Text & Talk

May 3, 2025

Jim Roseman

“The Truth of Christianity” and reasons and influences leading non-believers to dismiss the Christian worldview.

Note: I was assigned this very “small” topic (Ha!). Forgive the length and if I don’t do it justice.

The Truth of Christianity

The truth of Christianity simply is Jesus Christ.

The truth (veritas) of Christianity rests on the claim that the second person of the Triune God became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth: The only begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light. Very God of very God, begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made.

These familiar words of the creed are anchored in what Jesus said to Pilate, what he told his disciples, and how they, the Apostles and the Church came to understand who he was, who he is.

Pilate asked him, ‘So you are a king?’ Jesus answered, ‘You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’^ ^ Pilate asked him, ‘What is truth?’ (John 18: 37–38[1])

When he says he “came into the world,” it was more than a declaration of his mission; it alludes to his pre-incarnate existence. Jesus of Nazareth, born of Mary, who stood in front of the Roman governor charged with sedition, preexisted the whole cosmos into which he was born and the marble floors of the Judean headquarters on which he stood. This allusion became explicit when John the evangelist was inspired to write:

In the beginning was the Word [Logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. . ..

He was in the world, and the world came into being through him. . ..

. . . [T]he Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

And when St. Paul declares this grand mystery of reality to the church at Colossae:

[the Father’s beloved Son] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell . . ..

Jesus told Pilate that the reason he was born, the reason he came into this world was to testify to the truth. And he says everyone who belongs to the truth listens to his voice. Which prompts Pilate’s famous question. Maybe it was rhetorical. Maybe not. Either way the question has echoed through the ages and through the annals of philosophy and everyday life. Yet there is something in this exchange we should not miss. If the whole reason the second person of the Trinity entered this world was to testify to the truth and that everyone that belongs to the truth listens to his voice, the truth of what is being said by his voice must be the whole of who he is.

This is what lies behind what Jesus had earlier told his disciples, that he himself is the truth, (John 14: 6). The voice of Jesus is the Word made flesh, the Logos of God.

Logos has a variety of meanings or uses. Among the most often cited meanings are “reason” or a “principle of order and knowledge” or “the logic behind an argument,” even the “generative principle of” and “divine animating principle pervading” the universe.[2] St. John certainly had all these in his mind when he wrote his Gospel, in part because he lived in a Hellenistic Greek-minded world and wanted the scope of his declaration about Jesus Christ to be all encompassing. However, even among all these varied meanings, the most straightforward and base meaning of logos is “discourse,” as in speaking, having a conversation, communicating, even intimacy, as one has in a relationship. This means the most dominant image in the Christian story is one of relationship. God’s Logos/Word relation to his creation is not distant, abstract, or capricious but fundamentally relational. It is not so just in that he has and does actually speak, in word and deed, though he has and does. It is fundamentally the way God relates to his creation. There is a discourse relation between God and creation built into nature, an expression of overflowing and incessant love.

This basic Logos/Word relation between God and his creation is what I call the “language and vocabulary of the human heart.”[3] It is not just with words that we have the capacity know God. His word-language relation with creation is a basic, fundamental way we experience his presence. This is why the metaphor of mythopoesis, or story, is more than just a metaphor. It is real. This is a natural expression and therefore a natural sign of our participation in God’s Grand Story. It is an indicator of [what St. Augustine calls] capax Dei, the capacity to know God.[4]

This relation of God with his creation through his only Son the Logos is the echo of the Truth that the human heart and intellect reaches for. This is why the church has traditionally said all truth is God’s truth. Jesus Christ is the source of all truth because he is the truth. It is why, as he told Pilate, everyone who belongs to the truth listens to his voice. His divine condescension is like a shepherd calling his sheep. They hear his voice and listen to it. It is the voice of the author of all things echoing through every crevice of his creation. That “beckoning from a voice we have not yet fully heard to a place we have not yet fully known, yet with a clear sense that somewhere there is a true home”[5]—like Psyche longs for the Grey Mountain in the distance in C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces. That restlessness in the human heart until it finds its rest in him.

This is why Jesus Christ is the truth of Christianity.

Reasons and influences leading non-believers to dismiss the Christian worldview

The Christian claim above is not one among many different possible truths. It is a claim about reality as such. Human beings have always sought to know and understand reality and have come to know a good deal about it because of the gift of human heart and intellect. But the grand story of reality set out above is only glimpsed at and knowable only in part by natural reason and poetic knowledge. The fullness of reality is made known to us only by God’s self-disclosure. The fullness of that revelation is the incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ, even if we still understand only in part.

If this Christian claim is not true, it means nothing. If it is, it means everything.

It means everything because it is the true story of reality. Yet to say this is not to say that all other religions, metaphysical systems and scientific claims are completely erroneous. Indeed, Christianity has always acknowledged that there is truth to be found in most all religions and intellectual and scientific pursuits.[6] This is because the human heart and intellect naturally reach for The Truth. Christianity holds that the pursuit of human knowledge and truth are part of the imago Dei in man. We are all drawn to the pursuit of knowledge and truth. It’s part of our nature.

If this is the true story, why then are there so many non-believers? And what are some of the key reasons and influences leading non-believers to dismiss the Christian worldview.

First, it is not that there are insufficient reasons to believe. Yet “[n]o amount of argument or intellectual credibility will by itself cause anyone to have life-transforming faith in God. But a genuine encounter with God always will.”[7] The deepest problem with disbelief in the Christian story is one of will and disordered loves. All of us are stricken with this problem. Only God’s grace can release us from this prison. Only his grace will effectuate the faith we need to believe.

That said, there are reasons and influences for many that make belief in the Christian worldview quite difficult in our modern world. Among the many reasons include how Christians and church have failed to live up to their own faith — e.g., moral failures of the church, hypocrisy of individual believers, and the shallowness of too many churches and believers. But many non-believers believe that religious faith is simply irrational in the light of modern science and modern philosophy. Exploring the reasons and influences is a big topic so I will need to be brief (if still way too long). In sum, I am convinced that among the biggest reasons is that in modernity we have become willing to live comfortably with incoherence — we’re willing to leave some of the biggest questions unasked and unanswered. The result is we think non-belief is the most coherent, the most rational. But upon scrutiny, it’s the opposite. To show this incoherence I will restrict my comments to one major reason and influence: the shift from an open world structure to a closed world structure metaphysic; and one major conundrum created by a closed world structure view: the idea that human knowledge should yield anything like truth.

Open and Close World Structure

One of the most succinct ways to think about the core reason why non-believers dismiss the Christian worldview is the way philosopher Charles Taylor puts it in his book A Secular Age. He describes how in the passage from the pre-modern to the modern period we moved from an “open world structure” to a “closed world structure.” From a belief that all material reality (all of nature) obtains and maintains its existence from a transcendent reality beyond the material to a belief that there is nothing but material reality. Here’s an illustration I created.

The core difference between the pre-modern and the modern worldview is its metaphysical vision. The pre-modern vision, especially under the influence of the Christian vision, is an open world structure. All that has being (existence) is because God gave it its being and holds it in it being—as St. Paul told the philosophers on Mars Hill, God made the world and everything in it, and drawing upon their own familiar poets he said, “In him we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:22–29 Emphasis mine) In philosophical language, being as-such gave all of what we know as the universe (or any other possible universes) its being and holds it in its being. If God should for one second not hold the created order in its being, it would not exist. God is transcendent to his creation. God is self-existent, and the existence of his creation is contingent to him. He is the source of all that exists. In Aristotelean terms, contingent being exists only from un-contingent being — the unmoved mover. In the modern outlook, the being — the existence — of anything at all just is. It source, if any, is from is some other contingent existence, like another universe or multiple other universes (multiverse theory). This is not a real answer to existence as-such; it just pushes the question of existence further back.

Thus, for moderns who adopt a closed-world structure, there is no transcendent reality. There is no God or gods. There is only material reality. This is the core difference. This is the core reason non-believers have a hard time with the Christian worldview.

The passage to modernity led to skepticism of transcendence. Over time this became the default outlook making belief in God irrational. See here how John Searle puts it:

This world view is not an option. It is not simply up for grabs along with a lot of competing world view. Our problem is not that somehow we have failed to come up with a convincing proof of the existence of God or that the hypothesis of an afterlife remains in serious doubt, it is rather that in our deepest reflections we cannot take such options seriously. When we encounter people who claim to believe such things, we may envy them the comfort and security they claim to derive from these beliefs, but at bottom we remain unconvinced that either they have heard the news or they are in the ‘grip’ of faith.

John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992)[8]

“The news” Searle is referencing is that belief in God is irrational. Which is to say that his view is the most rational. It reflects a narrowed view of reason. One that adopts applies the scientific method to all questions. The modernist outlook tends to assume this fixed and restricted notion of rationality: scientific rationality; can the question at hand be proven using inductive scientific or pure deductive reason methods? When the question of God and his revelation is asked in this restricted view the answer must be what Searle concludes: God and revelation are irrational. The problem with this answer lies in its methodological foreclosure to any other possible answer. Philosopher William Abraham says this reveals a problem in the way we practice epistemology today in general and specifically in reference to the question of revelation. We are trapped into this answer by what Abraham calls epistemological “methodism.”[9] We declare scientific or logical positivist method of knowing to be the proper epistemological one. We therefore we must judge claims of the existence of God and his revelation to be irrational, without warrant, and not real knowledge.

To be clear, of course, it’s not that the empirical method is faulty. It is not. It has provided us with extraordinary discoveries and understanding with modern science. But behind the adoption of this method exclusively lies a philosophical problem. There are big questions it simply cannot answer. One huge one is idea of human knowledge and the notion of truth.

The Idea of Human Knowledge and That it Should Yield Anything Like Truth[10]

That humans can know anything that should yield anything like truth is a mystery, just as existence is. That we obtain knowledge of any sort is not debatable. Why we do and that the knowledge we obtain should yield truth is.

The Open-World-Structure View

In the open-world-structure view, particularly the Christian view, the capacity that humans have for knowledge is directly related to God. We know, “through a glass, darkly,” because God knows. Human beings are a reflection of God, and all true human knowledge reflects The Truth that abides in God.

How we obtain knowledge is diverse: it is through natural reason, including logic, and rational-sensory experience (and experimentation); it is through imaginative, artistic and poetic life, which C. S. Lewis says is the meaning that gives reason its fodder; and it is through God’s special revelation of himself to his creatures, including God’s self-disclosure in his acts, his Spirit’s disclosure to and through people, and most fully in his self-condescension into his creation in his son, the Logos of God. All of these are thoroughly rational and consistent with God who is in constant relation with his creation, upholding it in its being. Without God there would be no being as such nor any actual knowledge and truth, or at least none that we should have any confidence constitutes actual knowledge and truth.

In an open-world structure—at least in something like traditional Christian metaphysics—all knowledge is ultimately sourced in God, even if not acknowledged. In at least this sense all knowledge is about God. If, as Christianity maintains, God is truth, all knowledge therefore finds its truthfulness in God. In the broadest terms, without a transcendent source, human knowledge that yields anything like truth is either a mystery (like the “brute fact” faith of the naturalist on the question of existence) or, more likely, incoherent (and in deep conflict with the empirical science the naturalist so relies on).

The Closed-World-Structure View

In the closed-world-structure view, human knowledge is sourced in the world and in the knower. What counts as knowledge is only that which is about the world found through reason, logic, and rational-sensory experience. Only knowledge about things of the world can be considered actually true—based on the fundamental notion that there is an actual “way things are.” Other things we call “knowledge,” “true,” or “truth” are either expressions of human subjectivity or what a group of knowers agree upon.

What is “true” or “the truth” in a contingent-plane-only reality is always relative. It must be. For all scientists (whether open- or closed-world), for whom the contingent plane of nature is the domain, truth is always relative—or better, tentative—and subject to further knowledge of what is known now. For all scientists, there is an assumed “truth of the matter” with respect to material reality. And, all scientists acknowledge that what they know about the “truth of the matter” is what we know now. All scientific truth is relative to “from where we stand, with what we know now.” This is the way all science works. It is driven by ignorance, coming to know some things which then raise new questions about what is not yet known.[11] Science is primarily a methodology—a way of discovering and inferring what nature is and how it works. Scientists form theories, or “models,” that can hold what is known now and form new ones when new discoveries cannot be held in the old theories or models. For the politician or social theorist who adopts closed-world-structure naturalism, notwithstanding the same moniker “scientists,” there is no “way things are,” no nature as it were. Morality, law, and truth are relative to whatever the society and culture they are part of decide is “true.” “Truth” is pure social construction.

For the scientist (all scientists), therefore, truth is measured against what we know now—which is as it must be. But for the closed-world naturalist scientist who steps out of the role of scientist and becomes a metaphysician or social theorist or ethicist and begins to declare what a human being is or what should be done because we know what human beings are and what is good, just, and true, that scientist has made absolute assertions from provisional knowledge. Science’s plane of study is material existence, which is always changing. It assumes material reality. That is its field of study. The measure of truth is against this reality alone. Notwithstanding whatever we may discover by science, in a closed-world structure metaphysic, nonmaterial things, like concepts such as beauty, goodness, morality, justice, personhood, identity, gender, and so on, must be either purely material or physical phenomena or only social constructions (not real).[12]

Furthermore, though all scientists believe there is a “way things are” and we slowly but surely learn more about what that is, once the closed-world structure naturalist metaphysics position is taken, the naturalist faces a conflict with science—one that the theist does not face. In closed-world-structure naturalism, there is no reason we should trust that human cognition should yield anything like truth or that what we know should be or is true. This closed-world view must hold to a nondirected, wholly random form of cosmic and biological evolution. The problem is not with science or with evolution as such but with philosophical naturalism. Naturalism must on the one hand hold that knowledge is real and rises to the level of real truth about the way things are, and yet on the other hand has no logical explanation for why this should be so. It is wholly illogical to believe that we should trust human cognition to yield true, reliable beliefs or even true knowledge. Those who hold this outlook should doubt whether it is true. And many of the best minds within the camp of naturalism have openly done so. Darwin did: “‘With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?’ Nietzsche, Nagel, Stroud, Churchland, and Darwin, nontheists all, seem to concur: (naturalistic) evolution gives one a reason to doubt that human cognitive faculties produce for the most part true beliefs.”[13] As such, naturalists should either seriously doubt their belief that there is no transcendent explanation for the concurrence between our cognitive faculties and what we experience, or seriously doubt their belief that their cognitive faculties are delivering true, reliable beliefs, or knowledge, including the belief that somehow, in some way, a material-only reality caused reliable cognitive faculties to develop such that we should trust them. Either way, naturalism has a problem.[14]

An open-world structure that holds to theism, in particular the Trinitarian theism of Christianity, does not have this problem. It has the most rational, coherent reason for human knowledge and truth: God. With knowledge grounded in God, we obtain an answer to an even more visceral question about knowledge: Why are we drawn so incessantly to pursue it? The answer is found in St. Bonaventure: “All knowledge [is] integrated into a spiritual journey toward love; love of God and love of fellow human beings.”[15] Even in our pursuit of knowledge, we are longing for God.

The Limits of Scientific Knowledge

The unalloyed mystery that science demonstrates so well is that nature is orderly. Because of this order we can come to know and have a significant understanding of it. But science is limited in scope. It explores and seeks to understand only the contingent plane of existence, what we call nature.

Science, which is primarily a methodology for knowing, is the best way we have for discovering what the makeup of nature is, how it works, and to some extent how what we now observe came to be as it is now. This is an invaluable source of knowledge, especially practical knowledge. But science’s scope and its methods have limitations. By default, science can only answer questions within its scope. It cannot answer questions about existence that are not within the contingent plane. Anything beyond the contingent plane, and certain phenomena in it that are not physical properties beyond how they work and their chemistry, science cannot address: for example, what consciousness actually is and what love is. Science explains what is in the contingent plane of existence, how it works, and how it moves from what it was to what it is now. It cannot explain whether there is anything beyond the contingent plane, nor why anything in that plane exists except in terms of the processes that explain how they came to be what they are now. Science is impotent on metaphysical questions.

This is not to say that reason cannot address such questions, only that science’s material and efficient cause-effect methodology cannot. Logic, which is a human capacity that science uses but that is not equivalent with science nor can science explain it, and speculative reason can address metaphysical questions. (This is so, I suggest, despite the Kantian tradition that suggests no such metaphysical knowledge is possible.)

The closest science comes to metaphysical questions is in its findings. Science’s findings reveal how improbable the universe (or universes it may theorize) it studies really is. This is seen best in what is often called the “fine-tuned argument.” This argument suggests that the contingent reality that science observes and seeks to understand is found to have such narrow tolerances for the conditions necessary to spawn and sustain life that it must have a deeper reason behind it—an intelligence behind it that made it in just this way such that life could develop and be sustained. The staggering coincidences are otherwise too improbable. The most recent theory to explain these improbabilities put forward by closed-world-structure cosmological scientists is the multiverse theory outlined by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow in The Grand Design. In this view the improbabilities that are present in this (our) universe are accounted for by there being many universes, enough so that it is only reasonable to assume that with enough time, the otherwise improbable constants and chemistry found in our universe that are necessary to sustain life would occur.

Most scientists are not philosophers. Their work, again to use Lewis’s comments on models, is to observe the reality they have at hand and perform experiments and come up with theories that can best explain it. They look for the theory/model that can best “hold it all.” So it is reasonable that scientists would theorize a multiverse to explain what is observable and use math to confirm the plausibility of their theories of cosmology. It is more than appropriate that philosophers would take this data into account in their pursuits. But in the end, the scope of the scientist’s work doesn’t and cannot reach beyond its domain—again, as [David Bentley] Hart points out, cosmology cannot become ontology.

But no human knowledge-seeking enterprise of any kind operates outside of a philosophical framework. Within this framework are embedded answers to a host of nonscientific questions—whether well considered and articulated or not. Among the nonscientific questions are the question of existence itself, the question of contingency, the question of knowledge, the question of logic, and the question of human cognition and conceptualization, among a host of others.

Being a good scientist does not include or preclude judgments about transcendent reality, or God. Most of the greatest scientists have believed, even if not always in traditionally orthodox terms, that the universe (or multiverse) did not just come about and is sustained on its own but must rely on a transcendent source, God. The limits of scientific knowledge are not a weakness; they are simply a limitation of scope. Listen to Oxford Professor Michael Ward on C. S. Lewis’s understanding of the narrow scope of science:

The smallness of scientific statements is often obscured by their successfulness. Scientific statements succeed in defining and predicting certain pockets of the natural world, definition and predictions which can then be put to use, in curing small-pox, or building the internal combustion engine, or devising the microchip. The magnificence of such scientific achievements is so huge that it can mislead us into thinking that they have said a great deal, when actually they have said relatively little, but said it very well. A true scientific statement has to be relatively small, because it is only relatively small things that can be said with sufficient univocality to be empirically verifiable or falsifiable. You might think it preposterous to describe the mapping of the human genome as a “small statement,” but genetics is only one department of biology and biology is only one department of science and science is only one department of human knowledge. Seen in context of all that there could possibly be said about a human being—socially, psychologically, spiritually, economically, historically, geographically, emotionally, visually, audibly, tangibly, olfactorally, racially, anthropologically, dermatologically, psephologically (you get the picture!), any genetic statement, however marvelously correct, is still a minuscule fraction of the total. When you start trying to make larger statements you move into the language of the humanities and then into the arts and then into religion. Religious statements, by saying things which attempt to explain life in the round, use language which is very hard to quantify, to measure, to test. But that is because they are trying to say a very great deal; they are trying to find the unity, the oneness, the heart of all reality. Here the stake is not a mere thirty shillings, but every penny you have, your life, your soul.[16]

There is so much more to be said about the reasons and influences leading non-believers to dismiss the Christian worldview. But this will have to do for now.

[1] All biblical passages are in this section are from the New Revised Standard Version, Anglicized Catholic Edition.

[2] See “Logos” in Liddell and Scott, Lexicon; “Heraclitus” in Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy; Hülsz, “Heraclitus on Logos,” 281–301.

[3] In support of this idea, see Candler, “Tolkien or Nietzsche.” In particular note Candler’s comment that for Tolkien in comparison to Nietzsche, “Christ is capable of ‘transubstantiating’ all moments of human poiesis. The Word who is before all worlds, who creates all worlds, who was made flesh and dwelt among us—does not all creation speak, in an infinite variety of tones, keys, timbres, and tongues, of that Word? Does not the Word made flesh render all flesh in some sense articulate?” (123). Editor Ralph Wood, in his introductory comments on Candler’s essay in Tolkien among the Moderns, says, “Tolkien is not at all troubled by the linguistic character of both divine revelation and human truth. Rather than leading to nihilism [Nietzsche’s contention], our irreducible linguisticality proves, in Tolkien’s work, to be our abiding hope, since human beings are sacramentally created to participate in the life of the triune God, who creatively speaks all things into being” (3).

[4] This and the preceding paragraph is from my book: James M. Roseman, Rediscovering God’s Grand Story: In a Fragmented World of Pices and Parts, Resource Publications, 2017, pp.84–85.

[5] Roseman, Rediscovering God’s Grand Story, p. 15.

[6] For a recent exploration of this, see Ross Douthat, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, Zondervan, 2025.

[7] Roseman, Rediscovering God’s Grand Story, p. 71.

[8] John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 90-91, as cited by William J. Abraham, Crossing the Threshold of Divine Revelation (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005), p. 4 n9.

[9] “Methodism” for Abraham is, of course, not a reference to Methodist Christians (though he himself a Methodist). It refers to the development of a big-picture approach or theory of rationality, justification, warrant and knowledge, and evaluating the rationality of belief in God, an in the specific case he is considering, revelation from God, in the light of the methodology adopted by the theory. This he calls a “Methodist” approach versus a “particularist” approach. Particularism, in epistemology and in reference to the subject of revelation, is to take a serious look at specific claims of revelation (the phenomena of specific claims to revelation from God) and evaluate them not with pre-defined epistemic categories but to determine if the claims themselves can marshal epistemic warrant considering a wide array of epistemological methods and principles. This approach, Abraham suggests, does not prejudge whether revelation can occur within the boundaries of a specific grand epistemology; but rather allows the claims to stand unless there is a good reason not to. For an explanation of the terms methodism and particularism as used by Abraham, see Ibid., p.30ff.

[10] This section is from Roseman, Rediscovering God’s Grand Story, pp. 34-40.

[11] See Firestein, Ignorance.

[12] For some closed-world-structure idealists and postmodernists, all reality is a human construction, even material reality.

[13] Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 316.

[14] This way of framing the problem of knowledge and truth in closed-world naturalism is addressed in Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies. The explicit argument is that whereas it is often thought that there is a deep conflict between religion and science and no conflict between philosophical naturalism and science (basically a closed-world-structure view), the reverse is the case. Plantinga shows that between religion and science there is only superficial conflict and that there is deep conflict between naturalism and science, particularly between naturalism and current evolutionary theory in science. Plantinga concludes that “one can’t rationally accept both naturalism and current evolutionary theory; that combination of beliefs is self-defeating. [And] there is a deep conflict between naturalism and one of the most important claims of current science.” Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 349–50.

[15] Bonaventure, On the Reduction of the Arts, 9. Emphasis added.

[16] Ward, “Science and Religion in the Writings of C. S. Lewis,” 10.

Text and Talk

March 8, 2025 – Zoom Only

Jim Roseman

The Importance of Public Philosophy

As the old expression goes, sometimes it’s darkest just before dawn. Is it so now? Might it be that within the columns of our present cultural darkness we might be able to color a new day?

When we look out upon the Western world today it’s easy to be melancholy, even at times to feel depressed, almost losing hope. Some say that’s just nostalgia for a world that never really was. And there’s some truth to that. But that’s not all it is. For a long time now on a lot of different fronts there has been concern, even outrage expressed about the loss of civility and the deterioration of culture. We think of this mostly as a contemporary phenomenon, the pugnaciousness of our current political and social moment. And then someone reminds us of the uncivil raucous between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams during their presidential pursuits.^[1] But there is something different about our moment, and it didn’t begin in this generation. It’s not only about incivility in politics, nor even about crime and social injustice. It’s more fundamental than that. Listen to famed journalist and public intellectual Walter Lippmann whose reflections began in the wake of WWI in the 1920s, developed with the rise of Hitler, and finally came to print after the Second World War in 1955 as The Public Philosophy:

During the fateful summer of 1938 I began writing a book in an effort to come to terms in my own mind and heart with the mounting disorder in our Western society. . .. I was filled with foreboding that the nations of the Atlantic Community would not prove equal to the challenge, and that, if they failed, we should lose our great traditions of civility, the liberties Western man had won for himself after centuries of struggle and which were now threatened by the rising tide of barbarity.^[2]

Could liberal democracy and its prevailing late nineteenth/early twentieth-century American tenet of always advancing upward idea of progress, survive? In his The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, historian George Marsden identifies what led to Lippmann’s question and his growing concern that liberal democracy had lost its story. “John Dewey, the highly influential philosopher and educator . . . had proposed in the 1930s that a ‘common faith’ [a public philosophy] could be built on self-evident ‘goods of human associations, or arts, and of knowledge.’” To Dewey, “‘We need no external criterion and guarantee for their goodness.” These “goods” exist simply in pragmatic terms. They operate “as good, and out of them we frame our ideal ends.’”^[3] Expressed in his concern that the West had lost its way, Marsden says Lippmann began to speak as a heretic to his own tradition of political and social liberalism. He came to reject the consensus that a coherent public philosophy, a social fabric, could be built merely on “inherited principles, even after [the culture] had dynamited the foundations on which those principles had first been established.”^[4] Having escaped freedom, of which Eric Fromm famously wrote,^[5] Lippmann questioned whether any freedom could be sustained in a public philosophy whose foundation is moral relativism. “Lippmann was concerned that there were no longer any transcendent moral standards to which to appeal in guiding either the government or the people. In the first half of the twentieth century, there had been a trend to separate the law from any higher moral system. Lippmann had now come to see that as a dangerous innovation.”^[6] By jettisoning any requirement of an “external criterion” to underwrite our goodness, Lippmann had come to believe the center could not hold.

Once the traditional liberal public philosophy no longer had a center, and once the theory of public life had jettisoned any external criterion to order public life, new horizontal-only structures had to be found. Ever since experiments with new foundations on which to rebuild liberal public life abound. In the wake of WWII, as 60 million people went home to restart their lives, and as rebuilding the whole world became an urgent focus, the U. S. and global economies experienced a jolt of energy. Global free trade took over and the prevailing public philosophy became economic—in part a function of the post war effort and in part a Cold War strategy in the West against the encroachment of communism.^[7] American consumerism exploded and was slowly exported around the world. Homo Economicus (Economic Man) and globalization were born.[8] Still wedded to 19^th century progressivism, parallel with and to some extent an expression of it, a newly energized semi-Smithian “invisible hand,” a semi-Hegelian “absolute spirit,” and semi-Marxist “dialectic” secularized providence theory of progressivist public life. The 1960s pursuit of the Great Society was viewed as the “manifestly destined” complement to the market-driven economic order. But even these complementary economic and social theories quickly proved insufficient for the new progressivism. It must go further. Sparked by the 1960s American cultural revolution, the 1970s spawned a complete fracturing of common life into a new kind of tribalism. Racism, feminism, LGBTQ-ism, environmentalism, etc., etc., each bobbing like corks on a wispy sea of moral relativism and its social progeny cultural relativism, adapted into a political strategy: Identity Politics was born. Added to these in more recent days, now established with their own political identities, immigrants and refugees from foreign conflicts and abusive political orders have become their own tribes. The Western world has fragmented into nothing but pieces and parts.^[9]

When we attempt to build and live in a society with no external criterion of goodness, moral relativism reigns to such an extent that the very idea of “common” good vanishes. Goodness itself becomes lost in ‘he said, she said’ arguments. The whole society becomes incoherent. The social fabric frays into an array of individual threads. Life doesn’t make sense anymore.    

Philosopher and ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre says, “When someone complains – as do some of those who attempt or commit suicide – that his life is meaningless, he or she is often and characteristically complaining that the narrative of their life has become unintelligible to them, that it lacks any point, any movement towards a climax or telos.”^[10]  He further says, “man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. . .. There is no way to give us an understanding of any society, including our own, except through the stock of stories which constitute its initial dramatic resources.”^[11] We have lost our story. We try to live today as if we don’t have inherited traditions. We live only in the moment. And without a story every moment is just a moment. None is connected to another. Life has become unintelligible. 

In fact, we in the West do live within a story. The core story is the Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian story. But it did not begin as a single seamless story. The Greco-Roman stories came together and became understood as a single story through the influence of the Christian story. This was enabled as the Grand Story of God came to be understood as a single story through the Jewish story in and through the person and work of Jesus of Nazareth as the long-awaited Hebrew Messiah. As this story unfolded early believers in Jesus as Messiah, followers of The Way (Christians), came to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the one true God and the hinge-point of all of human history, thus enabling them to look out upon their world and back across time—the Hellenistic Greco-Roman world of which they were a part at the time—to interpret the ancient poets and philosophers as having captured glimpses of the Grand Story albeit through a glass darkly. Reinterpreting those ancient poets and philosophers in the light of Jesus Christ, the Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian story became a single story. Beginning only as a very small seed, this story became the prevailing story as the theretofore imagined Eternal Roman Empire began to fail and eventually fell apart with the help of its last emperors, and the Christian church stepped into the breach. Pushing back against the assertion by some in the fifth century that the Christians were the cause of the fall of Rome, in his City of God, St. Augustine told the Grand Story of God in Jesus Christ. The way the followers of The Way (the Christians) lived, following Jesus and his Apostles and their writings (which became known as the New Testament), along with the trans-historical interpretations by St. Augustine and the early Church Fathers, this lived life became institutionalized in the transformed ruins of the old structures of the Empire. This confluence laid the foundation for Western civilization to emerge. And enabled its character, social life, and intellectual order to be shaped and formed. This story became an interwoven social fabric. But, of course, it is still more.

Within and out of this core Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian story, smaller stories would emerge—ones which would become big stories. These smaller stories initially developed organically as themes within the main story. But some became reactions to the core story: think the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, and Social and Political Revolution.

This complexity, and the ever-greater complexity that has developed since, makes it difficult to recognize the core Greco-Roman/Judeo-Cristian story of the West as a single fabric. Looking only at the back side of the fine old carpet, all one sees is disparate threads. Frayed and tattered, the messy complexity still has a picture. But on the front side, and only from an external vantage.  

Walter Lippmann concluded he and his society of progressive elites had rejected that vantage, what held the fabric together: the “external criterion” which had underwritten it since the beginning. Without it the once coherent world became incoherent. In his Public Philosophy he called for it to be reestablished. And though when he wrote, it remained largely intact among the people at large in the 1950s, it was dissipating. Like remnants of fluorination seeded in the public waters long ago, the dry winds of the prevailing progressive pragmatist philosophy were whisking it away fast. But he feared the old wineskins could not hold the new wine. The religious-based goodness of the people that Tocqueville had noticed on his visit to America, on top of which the positive civil law and public life rested, was changing. This goodness could no longer be relied upon, not at least without an external criterion for the good. Individual liberty without it could not maintain a people good enough to sustain the liberties it had achieved. The chaos of incoherence would eventually engulf the whole, rent the fabric in two, or make it disintegrate. Lippmann first saw this just after WWI, and it broke upon the world in unspeakable ways during WWII. The once coherent story, the finely woven fabric that could give meaning to the common good, to an e pluribus unum, reduced to a jumble of disconnected small stories could give meaning no longer. When the narrative of life becomes unintelligible, life becomes meaningless, MacIntyre says. And we feel it in our bones. Lippmann felt it. We feel it more and more today. As Romano Guardini said, “It is dangerous to ignore realities, for they have a way of avenging themselves.”

[1] For example, Jefferson says of Adams, he has a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” Adams called Vice President Jefferson “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.” So much for civility. The two men were actually great friends. Their presidential bids (there were two: Adams won the first; Jefferson the second) separated them for a season, but they reconciled later in life. For an elegant account of their relationship, see Gordon S. Wood, Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (New York: Penguin Press, 2017).

[2] Lippman, The Public Philosophy, 3.

[3] Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, 43. Emphasis added.

[4] Ibid., 44.

[5] Fromm, Escape from Freedom (Farrar & Rinehart, 1941)

[6] Marsden, 46.

[7] And along with this, the new formidable Military Industrial Complex was born, further spurring economic activity.

[8] See R. R. Reno, You Better Like It – First Things  and “Conservatism, Inc.” in “Let’s Rebalance,” January 1, 2019 Let’s Rebalance – First Things, reviews of Jonah Goldberg’s Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy (2018).

[9] Consider Columbia Professor Mark Lilla’s comments on the loss of vision in American politics today: “We’re living in a kind of vision free America right now; where the Reagan vision no one really believes in anymore, um . . . on the economic side and even a lot of the social side (gay marriage has been accepted, homosexuality has been accepted), and the old Roosevelt vision is gone; . . . and everyone’s gotten out of the vision business, and . . . Trump does not have a vision [of where] he wants us to go together. And, so it’s really going to be who gets there first. I don’t see either party pointing in that direction right now, and that’s what worries me.” In, Mark Bauerlein, “After Identity Politics,” First Things Podcast, March 18, 2019, https://www.firstthings.com/media/after-identity-politics, accessed April 22, 2019, an interview with Mark Lilla by senior editor Mark Bauerlein to discuss identitarianism in America and Lilla’s book The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics.

[10] MacIntyre, After Virtue, 202.

[11] Ibid. 201.

Text and Talk

September 7, 2024

‘Satire’

Jim Roseman

According to the OED, satire is “a poem or (in later use) a novel, film, or other work of art which uses humour, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize prevailing immorality or foolishness, esp. as a form of social or political commentary.” The term comes from the Latin satura, which usually refers to poetic medley. It enters English (saˌtī(ə)r) from French (sætaɪər) in the sixteenth century, and is described as the “art of making someone or something look ridiculous . . . in order to embarrass, humble, or discredit its targets” (Evan Gottlieb, professor of British Literature), or “artful ridicule of folly or vice as a means of exposing or correcting it.” Some call it a genre, others a mode of expression in literature or rhetoric. Examples of satire date way back, e.g., Aesop’s Fables (7^th/6^th century BC), Aristophanes (5^th/4^th century BC), to Horace in the Roman Republic days and Juvenal and Lucian in the Roman Empire days. It enters the Western canon in earnest with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1387–1400), and in the sixteenth century with Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly (first printed in 1511), Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), and of course many of Shakespeare’s works. It continues in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with Cervantes’ novel, Don Quixote (1605–1615), Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and A Modest Proposal (1729), and Voltaire’s Candide (1759) – eighteenth century Britain has been called the “golden age” of political satire with its use in newspaper cartoons. The nineteenth century saw new enduring voices of satire in many authors, including Jane Austen (Love and Friendship), William Thackeray (Vanity Fair), Charles Dickens (Hard Times, Tale of Two Cities), and Mark Twain in the U.S. (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, et al). Stretching into the twentieth century the pace of the use of satire in literature picked up with writers like Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Will Rogers, P. G. Wodehouse, G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy Parker, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, Malcolm Muggeridge, Ray Bradbury, Flannery O’Connor, and on and on and on.

During the twentieth century, literary and rhetorical satire became an increasingly dominant form of social, cultural, and political critique. It has in many ways become a specialized form of the modern novel. Late in the twentieth century and especially since, satire has become the dominant form of political criticism. To see this, just watch any of the comedy talk shows (Jimmy Kimmel Live, The Tonight Show, Last Week with John Oliver, Real Time with Bill Maher, The Daily Show, and particularly The Late Show with Stephen Colbert). But modern satire is applied not only to politicians. Satire is also famous as a basis of cultural critique as seen in Orwell, Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, and Ray Bradbury (e.g. Fahrenheit 451). Other somewhat lesser-known writers have used satire to critique the prevailing culture. The one I want to focus on today is Jerzy Kosinski, in his 1970 novel Being There.

—See the synopsis of the movie version on page three—

Sidney Gottlieb, Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut says, Being There “is one of the truly essential fables about the far-reaching dangers of electronic media to classical notions of what defines us as humans and to the prospects of shaping and maintaining a culture and society that help make us more fully human.” He calls it a fable. That seems right, but it can also be called a parable, too. Using the form of a novel rather than non-fiction, Kosinski dramatizes Marshall McLuhan’s non-fiction critique of mass media in his 1964 Understanding Media, in which he coined the now famous phrase “the medium is the message.”

Being There was made into a very famous Academy Award nominated movie by the same name in 1979, staring Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine, Melvyn Douglas, Richard Dysart, and Jack Warden. The movie follows the book very closely in part because Kosinzki was an active consultant on it. In his review in Cineaste Magazine, Gottlieb points out that Kosinski was more than casually aware of the Orwellian threat, having been “born into a Jewish family in Poland in 1933.” He captures the terror of Nazi Germany in the young boy character “who wanders the landscape of war and Holocaust in his novel The Painted Bird (1965).” In Being There Kosinski captures the concerns of Neil Postman in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business—Interestingly Postman’s book was the adaptation of a 1984 lecture he gave in celebration of Orwell’s book by that title at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Postman said there and in the forward of the book that the current state of the world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. We are more addicted to amusement than oppressed by state violence, as in Orwell’s work. Kosinski captures this and more in Being There.

Consider the phrase “he’s just an empty suit.” While writing the book, Kosinski says “his ‘code name’ for [Being There] was Blank Page, and sometimes Dasein.”[1] Being There satirizes the contemporary world as just that. A world shaped, formed, and punctuated by outward accoutrements. A world so eager to accept what’s on the surface that it probs no further. This attitude is personified in the main character’s name Chance and his work (as a gardener, the only work he’s ever known). After being evicted from the only home Chance had ever known and never been outside of, he is hit by a car, a limousine while walking across the street. A woman gets out and insists he be taken to the mansion where she and her sick aging husband live. They’ll care for him while he convalesces. On the way the woman asks his name. He says Chance the gardener, and she concludes his full name is Chauncy Gardner. At the mansion Chance is introduced to the world of the elites. There the life of Chauncy Gardener begins anew. He rises to heights rarely seen, passively entering doors opened to him by the elites. Listening to his brief, pithy way of speech always tied to gardening or some TV show he’s seen, they take him to be a mysterious wise man who speaks in deep metaphors with extraordinary insight.

The story depicts a world of flotsam. Yet there are many biblical metaphors in Being There.

Ten years ago I wrote something using Being There as a parable for our current moment. I entitled that piece Living in a Being There Age of Sardonic Tales & Comic Relief, an age where there are only Slices of Plot with no Dénouement. Social media and AI were still in their infancy then. Things are much worse now. This kind of world affects how we do politics, how we discern the truth (and if there is Truth rather than just truths), and makes it very hard to find meaning in life.

Brief Summary of Being There, the film version.

It is a placid fable about Chance (Peter Sellers), a reclusive, illiterate, passive and simple-minded gardener who is well-groomed, fed on schedule, and dressed in custom tailored suits, has lived his whole sheltered life on the walled-in estate of an eccentric millionaire named Jennings …. His only knowledge of the “real” outside world, an encroaching inner-city ghetto area [shades of Gautama?], is through watching television. His meals have always been prepared by the estate’s black cook Louise (Ruth Attaway).

When Chance’s benefactor dies, he is evicted by the estate’s lawyers and wanders aimlessly and helplessly into the streets of Washington, D.C. As he emerges into the outside world, a version of Also Sprach Zarathustra [clear references to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra] is heard on the soundtrack. He is confronted by a young urban gang, and threatens to “turn them off” with a TV remote control channel-changer. Later in a freak accident, he is struck by a limousine owned by Eve Rand (Shirley MacLaine) and bruises his legs. She takes him to her dying, patriarchal, industrialist husband Benjamin’s (Melvyn Douglas) home for treatment from her personal physician Dr. Allenby (Richard Dysart) and recouperation. During the trip, he identifies himself as “Chance … the gardener,” which is incorrectly interpreted to be his full name – Chauncey Gardiner.

Chance’s empty-headed pronouncements and generalizations, delivered dead-pan, are taken to be profoundly intelligent, metaphorically deep, and wisely insightful. He becomes wealthy, is treated as a famous celebrity in the media, and becomes a political advisor for the rich and powerful, including President “Bobby” (Jack Warden). His new-found popularity leads to talk-show appearances, insider parties, book publisher advances, and the potential to become a presidential candidate.

He offers simplistic responses to the most difficult questions, such as:

• First comes spring and summer, but then we have fall and winter. And we get summer again.

Some of the amusing remarks he makes, almost Yogi Berra-isms, hint that he might actually be insightful:

• On looking out a car window: “This is just like television, only you can see much further.”
• On planting seeds: “Spring is the time for planting.”
• On economics (actually on gardening): “In a garden, growth has its season … as long as the roots are not severed, all is well, and all will be well in the garden.”
• On watching TV (the most famous line, misinterpreted by Eve as an invitation to sexually stimulate herself while he watches her): “I like to watch (TV).”
• On death: “I’ve seen this before. It happens to old people.”

The last line in the film is a quote from the late Mr. Rand, read at his funeral: “Life is a state of mind.”

The final scene of his walking on water across a lake gives the film a fanciful element, and leaves the viewer debating, wondering about, and struggling to interpret the fable-like story.[2]

[1] Martin Woessner, “Introduction: Being Here Heidegger and Reception History,” Heidegger in America, Cambridge University Press, December 2010. “Dasein,” which literally means “being there” or existence, is a word Heidegger coined. From an excerpt at https://assets.cambridge.org/97805215/18376/excerpt/9780521518376_excerpt.pdf.

[2] See the review by Tim Dirks at Filmsite.org: http://www.filmsite.org/bein.html.

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

“Like Ferdinand Magellan’s great voyage in pursuit of new passages to new worlds, since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Western intellectual tradition has sailed far and wide and discovered many wonderful things. But just as Magellan faced great risk navigating the treacherous waters around Cape Horn, the tumultuous intellectual waters of the modern West presented great risks too. How would we find our way?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge captures the picture well in his poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Having been guided through the treacherous waters and early-modern fog by the Albatross (the soul), the captains of the new world became annoyed by the bird. In hubris, they killed it and hung it as a trophy around the neck, believing it a good thing that they had killed it. By the mid-twentieth century, the ship of modernism stalled. It is now adrift in a postmodern sea, bobbing like a cork with no soul to guide it.”

I wrote these words in my book, Rediscovering God’s Grand Story: In a Fragmented World of Pieces and Parts. As is obvious, my intention in writing these words was to draw attention to how the modern world has become adrift like the Ancient Mariner. It has. I repeat them now for a different purpose. To raise the question of what imagination is.

This is not an easy question to answer because the answer varies by the period and the thinkers considered. Though all summaries suffer from imprecision, I’ll nevertheless make a few sweeping generalizations. I’ll say there are four broad periods for considering what imagination is (or means): 1. The classical period from the ancient Greeks (especially Plato and Aristotle (especially his De Anima, book III)) and Romans up through the Neo-Platonists; 2. The Christian period from St. Augustine through the Middle Ages (including the mystics) up to the Renaissance; 3. The Romantic period, broadly from Goethe, Blake, Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Browning, up to and including, with a kind of Classical/Romantic period twist, Owen Barfield, Lewis and Tolkien; and 4. The Modern period including such poets as Hardy, Pound, Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and so on. I could add a fifth, the Postmodern period, but for this paper I won’t address that period.

 The place or role of imagination differs through these periods. In the ancient period, arising from the Greek philosophers, imagination (phantasia: image-making capacity of human beings) is largely a faculty related to perception resting on “images” (including images occurring in dreams) instead of reason – in De Anima Book III.3, Aristotle says imagination (phantasia) is “that in virtue of which an image occurs in us.” Plato definitely viewed dialectical reason to be superior to imagination. Because it could be faulty it was not considered as valuable as the rational faculties. Art for the ancient Greek philosophers was not harmful as such (though it could be) but it doesn’t lead to the good life. Art for Plato is mimesis, imitating life as in plays, and to the extent it achieves its goal of imitating life well, it can evoke the emotions and feelings of the audience for good or ill. Historian J. M. Cocking[1] says, “For Plato, art improves in status as it moves away from naked feeling to moral judgment and uses its spell-binding power to promote virtue rather than to awaken thrills.” In this critical Platonic sense, Imagination was looked upon with a kind of wariness or suspicion. Unlike Wordsworth in the nineteenth century, who claimed imagination is a doorway into transcendent knowledge, this was not the case for Plato. The ancient Greeks did not consider imagination without any epistemic value, only that it is prone to error. Shades of mystery and this attitude prevailed largely through the Middle Ages. Cocking says: “For Aristotle it is a puzzling, intriguing aspect of mental life, hard to relate to the other parts of the soul—neither sensation nor thought, but somewhere between the two (De anima 432b). There Aristotle consistently puts it; and there it was to stay, in the rationalist West, until the Renaissance changed both its nature and its status.”

Sort of. The Neo-Platonists came to view imagination as a vehicle for the soul. Neo-Platonism significantly influenced the Church Fathers and triggered some heresies (Arianism[2]).  St. Augustine imbibed deeply in Neo-Platonism before his conversion (including following Manicheism[3]). But it was later, as Augustine the theologian who, thinking through these complexities, set a moderated path. For him, human beings recognize in our souls that we are made in the image of God, but this recognition doesn’t happen except through knowledge.

Knowledge for Augustine is always above imagination, and abstract knowledge is repeatedly distinguished from mental images. What the mind presents to itself in the form of images is as ethically suspect to Augustine as it was to Epictetus and the later Stoic moralists (City XI.26). . . .Augustine distinguished three kinds of seeing—bodily seeing, which is sensation together with consciousness of sensation, the mental representation or ‘spiritual seeing’; ‘spiritual seeing’ on its own, without sensation, which includes what we now call imagining and dreaming; and ‘intellectual seeing’ or understanding. (Cocking, p. 43)

 In the late fifth/early sixth century, Boethius establishes an integrated relationship between philosophy and imagination. Unavailable to St. Augustine (by all accounts), Boethius had access to Aristotle as well as the Platonists and Neo-Platonists. Lady Philosophy in The Consolation of Philosophy invites Boethius to use his imagination to look at historical figures and poets, and judge them with philosophical judgment for approval by the philosophical imagination.

In the Christian West, the relation between philosophy and imagination largely remained a combination of St. Augustine and Boethius until the thirteenth century, when St. Thomas and Bonaventure came along. In his Summa Theologica (ST I, 78, 4.), St. Thomas, a Dominican, describes imagination “a storehouse of forms received through the senses.” Bonaventure, a Franciscan, though not contrary to St. Thomas, stressed the mystical power of imagination: “when [the mind] knows any-thing, [it] journeys from Christ’s humanity to his divinity. Shining the divine light of illumination on imagination’s phantasms, Christ manages the transition from sensory to intellectual cognition.”[4]

As the Renaissance emerged in Northern Italy[5] in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with respect to the meaning and place of imagination two things occurred: there was a strong desire to recover the classical world; and literary theory and criticism became a flourishing branch of literature. With the backdrop of all the dimensions of classical philosophy, theology, and medieval and renaissance literature, and with a marked move to a human-centered outlook coupled with growing resistance to received authorities, new views of the meaning and place of imagination developed. Creativity as a self-conscious deliberative process began to occur.

Then in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in Britain a new explicitly imagination-driven movement occurred: the British Romantic Movement. The roots of this movement are in Germany with Wolfgang von Goethe. It was imported to Britain when Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth went to Germany and brought it back home. Coleridge was the first to write a systematic theory of imagination in his Biographia Literaria.

Coleridge says that the world is made of symbols and we all relate to them – our organs of sense are designed to correspond to the world of sense. In like manner, our organs of spirit are designed to correspond to the world of spirit, but they are not developed in all alike. “But they exist in all, and their first appearance discloses itself in the moral being.” It is the job of human beings to discover what these symbols are and what they mean. The question is, who set these symbols? Is it just us, with our own imaginations? Is it just God? “Or are these symbols created by a continuous meeting between His imagination and ours?” Coleridge says the latter.[6]

C. S. Lewis follows in Coleridge’s footsteps (“a kind of expanded Christian Romanticism”) though he does not subscribe to all things Coleridge. For him, “imagination is not simply the holding of images in one’s head, nor it is simply creative invention. It is something else, something twinned, but opposite, to reason.” As with Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas, imagination is not good de facto. It can be good or evil. But it must be married with reason. In his essay, “‘Bluspels and Flalansferes’, Lewis discusses the issues of metaphor. His concern is to show that metaphors are at once built-in to the very words we use on a daily basis, but that new ones may also be created.” Shades of Coleridge. But he also says in that essay that reason is the organ of truth and imagination is the organ of meaning. But they do not exist one without the other. This is likely an influence of both Coleridge and Lewis’s close friend Owen Barfield. After the now infamous stroll down Addison’s Walk that evening after dinner with his friends J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, because of what Tolkien told Lewis about myth it would add a new dimension to what Lewis thought about imagination.

After that walk Tolkien went home an wrote his poem “Mythopoeia.” This would be what opened Lewis up to the truth of the Christian Gospel. “Tolkien argues again and again that sight and true sight, is a necessary outcome of the imagination. He also argues in the poem that this right [sic, sight?] of what he will call fantasy, is one inherent to us, even when we misuse it.” Here we see, as with the ancients, there is a caution in imagination. In his “On Fairy-stories,” Tolkien goes on to add another dimension to his view of imagination: human beings are sub-creators; we make things out of what has been made by God. This capacity allows us to cast worlds, to imagine worlds that don’t exist – linked to the Latin vert facere, to make. To make in the sense that an artist makes, a writer creates a story. For Tolkien this capacity is a reflection in man of the God who created him, whose story he lives within. Our sub-creative capacity is a mark of God in us.    

Additional links added for June 15:

85 Years Ago Today: J. R. R. Tolkien Convinces C. S. Lewis That Christ Is the True Myth (thegospelcoalition.org)

On Fairy-Stories : J. R. R. Tolkien : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Footnotes:

[1] Imagination: A study in the history of ideas, London: Routledge, (1991)

[2] Arianism is first attributed to Arius (c. AD 256–336), a Christian presbyter who preached and studied in Alexandria, Egypt. Arian theology holds that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, who was begotten by God the Father with the difference that the Son of God did not always exist but was begotten/made before time by God the Father; therefore, Jesus was not coeternal with God the Father, but nonetheless Jesus began to exist outside time.

[3] Manichaeism founded in the 3rd century AD by the Parthian prophet Mani (216–274 AD), in the Sasanian Empire. It is a form of Gnosticism. Manichaeism teaches an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness. Mani as the final prophet after Zoroaster, the Gautama Buddha and Jesus Christ.

[4] Michelle Karnes, “Imagination in Bonaventure’s Meditations,” Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages. University of Chicago Press (2011). Available at https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7208/9780226425337-007/html?lang=en.

[5] The Renaissance began in the fourteenth century with humanism and reached its zenith in the late fifteenth through the sixteenth century. Key figures of the renaissance include: Lorenzo de Medici, Niccolò Machiavelli, Leonard de Vinci, Michaelangelo, Raphael, Francis Bacon, Nicolaus Copernicus, Petrarch, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Galileo, Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, Hernán Cortés, Desiderius Erasmus, Thomas More.

[6] David Russell Mosley, “Toward a Theology of the Imagination with S.T. Coleridge, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien,” 13 April 2020; Accepted: 7 May 2020; Published: 12 May 2020, Religions, MDPI, available at https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/11/5/238.  

It was a typical scorching hot summer day in June of 1970 as I stood having meaningless chatter with some high school buddies in the cool of the shade from the big cottonwoods on the grounds of the Pleasant Oaks Recreation Center in Pleasant Grove where we grew up. It was just a short bike ride away from the Prairie Creek beds where in earlier years we explored the world, got into mischief, and played army in our Stand By Me days. A stocky gray silhouette appeared against the bright sunlight walking toward us from McCutcheon Lane. We all squinted. “Really?” we wondered. It was, it really was. Our old friend David Broach was back home. We couldn’t believe it! We hadn’t seen him since he dropped out of school and joined the Army. Everyone’s attention shifted to David as he walked up. There he was, standing by us. He’d been dropped in the jungle and survived his tour in Viet Nam and had come back home. We were so glad to see him, so glad he was home. We wanted to hear all about it. But he was quiet. He seemed glad to see us, but he didn’t have much to say. As we cajoled him, it was apparent he was preoccupied. We asked why. He finally he acceded. “My Buddies,” he said. “My mind is on my Buddies 9000 miles away from where we’re standing, and the new ones arriving every day.” Then without fanfare, he told us. “I re-upped. I’m going back.” “Why would you do that, David? Why?” we all asked in astonishment. He said, “I’ve been there and survived. The hardest part of survival is the first 5 minutes after jumping off the helicopter. If you can survive that, you have a chance. I know what to do and the green soldiers don’t. If I have a chance to save one brother with my experience, I’ve gotta do it.” Subdued, we continued our meaningless chatter then went our separate ways. I watched for a moment as David’s presence became a silhouette again.

A month later he was back in-country. Two weeks later word came: Specialist Fourth Class E4 from Co. K, 75th Infantry Lrrp, 4th Infantry Division, Earl David Broach was dead. I didn’t “see” David again until 1992. When working in DC, I walked across to the Mall, to the Viet Nam Memorial. As I strolled solemnly along the long black granite wall searching through the endless names, I finally saw David again. I ran my fingers across the etched name of my friend. There he was with 58,190 other names of the American boys (and girls) who went to war in Viet Nam (now over 58,300 names), and never came home again to their moms and dads, brothers and sisters, and friends.

David is in my thoughts tonight as I reflect on Memorial Day, and so many more. I think of my father, a Navy man, sitting on a lonely stool in a crowed bar on shore leave in Algiers in 1943. And my father-in- law that same year eating that “rare, unexpected, amazing” chicken dinner in his Chabua barracks at the base of the Himalayas with his buddies as they prepare to fly the treacherous “Hump” again the next day. I think of Daddy Claude, my grandfather, and his son, my uncle Carroll, who serendipitously met up in the South Pacific while serving respectively aboard the destroyer U.S.S. Heermann and battleship U.S.S. Saratoga—that same especially dark year in the Pacific of ’43. I’m reminded of my grandfather’s double sacrifice, his second call to duty, having first mustered into the Army 26 years earlier in 1917 during the Great War. I think, too, of my second cousin, Josh Wilson, and his wife Sara, both West Point grads and veterans of the Iraq War, and of my nephews, Retired Air Force Major Robert Babb and Michael Bond—a multi-tour veteran in Afghanistan and the terrible PTSD he struggles he’s left with. I think about so many others in my family who served in the various Services and the Guards and the countless others in our country who have served and sacrificed so much for us through the years.

As I reflect, I am struck by those famous words by President Lincoln on that solemn day in 1863, when on that short ride from Washington to Gettysburg he penned the words “that last full measure of devotion,” as he thought of those on both sides who gave their lives on that now infamous battlefield. It rings in my ears as I think of David, and for those many who at this very moment are taking off or putting on their specially fitted legs and arms, and for those who feel as though there is nothing left to live for having lost their way back here at home, no longer having the comradery of the “brotherhood” of war.

What more noble and courageous thing can one do than lay down his life for his friends, for his family, for his country? What more ignoble thing can human beings do to each other than go to war? We see the best of ourselves in the sacrifice given; we see the worst of ourselves when we kill each other. War is hell!

I think of David and all my family members who gave so much to this country and then I watch the TV these days. I think of George Washington, and the advice he gave his fellows in his Farwell Address in 1796. He says a couple of things we so easily forget these days, words of challenge to ensure the preservation of the union for which so many sacrificed so much. We must always remember that we are one (e pluribus unum as the original American motto said). And that to keep that union we are called to goodness. We must be a people of moral virtue. When we fail at these our sacrifices become lost in a fog. We lose our way. It’s worth revisiting President Washington’s wise advice in his Farewell Address.

The unity of government which constitutes you one people is also now dear to you. It is justly so, for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very liberty which you so highly prize. But as it is easy to foresee that, from different causes and from different quarters, much pains will be taken, many artifices employed to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth;

. . .

The name of American, which belongs to you in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived from local discriminations. With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles.

. . .

I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the State . . .. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally.

This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of hisown elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.

And then he says,

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. … A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

It is too easy to garner sacrifice under the banner of excessive partisanship, grievance, and revenge and thereby tarnish patriotism. Good judgment becomes clouded and the exercise the power becomes unbound from its proper restraint. Patriotism and “Party-ism” not underwritten by the centripetal force of virtue makes everything fall apart, as Yeats captures in his poem The Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity

Patriotism must be born of virtue in service of the common good, underwritten by the “religious principle.” The due honor for the sacrifices of my friend David Broach and the many who have sacrificed so much for this country derives from virtue in pursuit of the common good of all. As Washington urged us to remember: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness.” As Alexis de Tocqueville observed, “America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”

On this Memorial Day, let us honor those who have given that last full measure of devotion … and who did so in the constant belief that their sacrifice was in the service of the good. Let us give honor to those who sacrificed so much by giving themselves in pursuit of the good of the One who is the source of the Common Good, the One in whom is the basis of our liberty and the tie that binds the many into one.

God Bless those whose sacrifice secured and sustain our liberty, including my friend David. God, bless us all in such a way that our greatest happiness should be found in sacrificing ourselves in pursuit of Your goodness; for when we fail at this, we whitewash the sacrifices of those we memorialize on this day.

Copyright James M. Roseman

The world is awash with AI these days. ChatGPT grabbed the headlines last year. With Microsoft’s one-billion-dollar investment in Open AI and its Bing CoPilot and Google AI’s Gemini, you use AI every time you search the web. If you are on LinkedIn (a Microsoft company), every other post is about AI and its use in big business, and AI is embedded in the LI platform itself—for job recommendations, image credits, people you may know, profile building and more. Meta’s Facebook and its Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp suite of services use AI to analyze every picture and video you look at, every “like” you click or post you make, all under the banner to improve your “experience.” But from a business point of view, for Meta and all social media companies, the data and AI driven analytics are used either to sell commercial advertisements and to mine and monetize for additional revenue. Every social media App and platform uses AI. Every major business uses AI for core business purposes and for running the business: from choosing or changing the core business model to analyzing and charting strategy; to operate and secure the business; to solve and accelerate the ever changing needs of the IT infrastructure, both the fixed and on-demand requirements using public/private and on-premise/off-premise cloud computing and Edge computing; to develop new products and services, including advancing the Internet of Things (IoT); to manage the ever more complex global 24/7-365 suite of business and customer interface applications and for analyzing, managing and performing user support (inside the business and for its customers), to reduce errors and “enhance the experience.” In the world of healthcare and Big Pharma AI has become part of the core business for research and management: e.g., in diagnostics and robotics, in research and discovery of new drugs, such as the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. Generative AI is the fastest growing tool in every pharmaceutical company in the world. And AI is sweeping the worlds of agriculture, logistics and supply chain management, law, national security, geopolitics and warfare. It is simply everywhere all the time. It is in every sphere of life: media, universities (especially in research programs and scholarly work), economic forecasting and central banks, and in every government and defense department in the world. And every entity that uses AI for their own positive purposes—social, economic, political, and defense, etc.—must protect itself from bad actors who use AI for nefarious purposes.

In the 1940s, mathematicians and pioneers of modern computers Alan Turing (the famed WWII codebreaker) and John van Neumann had come to believe that computers and the human brain were analogous. Given this analogy, to them it seemed obvious that “human intelligence could be replicated in computer programs.” (Melanie Mitchell, Artificial Intelligence (2017)) In 1956 Dartmouth mathematics professor John McCarthy and some close friends and colleagues formed a two-month long 10-man workshop to explore creating a thinking machine. McCarthy said he needed a name for the purpose of the workshop, so he coined the term “Artificial Intelligence,” though he later admitted that his originally convening colleagues—Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon (inventor of information theory) Oliver Selfridge, Ray Solomonoff, and Peter Milner—didn’t like the term. The reason, according to McCarthy’s biographical memoir, was because the actual goal was to create a machine with genuine intelligence not artificial intelligence. With that goal in mind and ever since, the raison d’être of AI research has been to achieve machine intelligence equal to or exceeding human intelligence.

So, what exactly is AI? AI is a complex system of hardware and software technologies built to compile and analyze extremely large data sets very quickly using complicated algorithms¹ to produce pattern-based predictive and “creative” guess outcomes, “insights,” and actions (as in robotic and automated physical machine systems designed to mimic human behavior). AI systems are built on how neuroscientists understand the brain works. Here’s how: Neurons receive a vast array of perceptions (sometimes unconscious) that trigger electrical and chemical inputs connected by synapses. The neuron weighs the inputs and when they reach a “threshold,” the synapse fires. Synapses have different strengths that create stronger and lesser connections, thus certain inputs get greater or lesser weight. “Neuroscientists believe that adjustments to the strength of connections between neurons is a key part of how learning takes place.” (Mitchell, 24) AI systems are built on this understanding with a similar but simplified structure using what are called “perceptrons”: perceptrons receive an array of inputs with different assigned (programmed) weights; these are added together and when the sum reaches an assigned (programmed) threshold, the output yes or no (0s and 1s) renders the “decision.” Repeating this over and over again using algorithms, the computer “learns.” This is what generative AI does with what are called large language models (LLMs) and neural network models (Deep Learning). This method is intended to imitate human thought, cognition, learning, reasoning, and creativity based on prevailing theories of how the human brain, cognition, and imagination work as a complex network of physical and biological processes.

A lot has happened in the world of computing and AI since 1956. But suffice to say, here’s where we are today. IBM breaks it down this way. There are three kinds of AI: Artificial Narrow AI; General (or Strong) AI; and Super AI. Only the first, Artificial Narrow AI, exists today. The other two are part of the McCarthy and Co. dream imagined those many years ago.

Within these three kinds, IBM identifies four functional types: Reactive; Limited Memory; Theory of Mind; and Self-Aware. Only Reactive and Limited Memory exist today.

IBM says, “Reactive machines are AI systems with no memory and are designed to perform a very specific task. Since they can’t recollect previous outcomes or decisions, they only work with presently available data. Reactive AI stems from statistical math and can analyze vast amounts of data to produce a seemingly intelligence output.” Examples of Reactive AI are IBM’s Deep Blue winning again chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in the late 1990s and Netflix recommending movies based on what you have watched previously.

Limited Memory AI can recall past events and outcomes for specific moment decisions for a short period of time, but it cannot store memory in a library for recall and use later. However it can be trained, it can learn (this is what is called machine learning and Deep Learning). Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and DeepAI “rely on limited memory AI capabilities to predict the next word, phrase or visual element within the content it’s generating.” Virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, and self-driving cars are examples of Limited Memory AI. Reactive and Limited Memory AI exist today in varying ways.

Theory of Mind AI and Self-Aware AI do not exist. They fall under General AI and Super AI. Theory of Mind “functionality would understand the thoughts and emotions of other entities. This understanding can affect how the AI interacts with those around them.” Self-Aware AI “would possess super AI capabilities. Like theory of mind AI, Self-Aware AI is strictly theoretical. If ever achieved, it would have the ability to understand its own internal conditions and traits along with human emotions and thoughts. It would also have its own set of emotions, needs and beliefs.”

Reactive and Limited Memory AI are everywhere today and expanding fast. The 2023 Stanford Emerging Technology Review says Generative AI alone “is estimated to raise global GDP by $7 trillion and lift productivity growth by 1.5 percent over a ten-year period, if adopted widely.” As mentioned above, the use of AI is in every industry and every sector of the economy, in governments, law, geopolitics, and national defense and warfare. The take-up of these two types of AI is so fast it is impossible to keep track.

It is indubitable that Reactive and Limited Memory AI offer huge efficiencies and technical capability advantages—e.g., in medical diagnostics and research; in data access and analysis for a host of beneficial uses, etc. But even in these are buried questions of goodness or evil—e.g., are efficiency and the ability to crunch more data faster a moral good as such? Is the technologization of everything a societal good? Others argue that it’s not merely the AI technology itself that is of concern, but rather what it takes to create AI—i.e., it’s the ecological impact through extraction of core materials mining, the abusive sweat shops required to create devices, and the electrical power requirements necessary to run the data centers full of servers, etc. (See Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI, (2021)) Nevertheless, the genie is out of the bottle. Whether these two currently realized dimensions of AI are a good thing or a bad thing, they have already and will continue to affect every sphere of life. We must think wisely about them.

But none of the concerns from these realized dimensions of AI are even the penultimate concern. To see this, one need only to turn back to Alan Turing and John van Neumann’s view that “human intelligence could be replicated in computer programs,” and the Dartmouth workshop vision to achieve genuine intelligence in machines not artificial intelligence. That is, the penultimate concern is the Theory of Mind and Self-Aware AI. This concern is what prompted many of the AI pioneers and current leaders of AI recently to sign an open letter and testify before Congress urging caution. Here lies the very legitimate transhuman concern of AI.

The ultimate concern, which is never talked about but which clouds good judgment on the AI pursuit in general is the materialist metaphysic and the computational theory of mind that are embedded in it. This metaphysic is an inheritance from the Enlightenment and the computational theory of mind is the inheritance of the host of new philosophies and sciences that grew up in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century—e.g., neuroscience, neurophilosophy, neurobiology, cognitive science, linguistic science, and evolutionary psychology, etc.

AI is the “embodiment” of the modernist naturalistic metaphysic that material is all there is. It declares there is no activating “form” (soul), no activating potentiality into actuality, as Aristotle said. In the materialist (physicalist) theory of mind, everything is merely physical. There is no difference at all between the human person or the human mind and a sophisticated computing machine. There is only some not yet fully understood biophysical animating event which makes, for example, a mere body a living conscious organism. Consciousness, in this metaphysic, is only an epiphenomenal conjunction of matter. In this metaphysic, the “self-aware” and “super” AI become the equivalent of a conscious human being. The term “consciousness” loses its meaning. The living being loses its soul.

Technologies are built on point-in-time referents to extant thought and discoveries. As such, technologies are the instantiation or the embodiment of particular ideas and scientific discoveries. Technologies are unwitting “carriers” of these ideas. The technologies we use are not inert. They are purveyors of the ideas and discoveries instantiated in them. You might say, AI theory has at its core a kind of intellectual malware: a materialist computational theory of mind.

The ultimate question for AI is the meaning of the human person and human consciousness. The current scientific and AI theories cannot account for the soul (the psūchê in Greek, the nephesh in Hebrew). They have no soul (or form), the animating substance which makes a mere body a living conscious organism. Neuro-biophysical processes alone cannot account for this. Aristotle’s (and Aquinas’s) hylomorphic theory still offers the most integrative compelling explanation.

The great confusion created with such a reductionist materialist metaphysic is to assume that if one understands how something works, they understand what the phenomenon is. As Socrates put it to his friend Cebes in the Phaedo, “There is surely a strange confusion of causes and conditions in all this.” Cebe’s doesn’t understand why Socrates doesn’t try to escape his imprisonment. Is it his body that is the cause of his condition? Socrates explains it is not his body that is the cause—his state is not determined by his body. Socrates explains “the Athenians have thought fit to condemn me, and accordingly I have thought it better and more right to remain here and undergo my sentence.” The true cause is Socrates’s will that keeps him in prison, his desire to live virtuously. To be only his body is not to be his whole self. This is the same confusion philosopher Roger Scruton identifies in his book The Soul of the World (2014, 37–38) when he speaks of the difference between what the acoustician and the musician hear in sound. Beethoven hears life as a symphony of musical space; the acoustician hears mere pitched sound.

1. What are algorithms? It’s a ‘recipe’ of steps a computer takes to solve a particular problem.” (Mitchell, 28). “An algorithm is a set of defined steps designed to perform a specific objective. This can be a simple process, such as a
   recipe to bake a cake, or a complex series of operations used in machine learning to analyze large datasets and make predictions. In the context of machine learning, algorithms are vital as they facilitate the learning process for
   machines, helping them to identify patterns and make decisions based on data.” What is an Algorithm? Definition, Types, Implementation | DataCamp. The process works like this: Data Inputs; Processing that data – this is the core
   function, where the processing steps (the logical and arithmetical calculations occur, the written algorithm) are done and repeated in a loop until the problem is solved; resulting in an output. Think of how the thermostat in your house works: temperature is received into the sensor (the input); the thermostat processes (calculates) the input according to the algorithm; if the temperature is lower/higher than the setting, the thermostat triggers the air conditioner or heater to turn on (the output). Once complete (problem is solved), it stops. This is the final step. ↩︎