Paul Sanduleac

Machines and Morality

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 03:00:10 +0300

Of course, if you see people as being, fundamentally, machines, then there really are no moral problems. This is the quandary Harari finds himself in. He knows that AI totalitarianism would be bad, but ultimately his defence of the human is no match for it because his sense of the human is so thoroughly demystified and disenchanted. He never seems to ask whether this thoroughgoing demystification is itself another narrative and if it perhaps leaves out key features of human experience. But if he ever asked himself whether human beings are more than just biological machines, he would have to restart his entire intellectual project from scratch.

– The fables of Davos Man

Self-worship is not enough

Sun, 15 Sep 2024 13:00:10 +0300

Worth wondering—when we’re downloading these mental health apps in our millions, repeating our positive affirmations, speaking in the language of salvation and higher powers—what we’re really drawn to here. Worth asking ourselves, at least, why we mocked religion only to mimic it. And why what we’re doing isn’t working. My guess is that what we need most in this chaotic world is moral direction. What we need most in a rapidly changing world is rootedness. Could just be me but when I listen to the misery and confusion of my generation beneath it I hear a heartbreaking need—a need to be bound to others, to a community, to a moral code, to something more. This is not enough.

I’m not saying we should all be religious. But I do believe we all worship something. We all serve somebody. And the bitter irony is, the best way to protect your mental health is to be damn sure it isn’t yourself.

– Our New Religion Isn’t Enough

Credobaptism, nature, and grace

Fri, 30 Aug 2024 13:00:10 +0300

One can say, therefore, that every criticism of infant baptism runs the danger of falling back on the position of the Anabaptists, who always started from the contrast between nature and grace. They could not believe that “the natural” could have a place in the Covenant, because they thought that this threatened “the spiritual” of the Covenant. The Reformers, however, always maintained that the contrast was not between nature and grace, but between flesh and spirit, sin and grace, and that for that reason the richness of baptism could not be threatened by normal life, unless it be through superficiality. The position of the Reformers is inviolable here. It rests immediately upon Scripture. Against those who asked for a direct scriptural proof in which infant baptism was divinely commanded, the Reformers courageously pointed at the injustice of this question. In response, they asked their critics precisely where the Bible says that this fundamental Covenant relation is broken in the New Covenant.

– G.K. Berkouwer, The Sacraments.

Preachers, don't pretend

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 13:00:10 +0300

You must be what you profess to be. Unless God is really in your own life, controlling, directing it, is manifest, your preaching and ministry will avail nothing, or be of very little real value. To pretend to be what we are not will be fatal to our effectiveness.

– Francis Grimke, Meditations on preaching.

Image: Log College Press

Artificial achievements

Thu, 15 Aug 2024 13:00:10 +0300

When we discover that some record-breaking swim or jump was fueled by artificial performance enhancers, we are rightly scandalized. How much more so if we discovered the swimmer wasn’t human at all! “But why?” the AI enthusiasts might ask. “If it’s amazing to watch someone long jump 30 feet, wouldn’t it be even cooler to have a world where robotically-assisted athletes jumped 50 feet?” Google’s marketing team might think so, but the rest of us know better.

We begin by letting the AI correct our spelling, and soon find ourselves letting it draft entire emails. At first, we might ask it to summarize some articles for us so we can save time on research and focus on thinking and writing, but before long—especially if we find ourselves in a pinch—we may ask it to do the thinking and writing too, so we can focus on … enjoying more leisure time, perhaps? What begins as a supplement can quickly become a substitute, if we’re not careful.

Not only does the lack of effort take something away from the pleasure or achievement, but it deprives us of the opportunity for growth, causing our capabilities to atrophy. If we are too careless in letting Copilot take the controls, we may find ourselves hurtling toward a future not unlike that of Pixar’s dystopian tale WALL-E, in which the surviving humans, glued to their screens and their Slurpee straws, became less authentically human than their robots.

– Brad Littlejohn, The anti-human temptation of AI.

Technology and our passions

Wed, 14 Aug 2024 13:00:10 +0300

Attentive readers of the account of Genesis 11, however, might notice that the Babel builders begin not with a plan to build a city and tower, but with the discovery of a technique for firing bricks. The determination to build the city and tower seemingly arises, at least in part, out of humanity’s intoxication with new technological potential.

…the words and works of creatures striving for a rebellious autonomy have their own tendencies to autonomy and can imprison those who supposed themselves to be their masters. Make an idol – political or technological – and it will turn on you. The Lord’s frustration of humanity’s ambitions through death, the resistance of creation, the confusion of language, the scattering of humanity, and other such means are ways in which he saves us from those who seek to be, or create, gods.

Like Nebuchadnezzar, proud in our technological capacities, our humanity is debased as technology empowers our passions to dominate us. Seeking to exercise our good human abilities in illicit ways to attain godlike power, we lose not only the godlike power we thought we had, but even our good human abilities themselves.

– Alastair Roberts, Tech Cities of the Bible.

Wendell Berry on modern marriage

Tue, 13 Aug 2024 13:00:10 +0300

Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate “relationship” involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the “married” couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other. The modern household is the place where the consumptive couple do their consuming. Nothing productive is done there. Such work as is done there is done at the expense of the resident couple or family, and to the profit of suppliers of energy and household technology. For entertainment, the inmates consume television or purchase other consumable diversion elsewhere.

– Wendell Berry, Feminism, The Body, And The Machine.

Unhealthy pedagogy

Fri, 09 Aug 2024 13:00:10 +0300

Following this logic, the job of an education is to fill students with correct information and right opinions, which are possessed by the teachers or curricula. Arguments are not to be presented as arguments—since then they are open to questioning—but rather as bedrock truths. Often students are discouraged from speaking—and in some cases I’ve seen, prohibited from doing so—if they aim to challenge the opinion of the teacher, curriculum, or dogma of the Church. In my experience, one of two things happens in these situations. Either certain like-minded students form a cult-like following around certain teachers (since they alone possess the truth) or students grow disinterested and seethe quietly in their seats, as they realize they are being infantilized. Both scenarios expose the unhealthy fruit of an unhealthy pedagogy.

The students’ subjective feelings are not a reason to dismiss them as irredeemable victims of the modern world, but rather the starting point for their journey out of the cave.

Auden claims, perhaps counterintuitively, that a certain amount of distance between teacher and student is necessary to allow the student to approach the truth freely. He posits this as a third way between the “traditional birch” and the “progressive lollipop,” both of which place the teacher’s will at the center of the pedagogy… a sound educational philosophy must treat the students as free human subjects, and orient itself around their growth.

– Mike St. Thomas, Contemplative Pedagogy.

Physics and Philosophy after World War II

Tue, 06 Aug 2024 13:00:10 +0300

While Einstein and Bohr’s generation was widely schooled in philosophy, the push toward specialization after World War II had taken its toll on the liberal arts education of the new crop of physicists. Academic departments had become Balkanized as they had grown in the postwar boom, and physicists, busy with enormous grants and hard-nosed calculations, were generally dismissive of philosophy. So physics trudged along, not wknowing that a major revolution had happened in an adjacent field. And philosophers were, mostly, not surprised by this.

– Adam Becker, What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics, page 189.

To Change The World, by James Hunter

Mon, 05 Aug 2024 03:00:10 +0300

To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World, by James Davison Hunter

The first 2/3 of this book are mostly helpful. The last third is a mixed bag. James Hunter sets out to correct common evangelical approaches to culture, and to offer his own. His theses are as follows: (1) Culture change starts with the elites, not with the grassroots, therefore mere individual evangelism does not result in changing culture. This point has a lot of merit. (2) Changing culture has to do with theories of power. Hunter is very much against anything “Constantinian”, any goals of conquest and domination. He loves the “exiles” paradigm, except when it comes to cases of biblical exile where a pagan ruler is rebuked by prophets or where a they are brought to acknowledge the lordship of the true God. (3) Modern Christians conceive of power as too exclusively/focused on the political. Politicizing everything. “To pass a law is to change culture.” Again, this is a rebuke that needs to be heard. Hunter is at his best in the first parts of the book where he analyzes existing approaches.

“When people participate in common grace operations, they are not, strictly speaking, building the kingdom of God. This side of heaven culture cannot be the kingdom of God.”

Hunter seeks to find a middle ground between neo-anabaptism and superficial dominionism. “Engaging the world means both affirmation and antithesis. Affirmation should be the starting point because God affirmed the good things in the world at creation.(…) [Yet] the world of common grace is not neutral. It is God’s world after all.”

Hunter’s proposal is to abandon talk of “redeeming/reclaiming/transforming the culture,” because “it carries too much weight.” That’s fine as far as it goes. He proposes instead that Christians and churches purse a paradigm of “faithful witness.” Again, fine as far as it goes. But what’s the plan for when that witness grows and gets a hearing? An aspect he should have talked about, and never did, is whether Christians are promised lasting cultural impact in their labors and witness. Perhaps they are not, then faithful witness is a good ad biblical goal. But are they promised failure in that faithful witness? Perhaps failure is not guaranteed either. He emphatically says that common evangelical approaches do not work, but he’s certain that if people follow his path to Christian engagement it “will inevitably permeate elite networks.” Really? Inevitably?

Some of Hunter’s failures come from his deep, unspoken, and unexamined commitment to American pluralism. “Christians should not pursue Christian culture and government.” ““America was never a Christian nation, the West was never a Christian civilization.” On that last point, Hunter contradicts himself. He’s confident we live in a “post-Christian” culture, but how can that be if it was never Christian to begin with?