s, 80s.

So that, in a sense, it's been already remarkably successful that a lot of people who, in generations gone by, would have been dead by the time they were my age, mid-60s, are still, well, here we are, still here, living proof that something's happened. So I don't see there's anything wrong in saying we could actually increase that. But the point at which it treads into dangerous territory, it seems to me, would be to imagine a sort of elixir of life, as you say, a magic pill, something which sounds rather like what was in the Garden of Eden and wasn't allowed to be taken.

But I guess, and I guess the question would be, is that a... Go ahead, go ahead. No, well, it strikes me that, you know, one sort of, we're getting near to the point where we'll segue into questions and answers, but one sort of pointed question I would put to you is, in a sense, you know, does entrepreneurship, does science need religion? But as a corollary to that, it seems, again, as an outsider sort of observing the culture of Northern California, Silicon Valley, and so on from the outside, there does seem to be an extent to which that narrative, to the extent that anything is filling the void left by the collapse of religious belief, it is a sort of quasi-religious vision of the Singularity, of sort of indefinite life expectancy and so on, that's untethered from any metaphysic, but is sort of promising something that religion used to deliver.

Well, let's see. I don't want to get into it. I suspect it's very dangerous to get into a theological debate here. But I think in the Garden of Eden, if I recall, there were two trees. There was the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And they weren't supposed to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The Tree of Life was not forbidden.

But it subsequently was after they—yeah.

But not in the original conception. And so I think there is this question whether one thinks of death as simply a natural part of life. And every myth on this planet tells us that all that lives must die, to quote Hamlet's evil mother. And we sort of rationalize death in one form or another. And I think the notion that death is unnatural, that it's this sort of fallen or flawed or very screwed up condition in which we find ourselves, that's not a pagan view. That is a Christian view. And so I don't think it was part of the agenda of science or Christian agenda to do this. But I think it was not surprising that it emerged in this sort of world where people thought that that was possible.

But do you think that that idea, unmoored from a metaphysical hope, could be sufficient to sort of sustain or create a rebirth of the kind of optimism that you think American society needs? And then I'll have a— Yeah.

Yeah, I'm always skeptical of metaphysics. I think the thing that is striking on the sort of transhumanist versus Christian thing is how similar they are. And so I think you can sort of point to metaphysical differences. But the thing that sort of is always striking is you're going to have a transformed body. There's going to be this radical transformation of the way everything works. There will be no more random freak accidents that happen to kill you. And so I think it's actually the similarities that are striking, and then one shouldn't try to overlay some metaphysical difference.

And is this not because, I mean, a lot of early science—and by early science I don't mean the Greeks or the Egyptians, I mean early modern science in the 16th, 17th century—grew out of a Christian celebration of the goodness of creation? And the old phrase used to be that science was thinking God's thoughts after Him. And it wasn't science or religion; it was science grew out of a Christian faith, a Christian exploration. But what's happened since—and again, particularly since the Enlightenment, and this has happened on several issues—I mean, the previous Pope said in a speech at the United Nations that with regard to human rights, what's happened since the 18th century is that human rights, which really grew out of a Christian vision of what it meant to be human, how you should treat your neighbor, et cetera, that's been cut off from its Christian roots, and it's now been made into a kind of independent, freestanding entity,

which then is getting you into all sorts of areas where every possible pressure group claims, 'This is my right, these are our rights,' and it's impossible to get past the shouting match between these competing rights because we've cut it off from its roots. Might it not be possible that the same thing has happened with science—that science, grown out of a faith-based exploration of the world, Jewish and Christian, and Muslim, actually, because if you're a creational monotheist, there is always this sense of delight and exploration in creation? But then when science cuts itself off from that, kicks God upstairs and says, 'We now have this progress thing which is just taking us where we need to go,' so then you get the archetypal mad scientist or the Frankenstein maker or whatever, because, as with

the modern confusion about rights, it's been cut off from its original roots. Would there be—if that's, A, is that the right analysis? And B, if that's so, would it be healthy to explore ways of putting science and Christian faith back together again, not by going back to the 17th century, but by going on to a different way of conceiving it?

I think there is a point where people overdo science and technology. I think there aren't very many people who do that in our society. So I think the Frankenstein novel by Mary Wollstonecraft was semi-autobiographical because her father was involved in a variety of sorts of experiments. And I have a preference for her father over the rebellious daughter who was not honoring her parents. And we are living in this. And I do think there's something about the Faustian ambition of Goethe that's maybe a little bit screwed up. You know, the, the, the alternative, you know, is I think it is better than the sort of Nietzschean alternative. I always think of Nietzsche as sort of the first environmental philosopher who rejected both Christianity and the scientific technological utopia and sort of willed a return to nature, to sort of a counterfeit Eden, nature, red in tooth and claw.

Yeah, yeah. But Nietzsche, quite wrongly, I think, saw Christianity as, in his phrase, Platonism for the masses—that this was a way of getting a spirituality that would leave the philosophical academic halls and be available to everyone. I think that was a radical mistake on Nietzsche's part because Christianity was never a form of Platonism, because Platonism is precisely a dualistic framework which says that this present world doesn't matter that much and ideally you inhabit another world already and you will one day inhabit it completely. That's what people have done with Christianity—to that extent, Nietzsche, I think, was right—but that isn't what original Christianity, Jesus and Paul and so on, was all about.

And I think the task then would be not to say we agree with Nietzsche's critique, because there were all sorts of odd things about it, but to say we need to get back to a more robust, holistic, heaven and earth together, faith and science together, way of looking at the world. One of the great commentators in Britain at the moment is the former Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks. I don't know if you've worked with him at all, but he's an amazing man. He wrote a book called The Great Partnership recently about science and faith. And I was thinking about that in the light of this. And he says, "Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean." So you see, that's a sign of a great partnership.

And okay, it's an oversimplification, and he knows that. But I think there's something enormously important there. But what you're talking about is so much not science as in—and maybe this is an important distinction we haven't made—not science as in, "Let's take it apart, see how it works," as in, "Let's think of something else that we might be able to do, see what it would take to make that work"—in other words, to go forward in not just exploration and description, but actually innovation and development.

I agree that there's something very screwed up with Cartesianism. And I think to sort of concretize this a little bit, I would say one could say that the last 40 years, we've had a Cartesian economy, a dualistic economy in which there was enormous progress on the level of information and bits, but not on the level of matter and atoms. And in some ways, again from a sort of libertarian perspective, I would argue the government did not regulate bits, and it outlawed atoms. And so there was a regulatory reason for this. But we've had this sort of Cartesian economy in which we've had enormous progress in bits, not very much in atoms. And that's probably been inadequate because the reality is that we are material beings in a material world.

And that's why—it's one of the reasons, I think, technology has been—more, information technology alone has not been enough to create the better world people were promised.

So it's time now to go to questions. I would say that we've sort of walked up to, especially in the foray into Nietzsche and environmentalism, a sort of unaddressed issue here, which is the impact of sort of anxieties about global warming, climate change, limits to growth, and so on, that I think has played a role on sort of changing the conversation on both the science and religion fronts. Take that up in some form in response or sort of working off a question, but maybe not. I just wanted to take note of it. So we're going to go to questions that are going to be read, not by their authors, but in a more interpretive fashion from the floor. Thank you.

And I'll accompany that with a dance after.

Yes.

What are the primary personal questions that you would encourage us to sort out before going to try to change the world, and therefore decreasing the risk that we're making the world more of a mess ourselves?

I think if we wait to sort out primary personal questions, we'll wait a long time. And that could just be a way of putting off responsible action. I mean, I believe that humans are made in God's image, and that that isn't simply reflecting God back to God, but a vocation to be reflecting the wisdom of God into the world. That is always hugely costly, and sometimes it results in the people who are doing it actually suffering and being broken in the process, because that's what happened to Jesus. We should expect it to happen to us. So if we try to put our own personal situations right first and sort ourselves out, we will try for a long time. We may not succeed. And meanwhile, the stuff we might be doing in the world won't be happening.

And in a sense, I mean...

Nothing to add to that, so...

Sorry, we're just waiting for the next reading, I assume. Yeah, here it comes.

So the next question from the audience has been: 'In an audience of motivated doers, what are the problems worth giving our life, passion, and dreams to?'

I sort of attempted to challenge the premise of the question. I think that you should—I think it's a sort of question that I'm very hesitant to sort of answer in the abstract. I think that there's an interview question I always like to ask people, which is, 'Tell me something that's true that very few people agree with you on.' And the correct answers... And so any answer to that question that would be conventional is probably wrong. So you should probably work on a problem that would not otherwise get solved. The nonprofit version of this is you should work on things that are unpopular, not popular. So the easy way I've found to turn down requests for money is to ask people why their causes are unpopular and explain to them that I only support unpopular causes because the popular causes are adequately funded.

Yeah, I don't think I have anything to add to that either. I'm just intrigued. Fascinating. Here's another one.

We've touched on belief in God in many dimensions, but not on whether this potential God is objectively a reality or not. So the question was, what is your personal belief in God, and how does it guide your decisions?

I guess I put most of my cards on the table already this evening. But the one thing to add to what I've said already is that the word God has been a question mark in contemporary culture, and many people think they know if there is a God, we know what He'd be like because of stuff they heard when they were young or whatever. And in my own belief, experience, practice, the word God systematically gets reformed around Jesus again and again, which is difficult as it's a reforming which takes place in one's whole life. And so Jesus becomes the focus and we discover who God is by looking at him. But that is difficult. It's a lifelong process. It's not just intellect. It's not just emotion. It's not just bodily.

It's all of them. And so the God project, as it were, is something which I think every generation has to be challenged by because every generation, certainly in my culture and I suspect in America, assumes, starts with the assumption we know who God is and then we try and fit everything into that and then we decide whether we believe in this God or not. And again and again, when you look at Jesus, it really does change that and change, therefore, how you see all the sort of practical issues that we've been discussing in the light of that.

Yeah, well, I think it always has a sort of very Trinitarian conception in a Christian worldview, where somehow it's relational. And this sort of image of God as the supreme introvert who is completely satisfied on his own and is sort of this Unmoved Mover of Aristotle is, I think, sort of a very different picture. And so it's worth, I think it's always worth contrasting the sort of a great introvert of the Unmoved Mover with this idea of God who shares in the hopes and sufferings of His creatures.

So the Christian God is an extrovert?

Not a total introvert.

Not a total introvert.

Okay, okay. Would you say that you believe in God?

Yes, although I think it's a tricky question to answer because you then have the question of who is God. And I think the question of who is God is more important than, "Does God exist?"

I think that's fair. What would you say is your biggest problem with the way the conception of God is understood, either by religious believers or by the culture as a whole? You can pick either one.

Well, I think often we get mistaken conceptions when people on opposite sides agree on things. That's when you get the really mistaken conceptions. And I think there's sort of this convergence between fundamentalism and atheism where you view God as fundamentally a violent being, sort of a totalitarian dictator or some sort of demon or something like that. And I think the conception of God as fundamentally violent is this mistake that people at both extremes in the culture wars share. They disagree on sort of secondary questions like whether or not God exists. They agree on the most important thing: that God's really violent.

What is the relevance of belief to our work?

A lot of my work has to do with writing about the Bible, about God, about the world. And so, in a sense, I'm a special case because it has a kind of a double relevance to it. But at the sort of meta-level, for me, it's to do with vocation. Vocation is a strange thing. I mean, when I was working as a bishop, one of the things I had to do on a very regular basis was to help people sort out vocation. Sometimes people in mid-career, say a clergy person who'd been ordained for 20 years and really was struggling with, 'Is this what I should be doing for the next 20 years?' And sometimes young people thinking, 'Where is this going? What is my life about?' And I found again and again that that sort of work has to do with helping people discover what God is saying through their friends, through their life, through their families, through the Bible, through their praying, through silence, to help them then be appropriately motivated for appropriate tasks.

And because we're all very different, that appropriate motivation, those appropriate tasks will be very different. But then, if they don't believe in God or give up believing in God, then some people will then find it, you know, 'What's the point of getting out of bed in the morning?' The only thing will be to earn enough money to stay alive, keep the family alive. It's a pretty depressing way to live, actually. Whereas, obviously, there are many other motivations as well. But for me, the thing is, I am excited, continually excited by the fact that I have struggled to be obedient to a rather odd-shaped vocation, but at least I have a sense that it is supposed to be going somewhere and that I seem to be—I actually enjoy doing much of what I do.

So faith and work go very closely together, but it's one of those multi-level meshings which—it isn't just A plus B equals C, it's several dimensions which all do come together and provides an extraordinarily rich personal and social environment for doing what I and other people do.

I'm always very bad at answering these sorts of questions.

Let me try sharpening it for you then, because I'll use my own experience, because I think I've actually found, just in practical terms, that being a—someone who—I'm Roman Catholic; my family converted to Roman Catholicism when I was a teenager. Before that, we were involved in charismatic, Pentecostalist Christianity, so my parents spoke in tongues on weekends, and so on. I've always found that to be, in certain ways—independent of the deeper and obviously more important questions about whether Catholicism is actually true—to be a kind of interesting advantage in my professional life as a journalist, in part just because, you know, journalism is supposed to cover the widest possible range of American life, and journalists tend to be a fairly secular population, and so I have sort of, you know, unique interests and connections to parts of American culture that not all of my colleagues have, but also because it sort of, in certain ways, lets me stand sometimes a little bit outside

my own profession in ways that can be helpful for writing, I think. And I wonder if that's—you know, you're someone from an evangelical background operating in an environment that—again, I'm an outsider to it, but I think most people would characterize it as fairly secular. Most of your peers at probably the high levels are—probably come from somewhat different backgrounds than you do. And I wonder if you've had a similar experience, that there's something distinctive and advantageous about an unusual-for-your-context faith background.

Yeah, well, there are definitely all sorts of contexts where one has sort of a very different perspective, very different perspective on things. I think when one sees things as an outsider, there's a way in which you see a consensus that exists where everyone simply is in agreement on things and you can question that a little bit more or relativize it a little bit. Is this really the truth, or is this just a psychosocial phenomenon at work here? And there is certainly an aspect of Silicon Valley, and I think maybe it's true in many areas of innovation where people, they position themselves as, "Oh, we're very innovative and we're very brilliant and we're very original and very creative," but all the fashionable people wear the same black clothes and they're all sort of... and you have all this sort of lemming-like, sheep-like, ape-like behavior.

And so I do think that sort of outsider perspective is quite critical. And then it's always sort of granular how you'd instantiate that in different contexts. But there certainly are many questions people don't ask, and there's sort of many times when there's a consensus that's just... that one is somewhat skeptical of. One of my rules of thumb is: when everybody agrees on something, it doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong, but it almost always means that nobody's thought about it.

That's hugely important, I think, hugely true, and it's certainly so on my side of the Atlantic that when there's a sudden cultural wave that's going along, and you can tell because all you have to do is to say one thing which goes against it, and suddenly you feel the fury of either the media or, whatever, a horror-struck look at a dinner party. Whereas if you're just going with the flow, it's very easy. I think one of the problems, to enlarge this just for a second, is the decline of reason, that we don't think properly. I was talking last night with an atheist philosopher. We were talking about the decline of reason and so on. We've forgotten how to do discourse, how to do reasoned discourse, how to line up arguments and actually work from premises to conclusions and think through issues.

So much is done in knee-jerk reactions. And maybe that's necessary in a complex culture. But I mean, in the world of Silicon Valley, somebody has to be doing the very fine-tuned, sharp-edged stuff. Otherwise, the machines aren't going to work. Bits aren't going to do what they're supposed to do.

It's always a very valuable discipline to do that and not to assume other people have done it for you. And certainly, it's always a shortcut to assume other people have done it, so we don't need to think through this issue or that topic. But I think if I had to leave anything to encourage the audience, it would be: even though this is... we live in a world of specialists where you're always supposed to—you know something about one narrow area, everything else you sort of go along with what other people think. It takes too much effort to think things through, and actually going through that exercise is really valuable. Yeah, I would agree.

In as concrete terms as possible, what is the future you most want to see, and what is necessary to enact that?

Well, let's see. Again, I sort of would challenge the premise of the question. Let me try to give a non-concrete answer to it. So I would like to see a world in which people think about the future more, in which the future is an idea that has some power against the present. And so I think if there's this consensus that's overpowering, if we say that the only thing that exists is the present—you know, all power is in the present, the present is actual power, the future is potential power—and so if you say that there is no future that you can contrast against the present, then you end up in this extremely, extremely static world. And so I would like to see a world in which there is a great deal more hope in the future, and in which the future as an idea gains some more currency.

And then you can sort of instantiate this in many, many different ways.

It seems to me that the concrete hope in the Christian vision is a new heavens and a new earth, which are part of a new reality, which is like the present reality, only much more so. That is the beauty and power and astonishing multifacetedness of creation as we know it. It will just be enhanced amazingly in a way which at the moment we've only got picture language for. There's no good language other than pictures to point to it. And people get stuck on the pictures about streets paved with gold and so on. These are pictures. They're ways of saying it's like what we have at the moment, only much more so. But since that remains an ideal which we can't bring about by our own efforts, it's going to be, if it's going to happen, it's going to be God's work.

There are nevertheless, and this back to something I said before, there are nevertheless all sorts of things we can do to anticipate in the present. For instance, in the vision at the end of the Bible, it says God will wipe away all tears from all eyes. Now, one of the most remarkable things that we can all do is actually bring comfort and healing and help to people in the present. I don't think we will ever cure death in the present age. I don't think we will ever prevent all diseases. I don't think we will ever stop accidents, et cetera, in the present. But the bringing of comfort, of healing, of hope in the present, I think is a real sign of what God intends to do ultimately in the future.

And that's why, for me, there is this interim, this intermediate period, which we're living in at the moment, which so many Western Christians have screened right out and think that the only thing that matters is you either get converted or you come to faith or whatever, and then one day you go to heaven. I'm really very interested in what lies in between. And the classic Christian things to do, which are signs of hope, are particularly helping the poor, the poorest of the poor, particularly medicine, particularly education. Those are things the church has always done from the very beginning. And they're the classic things. What's happened now is that the state, certainly in my country, takes them over,

and says the church doesn't belong here anymore. Actually, Christians have done a better job often, not always, than many on this. So I would see the concrete signs of hope as the instantiation of communities which out of a cheerful life of worship of the true God are actually making that sort of a difference in their communities. And this isn't the utopia, but it is a signpost saying one day there will be a future like this because of Jesus and who he was, and we can be part of it here and now.

What is the question that you would want to ask each other that we haven't asked yet?

Or that the moderator has conspicuously failed to ask.

One thing which we talked about before out of this room which I'm really interested in is how Peter sees the whole role of the innovator, the entrepreneur in our culture, not just as, "Isn't this fun? We can do this and we can create new industries and we can make lots of money," et cetera. But in terms of what it means to be human, is it part of the essential human condition that some of us at least should be radical thinkers out of the box, innovators, entrepreneurs? Or is this just something which we happen to be able to do in modern America, which most generations before and most people on the planet today can't do because they haven't got the wherewithal or whatever? Is it just sort of accident that we can do it?

Or is it an essential part of being human?

Well, again, to sort of key off the anti-Aristotelian prime mover description, I don't think it's an Ayn Rand-like vision of someone where everything just comes... And I think what is very different about—I think there certainly are professions that are very individualistic. I think most of these successful technology ventures, there is sort of a group of people that work together very effectively. And so they are sort of these somewhat charismatic—there's a charismatic aspect to it. And this is probably a very unfashionable category to use, but if you said, what's the political category you would use to describe a founder? And I think most founders, they're sort of like a king. It's obviously not a democracy.

It's not a republic. It's sort of like a king, but kind of a weak king who's very charismatic. People believe that they sort of know what they're doing. Then eventually, companies grow up and they sort of become sclerotic bureaucracies over time. I do think there is the sort of... And you have to be sort of careful what Christian parallels to draw, but there is sort of a sense in which Christ was a king. And maybe he shows us something about kingship as being fundamentally quite weak, not strong. We have this image of kings as being strong, but it's very dangerous. You need these charismatic figures, but things can sort of turn against them at any moment. And certainly, this is the thing that's very dangerous about these businesses, because very often, things of this sort do go wrong.

When the people come back, they are very, very powerful. So the second coming of Steve Jobs was incredibly powerful. I guess the question that you sort of touched on a little bit that I'd ask you is, is there a specific political conception that flows out of Christianity? So is it sort of the—is it the British welfare state? There certainly are very different versions that people would articulate over time. And do you have a thought on how specific that is?

Yeah, it's very interesting because in today's world, we assume with modern Western democracy that what really matters is that somebody gets voted for and therefore they have a mandate to do what they think they should do. In the early years of Christianity, when there was no question about democracy in the ancient Roman world—at least not as far as most people are concerned—Roman citizens would vote, but most of the Christians didn't have that kind of power at all. They didn't mind very much how people got into power. They did mind very much what people did once they were in power. And that goes back to ancient Greece as well, where rulers would regularly be put on trial after their term of office, almost as a routine thing.

Wouldn't that be nice? So that we could just... Hold them to account. Now, here's the thing: the Jewish, ancient Jewish and early Christian vision was never, 'We should take power and then we will do X, Y, and Z.' It was rather, 'Our task as worshipers of the true God is to hold up a mirror to those in power, to speak the truth to those in power, to hold them to account.' Now, what's happened in our modern world is that the media has taken over that role, sometimes quite explicitly, usurping the church out of the way to say, 'We are the ones who hold the politicians to account because they don't seem to be very good at holding one another to account.' And okay, I'd rather somebody who's doing it than nobody.

But that's actually part of the central core task of the church in the New Testament is to speak the truth to power. You can see Jesus doing it to Pontius Pilate at the end of John's Gospel. And so the political vision isn't so much, 'Here's a set of policies which should be put in place.' It's rather, 'Here's a set of things which are things we should hold governments to account over.' And one of them is to do with the poor, and another is to do with health. So that this doesn't necessarily mean that the British welfare state is the best of all possible welfare states. It certainly isn't. But that something like a total community care for the poor and care for those in need, I think, is absolutely basic.

Very interesting: in the New Testament, already in one of the earliest documents of the Christian church, in the Letters to the Thessalonians, written within 25 years of Jesus' death, Paul is having to warn people in church leadership about the danger of freeloaders, of people who realize that they can get a free lunch out of the church so they won't need to work anymore because the church is a sort of welfare system. And Paul says, 'No, it's got to be clear: no work, no food,' that you've got to—so the church, in other words, the church from the very beginning was a kind of what we would call a welfare system, particularly for the poor and the very needy, to the extent that already in the first generation, that was in danger of being abused.

People often say today that welfare systems are bad because they can be abused, and the answer is, yes, they can, and you have to be savvy about making sure it doesn't happen. But so that—I'm not saying that the British system is right. It's got a lot of creaky bits and silly bits and bits that don't work or work in the wrong way. But I am saying that part of what the church ought to be reminding governments to do constantly is to care about those who have no means of caring for themselves.

But isn't there—let me just raise the possibility, because just a few moments ago you talked about the problem of having the state essentially say, 'Okay, Christians, you had a nice run with your hospitals and charities, we'll take it from here,' right? And isn't there—it seems to me as an American looking at the European experience, it seems to me that there's a danger that what happens is that the church essentially sort of heaves a sigh of relief and says, 'Well, we don't have to run the hospitals anymore. That's great. We can just sort of support the government politically when it does that and sort of say, "Yes, we're in favor of the welfare state," and so on,' but that there's a sort of, on the one hand, an offloading of Christian responsibility to the state, and then on the other hand, the sort of state takeovers that sort of push Christian activism, in effect, to the margins.

Yeah, that's a real problem. In my country, we are—we pride ourselves on being field leaders in the hospice movement. That's the care of the immediately about-to-die people. The state doesn't really want to get involved in that. The church is still doing that remarkably successfully, and that's actually one of the best arguments against the kind of secular push to euthanasia and so on. So the church is still involved in some ways, but it isn't quite an either-or, quite as easy an either-or. And I think many of us in the UK, and perhaps in the rest of Europe—I'm not sure, that's not a conversation I've had—are aware that maybe things have been in danger of going too far, and that—but of course, in education, one of the things that many Americans don't know is that a lot of our state-run schools in the UK are actually church schools. Um, in America, I think—

They're completely separate. And so we do still have quite a lot of interplay. And that is a cause of political and social friction. But it's also the fact that most parents in the UK, given the chance, would rather have their children go to a church school even if they themselves aren't practicing Christians. And that's a paradox which we rather relish. And I'm sorry that in the States you don't have the chance to relish it because you just don't do it that way.

Occasionally the chance comes up.

Sadly, we are close to the end of our time, but I did want to give you each one more open-ended question. What's the one thing you want to leave us with tonight as we go to have some dessert and continue the conversation?

I think I want to hold out a vision of an integrated world, a heaven and earth world. Because our world is messy, the integration will be messy, but because God is good, the integration is ultimately promised and can be anticipated in the present.

And yeah, I will agree with that.

I don't think it would be appropriate for me to rush in where Peter fears to tread. So no, I will just say I hope that you've had as much fun as I've had. I'm tremendously grateful to have been a part of this. I'm very grateful to the sponsors, to all of you for being here, and most of all to Peter and Tom for sharing their time and brilliance with us. So please join me in giving them both a round of applause.

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