Does the reality of "life" (living creatures) require "intelligent design" (since life cannot emerge from non-life)?  Some random thoughts of a complete non-expert in any of the requisite fields: chemistry,  biology, statistics, and, well, others.  But I’d be interested in your thoughts. I’m reading Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, 2.0.  I had read the first edition that came out in 2003 and was mesmerized by it.  This one is even better.  He’s a genius at taking something complicated and explaining it in terms that even science neanderthals like me can understand (I’ve loved everything of his I’ve read, I A Walk in the Woods, which is hilarious, Home, and The Body). One chapter in Short History is on the “The Rise of Life” (how life came out of non-life).  The science shows how incredibly unlikely it is for life to have emerged on the planet, given what it takes not just to generate amino acids but even more to get them to form proteins, etc. etc.  But not impossible.  In fact, [...]

Some years ago Sarah and I were in England celebrating Christmas with her brother in Saffron-Walden, a market town just south of Cambridge.  After a lovely Christmas eve dinner, Sarah decided she wanted to go to the midnight service at the local Anglican Church.  We, both of us agnostics, decided to go with her. I had always had a soft spot for Christmas eve services.  All the way through high school in Lawrence Kansas I had served as an acolyte in the Episcopal church, which held a very moving candlelight service that I always regarded as the most deeply profound service of the year.  But I hadn’t been to a service in years and thought I would really like to go. As we were walking through the streets to the service we passed a number of pubs packed mainly with young folk.  Religion has not fared will in England for years now, and the idea of going to a Christmas Eve service (let alone a regular ole Sunday service) is the farthest thing [...]

Yesterday I shared one of the thoughts that crept into and dominated my mind for a few minutes while watching a glorious sunrise from the comforts of a nice chair in front of a big window while drinking a cup of coffee.  Here now is my second. We have some bird feeders out on the deck and I was watching not only the dawning of the day but also the birds coming out to break their fast.  Chickadees, Titmice, and Juncos for the most part.  They love the seed. And it occurred to me: these birds have no idea of my existence.  If I moved toward them they would instinctively fly away, so they do recognize the reality of threat.  But do they understand that I’m a human, that I have a mind with thoughts and organs and limbs that make me function, that I have the abilities to analyze and reason, that I have a career and possessions, that I think about lots of issues both academic and quotidian.  Do they have any conception [...]

I have been thinking a lot lately about the relationship of AI to human consciousness.  I'm obviously not an an expert, but hey, at least I can think.  Can AI think?  That, of course, is a major question constantly being raised.  And one on which almost everyone seems to have an opinion.  (In contrast to, say, religion….)  Is AI really that different from I?  Am I a different mode of existence? The people I talk with usually argue that real thinking cannot happen without consciousness, and machines cannot be conscious the way humans are.  OK, fair enough.  I agree.  It doesn’t seem like it.  It seems like I myself am conscious, have free will, can make personal and intellectual decisions on grounds other than data themselves (often bad decisions), can emote, can sense the world, and so on.   I say it “seems” like because, well, what’s it even mean that I can do and experience these things in the mechanistic world that I personally believe in?  How am “I” at the most fundamental [...]

This is now my 40th year of teaching at a university, 36 of the years at UNC Chapel Hill and 4 before that at Rutgers as a 28 year old.  It very nearly didn't happen at all.  Life is so strange. I was on the job market while I was writing my dissertation.. And even though there were job openings, I couldn’t get an interview to save my soul. Part of the problem was that my PhD was from a theological seminary, and a lot of the jobs were at secular institutions – state universities, private colleges, and the like. Most places simply don’t want to take a chance on someone who has been trained in a theological environment. Especially someone like me at the time. I had never set foot in a secular setting since high school! Starting when I was 17, I was at Moody Bible Institute (3 years), (Christian evangelical) Wheaton College (2 years), and then (Presbyterian ministerial training ground) Princeton Theological Seminary (7 years). Yikes! Even theological schools and Christian colleges [...]

I sometimes feel like a pestiferous terrier who goes after someone’s ankles and just won’t stop. There are some issues (among the “Big Questions”) that I repeatedly come back to and just can’t let drop.  I suppose that’s because they seem both really important and completely incapable of being figured out.  Hence my occasional return to them on the blog. I’ve mentioned before that I have a daily meditation practice, which does wonders for my stress levels and mental/emotional/psychological well-being, though it does sometimes leave me puzzled..  This morning I did one of those “go deep into your mind” sessions where you just dig deep into your conscience and try to understand who/what you are as a living being. As often happens when I do that, I once more again came up against the issue of what “I” can possibly be. I feel like “I” am somehow located in my brain.  And I don’t think that “I” will exist once my brain (along with the rest of my body) dies, since it’s quite [...]

Was Jesus’ birth meant to bring peace into the world? One of my favorite Christmas carols is Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,[i] which includes among its memorable lines, “Hail the heaven-born Prince of Peace, Hail the Sun of Righteousness.”  The carol is celebrating the announcement of Jesus’ birth to the shepherds “in the fields by night” in Luke 2:  13 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, 14 “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!” Without saying it, Luke is telling his readers that the birth of Jesus was a fulfillment of prophecy.  Throughout Luke’s account of Jesus he alludes to prophecies of Scripture without drawing specific attention to them (unlike Matthew, who is constantly saying that such and such happened “in order to fulfill what the prophet said….”).  In this case he is making a clear allusion to Isaiah chapter 9, more familiar to most people today from Handel’s Messiah: 1 The people who walked [...]

For a long time I’ve thought a lot about time.  Usually about how I don’t have enough of it, how I wish I had more of it, how I can use what I have most efficiently, how I can possibly get done what I have to do and … And, over the past couple of years, I’ve begun to think more about how all that (on one level) is nonsense and just creates anxiety and stress. My change began when someone (urgently) recommended me to read Paul Loomans' book Time Surfing (easily available to purchase online).  I wasn’t sure about it at first, just lookin’ at the cover.  But oh my god.  I read it three times and it started a revolution in my brain, that continues and has made the most enormous difference, not so much in how I fill my days, hours, and minutes (in my case, time-obsessive guy that I am, and seconds…) but about my emotional approach and attitude toward what I do and the time I have to do it. [...]

Here is another selection from the draft of my book, which, at this still early point, I am calling The Origins of Altruism: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West.  This bit is the introduction to my chapter 6, which deals with how the early Christians began to change and soften Jesus' ethical teaching soon after his death.I'm calling the chapter:  "Transforming the Ethics of Jesus: Moral Discourse in Early Christianity.' Let me know what you think. ****************************** Many codes of human ethics are widely shared across time periods and cultures and yet so many others are surprisingly disparate.  That is hard to explain if we were all granted our moral compass from a power on high, but it makes perfect sense given evolutionary and social pressures.   Our overarching “code” has developed over millions of years of evolution; but significant variations occur because humans have evolved in myriad different environments and cultures.  The basic code makes sense to nearly all of us because in order to survive in virtually every [...]