Revision of Theo-Anthropology in defence against a Robotic Culture

[0:00] It's a great joy and privilege to be back with you a year ahead from last year. And of course, I'm very grateful I'm still alive, so I wake up every morning and say, Lord, another day, that's great.

[0:16] Well, you may wonder what this theme is all about, the revision of theoanthropology in defense against the robotic culture. But the gist of it is simply this, that the term was first used by Karl Barth, and he was fighting against the distortion of being human in the ideologies of the 20th century.

[0:40] But it's much subtler, but it's more frightening, the globalization of our distortion of being human by becoming robotic in the 21st century.

[0:52] So that's what we're going to focus on. And I don't want to speak very long, because really the purpose is your discussion. So that's the aim I have, to hear what you have to ask or discuss or dispute or be like my wife.

[1:12] Don't agree with the word what he says, but this is my point of view, so let's have a lively discussion. In the founding days of Regent, and even now, people wondered what had a geographer to do with a theological college.

[1:27] Since there are always many cultural blind spots we all have, I could speak on this for the whole of our session. And I was certainly always sensitive of Proverbs 17, 24.

[1:39] A fool's eyes wander to the ends of the earth. Is that what a geographer does? Actually, since I first became a serious scholar, I've rather been a historian of ideas, because my thesis for my doctorate work was actually on the exchange of plants and therefore cultural exchange of ideas between the Aztecs and the Moorish gardeners in the huertas of the east of Spain.

[2:08] So it was historical from the beginning. And being a historian of ideas gives one great flexibility to interface with cultures, past and present.

[2:22] And again, as a Christian, I've never seen myself as having a professional identity, either lay or ecclesiastical, which all tends to create, I'm afraid, tunnel vision.

[2:34] That's the nature of being a professional. You have tunnel vision. So this personal preface may help you appreciate where I shall be coming from in this topic that we've chosen for our discussion.

[2:49] It is a revision of Theo Anthropology, for as I've just said, the term was first used by Karl Barth in the late 1930s and expounded in his church dogmatics against the ideology of Nazism to extol the new romanticism of the superior race of Aryan man.

[3:13] And it was further intensified with the subsequent innovation of socialist man that was most exaggerated by the Romanian dictator Nicoli Shishanku, who experimented tragically, appallingly, with small peasant children in their hundreds of thousands that were laid out in cots and barrack-like quarters, deprived of all humour, tenderness or care, in order to create this new race, socialist man.

[3:47] So as Barth said stoutly, nine, at the Barman Declaration against the Nazi takeover of the state church, so he further emphasised that all humanity has been created in the image and likeness of God.

[4:05] Prior to any human secular anthropology, the mystery of human beings is that God created them all. Pope John Paul II made a similar protest against the communist ideology in Poland in his doctorate work and subsequent researches.

[4:24] Now a new revision of theoanthropology is needed as we face the globalisation of hominids as various kinds of robotic anthropology.

[4:35] And this is even more serious, for it is now becoming global. Now when we speak of a revision, we simply mean that Christians have to reaffirm theoanthropology in a new historical context.

[4:55] For there is the new threat of the electric revolution that we are popularly calling the tech revolution. We are anticipating that quantum computers within the next decade will outpace the speed and span of the human mind with artificial intelligence.

[5:14] Robots of every scale and use will be operating as they are now fast doing. Unlike the ideologies of the 20th century, which were still regional, these new developments are already global in scale.

[5:29] At the same time, secularism as a new form of atheism is attempting to blur or even remove the distinction between humans and animals.

[5:41] This is somewhat ironic when democracy is at the same time calling for human rights, but logically now being coupled with animal rights. So then we have to ask how far down the scale do we have to go to have animal rights?

[5:58] Just for the mammals? Or for the birds and fishes? Perhaps even, as the Buddhists do, for the insects? Or even to all bacteria?

[6:10] Do all living things have that right? Globalisation is eliminating then many traditional boundaries.

[6:21] If you saw any part of the memorial service to the world champion boxer Muhammad Ali on television this past Friday, you would think he'd become a god in paradise, embracing all religions.

[6:36] Why? Because he was the greatest boxer of all time. Is that what narcissism has become? Man making himself god by physicality alone?

[6:50] Since the French Revolution, French intellectuals have been celebrated as taking philosophy to its extremities. And so now a new thinker, Luc Ferret, who teaches at the Sorbonne, has written a new book called Man Made God.

[7:07] He pays talk and appreciation to Christianity in giving us our humanitarian instincts for the world's nations to sign the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or more locally, the French charity of Doctors Without Borders.

[7:24] But his conclusion is the advocacy of the humanism of humanity made God. Wow. What does that mean?

[7:37] Pope John Paul II, fighting against communism as Karl Barth did against fascism, also demanded the return to theocentrism instead of anthropocentrism.

[7:50] But following Nietzsche, now Luc Ferret, quoting from The Twilight of the Idol, sees the illusions of transcendence as the illusions of the sacred.

[8:05] And making the new God history, humans are no longer authors of their acts or ideas, only a product. Like Samson using his great strength to pull down the pillars of the temple to destroy all under its sacred canopy, Nietzsche equated the death of God with the death of humanity.

[8:28] To move forward, man has now to take on, according to Ferret, God-like powers to restore the sacred, with man remaking God.

[8:43] Thus, Luke Ferret concludes, we are living today, I believe, at a moment when the two processes I have attempted to describe in this book, the humanization of the divine and the divinization of the human now intersect.

[8:59] This intersection is a point, and this point is one, he admits, of confusion. Yes, we are living today with utter confusion.

[9:13] So there is no doubt, then, that the magnitude of the changes we are in today surpass all others in all eras of human history. As David Christian concludes in his book, what he calls Big History, Maps of Time, he says, the scale of human impacts on the biosphere and on other humans is now so great that the changes of the 20th century will stand down the scale of planetary history.

[9:45] Yet, before we get hysterical about this perspective, we need, perhaps, a more common sense Irish perspective of wit as well as common sense that we get in C.S. Lewis.

[10:05] So in the last of his children's stories, the last battle, when there seems a foregooding apocalyptic, there is an increasing murmur among all the creatures that Aslan, or God, is not dead.

[10:21] For every now and again, Aslan himself speaks the words further up and further in. To all who had spent their lives desiring and seeking not knowing what, the new Aslan is revealing himself sometimes in a storm and flurry of glory sometimes in a majestic voice but at other times in a very gentle voice but always with the same message further up and further in.

[10:55] The sunlit land of Narnia now becomes different like a story you've never heard but very much wanted to hear or like a lovely landscape you'd only seen in a mirror and now you actually see.

[11:09] The new one was a deeper country. Every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more. Every creature began to say I have come home at last.

[11:24] This is my real country. This is the land I've been looking for all my life though I never knew it till now. Now it is all farewell to the Shadowlands.

[11:37] God's truth we know is all truth and when as Pilate was asked what is truth perhaps not honestly knowing how to answer we know that truth is history.

[11:58] And what is history? History is the patience of God with wayward and rebellious human beings. It is God entering into time as he did at the Incarnation that determines all that is true.

[12:14] For God became man that we should become godly and only then truly human. So the claim to be a Christian is simply the claim to desire to become a more genuine human being.

[12:31] however apocalyptic our times may appear to make us afraid we are all safe at the foot of the cross knowing that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.

[12:46] There we are safe in knowing and trusting such a God who transfigures all our fears and human sufferings by his eternal love.

[12:57] It is a quality of Christian life that all we need is a nodal moment that may transform and redirect our whole journey of life.

[13:13] Yet it may occur so inconsequentially as perhaps you may experience this morning just as you are stirring your coffee at the morning break and you hear a chance remark but it's not a chance remark it changes your life yet these nodal moments can change our life's direction like road signs and one such moment came to me in the spring of 1953 when I asked C.S.

[13:42] Lewis after our dinner together with other friends what was the central message of all his writings professional and otherwise simply he replied against reductionism strongly he was reacting to the popular philosophy of the period that we call logical positivism which he hated like deadly poison for it was infiltrating into literary criticism his own professional trade but was also dominating the whole secular culture he had to protest but he had to use all the imaginable literary songs that there are poetry letters prayers science fiction children's stories broadcast talks lectures essays even the revision of myths like he did in his last novel till we have faces even his conversion from deism to the christian faith was a reduction against religious reductionism for lewis recognized the profundity that truth needs to be explored in many dimensions as a contemporary german educator eugene rosenstock husey stated the more central a truth is the greater variety of ways we must use to express it the greatest truth therefore must be expressed by everybody in his own terms that is in the most personalized ways that you can imagine whereas the smallest truth can be expressed by everybody in the same terms you say that two and two makes four well that's a simple truth but the great truth of the mystery of the reality of christianity requires us to use myth imagination folktale poetry allegory symbolism apologia and indeed all the scope of human history and all the differing cultures of peoples scientism then in our social sciences today reveals then a great lie a great reductionism in rejecting the great truth of christianity as the foundation for all social life but what lewis did not experience in his days since he died in 1963 was now this new advent of globalization which is enriching christianity more than ever and thus deepening it also in unprecedented ways yet whose trajectory of preaching christ and the gospel as it always has been as miris wolf opens his book flourishing why we need religion in a globalized world he says the roots of world religions and globalization reach back nearly as far as the recorded history of humanity itself so a great defense against robotic culture is already in place namely cross-cultural communication and education to enrich us mutually even through diverse religions how deeply humanity is grounded in the most primitive to the most advanced of our cultures our christian faith shared by all the members of the body of christ ethically so become the richer the more we have intercourse with other nations and differing ethnic groups worshipping and living together the whisper of the

[17:43] new Narnia further up and further in is now reaching global proportions and ever more cross-cultural communication of fellowships and friendships so we conclude as we return to the three great statements of biblical faith what are they firstly god has created ex Niccolo out of nothing god has created all things all three monotheistic faiths are unanimous that god's creation has no rival in the paganism of nature as a rival reality there's no such reality as the goddess natura so we as christians should stop using the word nature altogether we should start using the vocabulary that's biblical we're talking about creation and even islamic scholars will rebuke us christians if we keep on talking about nature think of that secondly god has created man in his image and likeness what we call the imago dei that is why the more globalized africans aboriginals in australia hindus chinese japanese moslems westerns all intermingle atheist secular or religious the more we are surprised today how decent these people can be they're kind but they're also cruel they're honest or dishonest they give or they rob they're all the same and you'd be surprised what you can learn those of you who are engaged in marriage family therapy should learn much more from the aboriginals of australia they have much more complex ideas about social relationships and family life than we have if you want to be able to exercise your body in a better way you go to the hindu yogas to learn how to breathe more effectively and on and on you can go you can see that other people are smarter than we are if you want to have stomach control then go to the maoris because they've lived on canoes for thousands of years across the

[20:31] Pacific so let us learn that each ethnic group primitive or advanced has something to teach the rest of us but then thirdly and this is why you see when I used to live in my own house and didn't know the neighbours very well I never got to know them but now I'm living in a condo and I meet all sorts of people of all sorts of descriptions all sorts of faith of lack of faith and they're all very decent people you see and it stumbles you as a Christian how can they be so decent if they're not a Christian well open your eyes to God's creation so now thirdly Jews and Christians also believe and they alone believe in creato proverbum that God has created all things by the word of his power that's why to the amazement of

[21:35] Albert Einstein he observed that the most incomprehensible reality of the cosmos was his human intelligibility why because God has created all things by the word of his power it's because the manifestation we have of his truth humans have the ability to be scientists and so one of the things that we should be looking forward to is that the best friends of the future of science are the Christians think about them there's no ontology in the skepticism of the atheists for sustaining modern science because modern science actually came through the reformation and the snapping of the platonic or the neoplatonic cosmology was overtaken by the rise of

[22:42] Christian faith in the 16th 17th century so then to become intelligent Christians is our common goal each of us has a mandate to use our mind but also we have a mandate to use as Deuteronomy expresses it thou shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and Mark adds and with all thy soul and then with all thy mind and then with all thy might well what does that mean it means that to be intelligent Christian it's not your IQ that's enough it's in fact the healing of your family heritage the freedom from the spells of what curses us all our family heritage and I shocked the

[23:48] Christians in Hong Kong by saying that as Chinese Christians that the spells of their family dysfunctional influences was no different from the voodoo of the Haitians or the spells of the witch doctor in Africa because one thing that you discover in international medicine is that no witch doctor can cast a spell on another tribe it's within the same family the same extended so when we love the Lord with all our heart God is freeing us from the spells of our family heritage when we love him with all our mind yes we're using our intelligence when we say that we love him with all our might it means that we do so in twofold ways we love him in sacrifice because he's the sacrificial

[24:58] God you can't be a friend of the crucified without suffering so you embrace it redemptively and you cannot be a friend of God without humility because he's the source of all humility wow so that's what it means then to be an intelligent Christian and so then of course we begin to hear the whisper of Narnia again further in as well as further up further in to the heritage of our own families further up to have a much bigger view of God as J.B.

[25:42] Phillips said so long ago our God is too small to be a dwarf Christian is an oxymoron of a Christian it's our Christian obligation to make every thought captive to Christ as 2 Corinthians 10 verse 5 indicates so robotic intelligence cannot do any of those things none so again robots are not persons but our identity is to be persons in Christ and to be a person is to be a self for the other loving our neighbour as our self and so our daily conversation should be more about we than I for as we dwell in the communion of saints where our identity originates it also remains rooted eternally and so

[26:42] I'm finding continually now as I write more books I'm finding the greatest delight in being invited by others to co-author to co-edit these books often in quite unexpected ways but also in everyday life no word should be more frequent in our vocabulary than we and not I I can readily be kidnapped by robots we never will so I shudder at every worship service when all our songs are about I I I oh preserve us that's why I'm so eager for our dialogue now to begin we are sharing together a marvelous introduction

[27:48] I hope the conversation will do justice to the occasion where there is no vision the people perish this man has had more vision than any one of us in this room I suggest over the last 50 60 years or even longer and I think the opportunity to interact with Jim Houston is a privilege I want to simply comment on one the first point that Jim made about the use of the word nature versus creation came to my attention rather recently that in my lectures I was focusing on nature much more than creation and it seems like a profound and very simple thing to correct but I'm sure there are many other words that we use informally without realizing that we are deceiving ourselves and our students by using the secular word rather than the theologically profound with but anyway please questions comments thank you

[29:25] Jim I was wondering if you could share with us any of the spells or curses that you think are common to western families as you mentioned that we have our own like those of other cultures what do you see as some of the common ones that inflict families in North America well I think when I was in Washington D.C.

[29:54] just before I went to Japan and they were saying oh with a certain amount of condescension and what will you learn in Japan about the obstacles for Japanese to become Christians oh I said well that may be one of the objects that I've had but I've had to change my mind and you see if you're traveling on the road as Unumunu once said you have two ways of looking at life you either look at life from the balcony in which everything is static you see or if you're on the road then the view is changing every moment and so I already was changing my track because I realized that I had had a motive of going to Japan in order to show the Japanese Christians what were the blockages in their psyche in ten different addresses how this blocks the seeds from being sown in the good ground and the thorns and the thistles or the stones are obstructing the penetration of the word but then

[31:06] I suddenly realized when my friends in Washington said what do you think you'll learn from that and so I turned it on them and I said it'll give me new tools by which to critique American culture oh they didn't like that but that's what happens when you go global you begin to realize that every culture have positives that can help us in the gospel and so one of the things that inhibits Japanese from receiving the gospel is also the very thing that is medicine for us in the west to receive and that is the whole concept of amai is that we don't have a personal identity we have a social identity and so it's very difficult for them to understand the uniqueness of being a human being they understand it much more in pantheistic terms as being like particles of water in the sea and so amai is expressive of that social belonging to each other well but on the other side we could do with a good dose of amai because in our

[32:33] American culture we've had three centuries of uninhibited development of individualism and so from the time of the 17th century or the 16th century with the monarchical model of the self and then the Lockean proprietorial notion of the self that what I have colonized or drained of the of the marshes is my property or in the Rusian self of my self consciousness and my imagination is my own property all of this has led to with no challenge from a primitive culture that we become intolerably narcissistic as you can see in the Donald Trumps of our generation or in the buildings on our skyline all by people with a big ego we can learn an awful lot from Japanese

[33:38] Christians to be understanding much more the nature of their sense of fellowship or you can think of other cultures also making their contribution in different ways so that's why I see that today that when Paul was speaking about that we're all members of the same body we might have thought that being members of the same body is in our individualistic culture that some of us are chemists and some of us are mathematicians and some of us are school teachers and some of us are shopkeepers and business people that we all contribute well that's a very shallow view of contributing in the body of Christ what is a much richer sense of the body of Christ is that God needs Maoris and he needs Aborigines and he needs people from India and people from China all contributing together in a new richness for what is the body of Christ and it's only because we see things globally now with the tech revolution that we have this benefit of a much broader perspective is that an answer

[34:48] I'd like to take that one step further can you can you pick up I'd like to take that one step further and ask you this Japan had an unusual opportunity to develop that we sense in my I'm not sure about that right being an island country or a collection of islands separating itself consciously from Chinese cultures and not allowing immigration they could stay that way for a long time and develop we you know rather than I but we in North America both have immigrant populations right from the beginning more than one kind of person continues to come and we pride ourselves on multiculturalism which happens to be coincident with developing I very egocentric stuff because how do we maintain a sense of identity when our next door neighbor has a whole different identity you know and we aren't strangers to them so how would you address that problem in helping us to become more we centered and less egocentric in a multicultural context yes that is a big big challenge and of course it all goes back to the fact is how multicultural are we really you see is it the dominant culture that's absorbing the minority culture initially and each time that's what's happened

[36:28] I remember arguing with the first minister of culture who was a Christian really did he know what he was doing and being the minister of multicultural for the federal government I don't think he knew what he was doing to be honest but yes I think that's the issue that you see what gets in the way is our pride we're not humble enough to appreciate the whole human race so nothing can be more significant for a Christian than humility that's the protocol and entering into the temple of the king of kings so there are many different dimensions by which you could answer that question yes but it certainly means that we begin to think in other categories and other mindsets you see that we do have paradigm shifts of of mindset it thank you yes please do you see these minority cultures as disappearing do you see these minority cultures that have you know dominated the development of history as slowly disappearing under what you call the robotic culture they're slowly being converted and whatever contribution they might have made is possibly being lost a bit well that's what we have to try and be in a profound sense

[38:13] Christians should be the curators of anthropology as their curators of science and so that's another perspective so take for example the recent into Richmond there are a few Armenian Christians who come in now these Armenian Christians are from Syria well now if you speak to a Syrian Christian about orthodox Christianity they don't think we in the West have been as orthodox as we should be oh is that so well now why well it goes back to the debate of the council of Chalcedon where the question was being asked by the bishops how do we understand the God man that Jesus Christ is both human and divine well the pragmatism of the bishops of Chalcedon of the eastern Mediterranean said well that's easy the distinction is that when Jesus is performing miracles he's the son of

[39:22] God and when he's speaking parables simply to the peasants he's the son of man oh said the Syrian church that's wrong you're trying to explain a mystery when it is a mystery and so they cut themselves off from the the Chalcedonian decision as being a heresy well interesting that now so many centuries later we've got Armenian Christians who can say to us and how have you sustained that attitude about the mystery of the god man you see can we learn anything from you about it in other words none of us are really historical enough you see and if you're haunted by the fact that all history is the source of truth you see then you begin to see things differently so globally and historically we go broader and deeper than ever before it's a different mindset that's all yes last several decades there's this evolving truth that you know that again you could just sorry in the last several decades there's been this evolving truth that there's a divine spark within each of us yes sort of captured by the so-called new age movement yes so i'm just wondering if you could comment on the fact that we're created in the image of god so we have this capacity to fulfill what god's intentions are for our lives for our humanity but how do we respond to that that that comment say by by a modern day person post-modern day person who says i've got all i need within myself to find fulfillment joy meaning purpose yes what do we say to that well we have to say that's not the interpretation of being made in the image and likeness of god because it does not mean that he imparts deity to us what he does is he makes us his representative on earth as his co-agent or co-regent of creation and so it's like the illustration of the pharaohs that on their border posts their custom posts on the borders of the frontiers of

[42:16] Egypt they would have an effigy of the pharaoh that effigy was not that pharaoh actually was there but his power was there his influence was there and so that's in a sense the analogy that we may take that god sets us up as his co-regents and so we rule with him but he is the ruler we're essentially vicegerents or vice regents and so therefore that is totally against any idea that we have deity within ourselves our relationship is an iconic relationship we reflect we relate to but he is the only reality that is god and of course that's reinforced by the doctrine of creato ex nicolo that god created all things that he was not beholden to any other agency or any other source than who he is but it's our idolatrous minds that always want to somehow probe beyond and to not be prepared to accept a mystery and so in the whole study which is a very devious philosophical study of the doctrine of creato ex nicolo we have the kind of situation that we find in the mathematician in oxford at the end of the 19th century when he wrote about what was

[44:00] Alice in Wonderland and the question is asked and who passed you on the road nobody well then nobody must move faster than you do so ex nicolo has to become something in the minds of those who are questioning that probe you see but that's the issue that we find the human mind is always in rebellion to mystery yes I like your comments about we should use creation versus nature but what do you think of Jonathan Edwards has a famous quote nature is God's best evangelist well you see he was caught up and you see we're all enculturated so if you were to think of the culture of Jonathan

[45:00] Edwards in the 18th century he was right in the middle of that whole development of deism and although he was fighting against deism he was still using some of the vocabulary associated with deism you see even though he was against it very vigorously so you see so I think you you always have to see things as a context that happened to be his context general comment if I measure we're all very good at bashing reductionism yes and you've done so effectively this morning however we don't seem to be so good at exploring mystery yes we are very much captive it seems to me as a very intelligent group of

[46:05] Christians in using reductionism in our theology yes and it seems to me very often we don't hear enough and we probably don't experience enough of the mystery and so that is a comment that occurred to me when you talked of your conversation with C.S.

[46:26] Lewis and his hatred of reductionism he also spent his life creating more of a sense of mystery is there a person are there writers are there groups of Christians who are more sensitive to mystery in our present Canadian reality that's a very interesting question I mentioned Rosenstock Hussey who had his own of course we all have our own defaults and he undoubtedly had his too but he's an example of a very devout German Catholic who stood up against Hitler and stood up against having he could have been a brilliant lawyer he could have been a brilliant philosopher he could have been a brilliant theologian but he in a sense navigates through all of these things so his understanding of the transformation of the person in the mystery of Christ is probably one of the very few books that I would say needs further exploration it was published in

[47:49] English in 1947 but you probably never heard of it on the transformation of the Christian life transformation of Christians but he's an example of somebody who saw that and for him the mystery that he dwelt on is the mystery of speech that God has given man this wonderful ability to speak so when we talk about mystery we can speak about mystery in many different levels but one of them would be the mystery of speech that distinguishes the human from the animal as one example of mystery or we could speak about the mystery of being personal which means how far are we for the other and who is the other well we can go on indefinitely being a person in Christ and finding mystery in that reality in other words the problem that we tend to find with mystery it gets hijacked by sacramentalism and so there are people who if one was to think of us as

[49:05] Christians one would say that there are perhaps four categories of Christians that we represent here and we have four different psyches and one psyche is sacramental so to us mystery is all smells and bowels essential and then there is the mystery of communitarianism that you get with what we call the other form of reformation of the Mennonites and the East Europeans and living in communities so there is a mystery of communitarian life and then we have the psyche that's associated with a much more hypercognitive verbal communication that we evangelicals are very good at explaining everything and then we have of course what makes some of us a bit more uncomfortable the charismatic where you're outside of yourself in a much more kind of ecstatic psyche and the problem about being too ecstatic is you're not very familiar with who you are so the problem is we have these divergent psyches even as we share together this morning you see so yes of course it's going to always lead us into so what then is the posture that we should have towards mystery i think the reverence that we cannot give enough to god and with the reverence that we give to god the humility that we have towards god and so that there's no greater need of humility than when we say there's no other name under heaven given amongst men whereby we must be saved for the name of jesus why how do we say that with pride of course we can't say it in pride we're talking about the humility of god so how can we express it other than with the gentleness of amazing love amazing grace so these are some of the ways i'm struggling to answer your question thank you yes to both geographers i just saw that earlier the mystery of language at the ubc geography department if you kept saying the creation would you be regarded as eccentric would people say hey watch it you're bringing another kind of discourse into a science please get rid of that or could you respond to that i i find the use of that word any of our vocabulary can can be offensive and you have to explain it just to respond yes well i think it's how we explain it it's a manner of explanation as i say anyone is attracted to somebody who expresses it very humbly so that would be the first thing for they're not used to humility they're proud of their identity as a professional you see and as i say what i find that's given me freedom in life have been two things one of them is i don't have a professional identity so that's

[53:07] the first thing it gives you freedom and therefore you can explore anything if you're not a professional and then the second thing that i found is that i hide in this cover of historiative ideas because you're always digging back into something further and further past you see so that helps so i don't speak as a geographer so may i respond to that question i'm seen as very eccentric in many ways and using the word creation in class is seen as a dangerous thing it's perceived because the hard secularity of our major university is anxious to dissociate itself from the word creation creation so in a sense that becomes a testimony in a secular environment just using the word creation now it's ridiculous that we've reached that point but it's a reality and i think that of course in one's mentoring of students there is no difficulty at all in speaking about faith it's very often the main reason for our mentoring but in terms of how one incorporates one's statements of faith in formal lectures in a secular institution becomes a challenge and it's quite ridiculous that that should be the case but nevertheless it is so i appreciate your question i think that's no and i think what you're saying all of is that pastorally we will be gentle with the way we approach a question so if they're using a word that we would immediately demolish we don't do that we we we we say well you use the word nature so then let's speak about nature you see all right so then you gently lead them further and further into what are the perspectives that we have about nature and you and we have of course a wonderful geographer clans glacken who's talked about nature and the history of the word and so we refer them to an authority like clans glacken and see where does the word take you that was actually a great work of literature as well as geography there are not many of those but clans glacken's traces on the rhodian shore historical and geographical document yes first of all going back a few minutes you mentioned a book published in 1947 yes are you talking about the christian future

[56:28] Rosencock you think oh yes i think so his husie you mean yes von husie yes he developed he he actually was a jewish christian and he created the adult education program for jews in germany in the 1930s so he became a hitman for hitler and him last and so he fled and went to the state of maine in northeast america he tried out being a professor of philosophy at harvard for three years but that was enough for him and so he then retired to his estate and so there's a whole friends of von husie today that still read his works yes very interesting man we'll talk about that yeah going back to the question of creation in the in geography and elsewhere part of it circumvent the difficulty ambiguity of creation with the notion of stewardship but there's another difficulty that creation as we use the word here today is very close to the concept of creationism which is hated by yes the scientists yes yes and absolutely counterproductive in every respect yes yes the other comment is that you can use various things which are very

[58:30] Christian in the other context I have used the parable about not building your house on sand in the context of environmental impact statements well it's in Matthew of course yes but it isn't yes the ultimate statement about yes paying attention yes to the environment yes yes well that's very right and I think that our sensitivity to bad religion is not a subject I spoke about this morning but that needs to be explored much more and some of you may have attended the laying lectures that we had recently with Richard Dowett who's really a very intelligent journalist in New York for the New York Sunday Times and he's written a book called Bad Religion and creationism is of course an example of bad religion and so that's baggage that we carry as evangelicals we have to get rid of it absolutely that's one decision we reached this morning there tends to be currently a very anti-religious sentiment in science in general yes but I believe you commented that science and religion and faith should be complementary can you expand on that a little well I was

[60:17] I was helped to highlight some of this when I was in Japan because one of my addresses was how there could be a breakthrough for young people in Japan for the Christian faith as no other breakthrough has been in the past and that could be through establishing a new interest in the history of science at the highest level in the national university so I was speaking to the postgraduate students some of who were quantum physicists and mathematicians and other high level scientists and it was saying you know when you look at the history of the origins of science and Asian religions you're embarrassed as a modern scientist with that heritage I mean what happens in eastern religions is that there's a humble woodcutter in the forest and of course everything in the actual religions of Asia are dealing with forest and the forest is primeval primordial and it's mysterious and so here's this humble woodcutter with a hammer and a chisel hammering wood splitting wood he penetrates into the mystery of nature and immediately he becomes a god and now he becomes the god of thunder well you teach that to contemporary students on climatology they laugh at you and so

[62:03] I went to the history museum of Tokyo the national history museum and said do you have an exhibit on the history of modern science oh no oh no no we don't oh why not well we never thought about that they're very embarrassed and then I went to the national museum of culture and said in the history of Japanese culture have you an exhibit on the rise of modern science oh no no no we don't have anything about that you see so that's where we're beginning to show that without the ontology of reformed Christian faith that the Puritans especially people like Thomas Pratt who is one of the founders of the Royal Society and then again at the end of the century we have Boyle who invented of course the discovery of gas behaviours these are the originators of modern science they're

[63:07] Christians and so now we have to say well what would be the entry point for a new generation of Christians in Japan and I think the Achilles will be penetrating through the history of science that is established at a national level now Cambridge have already shown pioneering in this because they have a chair in Cambridge on the on science and faith and it's basically a study of the history of science so that's our entry point it's very exciting that it has to have vision well Jim I think you've exhausted the audience as a as a admirer of your ten decades of

[64:12] Christian witness Christian inspiration ten decades ten decades I should say in your tenth decade if we are all as lively and as provocative when we reach our tenth decade then we should all be very grateful thank you for leading the discussion for provoking the very important remarks about where we should be going thank you for being with us you Thank you.