 |
 |
Richard S. KirbyChicago, 20/07/1998"The role of theology in a technological world"SUMMARY:
|
   
|
INTERVIEW:Question 1 Answer Although theology is called in general "the science of God", what that actually means is that it is the ordered exposition of doctrines that touch upon particular ways in which humankind has experienced God, such as in the incarnation of Christ, or in the coming of the Holy Spirit, or—in Judaism—in the rescuing of the Israelites, and—in Islam—in the coming of the Prophet and the development of the idea of a Spiritual civilisation, and so on. Theology therefore lives in theologies like people live in houses, and when we are studying the place of theology in a scientific world we want to honour that science by being as scientific as possible. That includes exactitude of the kind I have just said in my definition; also completeness. It’s part of the work of a scholar, and theologians certainly should be scholars, as are scientists, to know what we are talking about, and to be as complete as possible. So there are many kinds of theology: there is philosophical theology, that establishes a relationship between theology and philosophy, there is systematic theology, that orders the doctrines. There are also some newer kinds of theology: there is existential theology, there is liberation theology, that deals more with the urgent, Marxist approach. The premise, translated from Marxist philosophy that philosophy should change the world rather than understand it, translates here into theology. And this is an interesting opportunity for theologies interested in science. But if theology is going to have a place in a scientific world it has to have some affinity for that scientific world. Somebody once said, "a roof that has no affinity for the sky is always in danger of falling in". And this has happened to a great extent in theology since the time of Galileo. In the time of the Galileo incident, even though the present Pope has apologised for the treatment of Galileo, it is well known that there are series of remarks, some of them apocryphal, but others conveying an important truth about the schism between science and religion, that when Galileo showed the facts through his telescope he was told that couldn’t be so because that conflicted with an existing theological cosmology, and when people were invited to look though the telescope they "do not confuse me with facts when my mind is made up". So when we talk about the place of theologies in a scientific world we are dealing with an entrenched resistance to it. That is a sad story but it is not the end of the story because we have a series of movements - science and religion in dialogue, science and theology in dialogue - so there is scope for a scientific theology. But theologies also live in religious communities. There is an ancient saying lex orandi, lex credendi, "the law of praying is the law of believing", which symbolises the fact that doctrines grow out of religious experience, and religious experiences to some extent come out of the wilderness, but also come out of formative communities. So your question translates into a different question, in theological syntax, and that is, what is the role of the churches, of religious communities, synagogues, mosques, and so on, in the scientific world of tomorrow. That is a question that can be answered very practically. The work I am doing in the University of Washington and elsewhere is to try and create science education programs within churches. That means changing our thinking about the particular branch of theology called "ecclesiology", or the study of the nature of the Church. The word ecclesiology comes from ancient Greek: ekklesia, meaning "called out of", so the religious community or the home of theology is a place that is supposed to have come out of the cosmos and brings sacred values, into the world, in this case the world of science and technology. If the churches do not get involved in things like computers, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, space travel and so on, than it won’t have a role to play. So, your question about the place of theology in a scientific world translates into an invitation to churches to change their thinking about science, and in fact that’s easy to do because the very notion of science only means "knowledge", so the sacred science which is theology here has the opportunity to impinge in a redemptive way upon particular works of science and technology. With my students at the University of Washington, I am reasoning analogically from the periodic table of the elements in chemistry to the periodic table of industries. And I say, theologies live in churches, businesses live in industries. There is an industrial side to science, there is a political side to science, and the churches, or any sacred communities, have a message to bring to this particular zones of culture: namely, what is the moral core of scientific method and scientific results? We can look particularly at things like the Y2K problem, the millennium bug, and say: I wonder how that could have happened? So what begins in metaphysics ends in politics: for instance, how can religious communities get involved in something like the Y2K problem? The answer is that they can get involved in many ways.
Question 2 Answer There are both pure and applied parts of this; for instance, when we think about questions of so called pure ethics, we are thinking about things like "do we have responsibility towards future generations"; that’s something debated by ethicists today and it’s quite an important question. There are also questions of applied ethics, however, two of which I am on: medical ethics and financial ethics. With questions like, "if there are three people who need a kidney transplant, who gets it?" There’s an ethical dilemma here. But I think this is the foundation of the subject, when I urge people to move away from the idea of ethics as dilemma to the science of the advancement, of our expression of ourselves as moral beings, and ethical agents. Why do I think the technology of communication and so on have brought a powerful opportunity to the world of ethics? Because ethics like any science has to express itself through some kind of medium of communication and behind that medium of communication is a philosophy, a philosophy with categories, as Aristotle, Kant and others would say. We can’t speak without these categories. Now, up until the nineteenth century it was said that the whole of philosophy was footnotes to Plato. What they had in mind was that notions like "substance", and "accident" and "essence", and so on, were the stock in-trade of philosophical discussion. But in the coming of various people, Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, H. G. Wells, and others (and this connects some of the futures movement), it became more and more clear that the scientific world from the Industrial Revolution on, in fact back to the sixteenth century Epistemological Revolution, has been a world of change. In books like Process and Reality and Science and the Modern World Whitehead substituted systematically the idea of the process as the cardinal metaphysical category. This leads, by a rather complex road, to our present situation: what is the ethics of process, and how does that touch upon the technology of communication, and vice versa? One very simple thing for us to understand is the ethics of speed. Everyone can understand the need for urgency. I want to introduce the notion of vector here, vector means "force with direction", or "speed with direction. I have been working in the field of vector philosophy as an approach to ethics and communication. In vector based ethics we have ways to touch people almost instantaneously, to be connected with people all over the world, to enlarge the collective consciousness of the human race. Therefore, the collective intelligence that we can achieve with multiple, simultaneous communication, virtual communities and so on, are ways in which ethical urgency has been enlarged by technologies of communication. The issues of privacy, for instance, secrecy, disclosure, and so on as ethical dilemmas are things, I think, that are resolved by the free play of moral consciousness across the Internet. So there is a great opportunity here for the technologies of communication to potentiate ethical reflection and in that way to help people to understand the answer to a very fundamental ethical question, which is: "who is my neighbour?" Perhaps this is the most fundamental of them all, if you believe in personalistic ethics which is the idea that ethics is about human relationships. That is a particular school of ethics but it is one that is very pertinent to our time. So, I would say that ethics in itself is not affected by technologies of communication but the very categories with which we do our thinking can be changed and enlarged, even improved, I would dare to say, by technology.
Question 3 Answer The great goals of civilisation - healing, prosperity, the cultivation of beauty, and so on - are the goals toward which we will want to deploy a technological future. Going back to my earlier point: let’s be sure we know what we are talking about. There is a prevalent assumption that technology is something that is happening to us, that we are on rails going inexorably towards a technological future. That’s simply a false analysis of the human situation. And of some of our choices. Moreover, we need to be sure we know what we are talking about when we talk about technology. The word techne, from which we get technology, is a very complex, subtle word. In ancient times it meant craft, it implied something artistic, creative, manufactured. So, actually, technology is the offspring of two parents, science and art. This is rarely understood, it is very important to people to understand the artistic implications of technology, not only in industry but in crafts, and when we speak of crafts we speak of art. So, if we would speak of the ethical basis of the technological future, it would be first of all in the cultivation of goals implied by the study of ethics, and those goals would be the great goals of human existence: liberation from pain and illness, liberation from ugliness and squalor, liberation from poverty, for example. The ethicist can help in the deployment of things like computers and artificial intelligence towards those ends by clarifying what the goals are, by mobilising moral consciousness and moral energies in the way that I have said. And that has to be done in some sort of ethical community, except in very rare cases of a sort of moral genius. But the technological future is not only deployed by ethicists but also refined. As we study the goals, or supposed goals, of human existence, we find often that they are radically incoherent. For example, if you take the goal of the "thinking machine", and say, well, "is that a person?", that turns out to be a set of very mixed scientific goals, of varying quality, and the human quality of the technological future is something we can work on by clarifying our ethical consciousness. A couple of cases in point here: one, as I say, is the Y2K problem. We have arrived at this partly because of the incoherence of society, where different branches of society like ethics, religion, science, art, politics, are all pulling in different directions and not towards a common goal. So, ethical leaders can have a great part to play in the sanctification, in the redemption of computer science. One problem that everyone can understand is the future of the automobile. What does the ethicist have to say about the automobile? A huge amount. I am work on something called "the social theory of the automobile", that takes as its premise some of the following ideas. A car is a world, a cosmos. An automobile is a continuing creation, and not just an event. And an automobile as a social reality can and should express a whole hierarchy of human values. Anybody can look at their car right now and say, "am I changing it day by day to suit my purposes, and do I even know what they are. One way that we can affect the technology of the future is to affect our journeys, and we can affect our journeys by affecting the technology that is setting our journeys, namely cars. As we are talking around the world there are billions of automated journeys going on; each of those is an occasion of moral excellence. So that is an example that people can get into right away.
Question 4 Answer We are the sum of our choices, and even our investigations of the future are the sum of the cognitive choices that we make. Ethicists teach that behind cognition and the moral foundation of consciousness, is a moral consciousness. This implies, therefore, that future studies should have a moral foundation. The method, therefore the ideal of futurist, and here we are moving to a central category of ethics, namely the study and the pursuit of the ideal, the futurist who works with categories like possible, preferable, and probable futures, has as the background and foreground of all such searches the search for the ideal future. That is the very nature and grammar of the ideal, the search of something that cannot be achieved, and yet were it not calling us we would not even be looking for it. So here we have something very practical immediately, and that is that futures studies can be conceived as the search for the possibility of an ideal society and the road to it. And that fits with existential futures studies as well, because instead of seeing the future as coming out as like an express train, instead, existential philosophy shows us to be the sum of our choices. One of the first choices we can make as futurists is to study the landscape of our consciousness as ethical reflectors and as moral agents to study the possibility of ourselves as developers of the future. So, the special calling of the ethical futurist is to articulate the nature of the study of the ideal in the future. We need to think about apocalyptic eschatology, and other approaches to the future that we may or may not reject. Therefore I think that ethicists and futurists have to combine in studying scientific cosmology. John Barrow and Frank Tipler in their book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, which appeared in 1988 out of Oxford University Press, lay out the whole long term future of human evolution, which they see somewhat oddly I think as a self-programming automaton, with computers taking over the world. That may be a barbarous idea from the point of view of personalist ethics, but at least it is a study of the scientific future. Other authors like Bertrand Russell in his book Icarus or the Future of Science have inquired into whether a future civilisation could be truly scientific and yet endure. The ethicist here is laying a foundation for thinking about the scientific future; that means we have to bring cosmology, scientific cosmology, into our thinking.
Question 5 Answer At the other extreme there is a medium of communication, and what is communicated is opportunity and invitation. So here we see a theory of media that implies an invitation to react, an extension of an opportunity, the very notion of knowledge, as catalyst, as an exchange. If the underprivileged communities are going to be reached by the mass media, they have to do so as the result of a change in heart on the part of the media. I do not want to make it sound worse than it is: the role of the media is also to highlight something and to inspire, and the people who are going to be inspired are young people who can reverse the situation of underprivileged communities and go to them. For example, mobile media - the idea of one person representing a sort of virtual newspaper - can become an agent of news to underprivileged communities, so here we could develop the picture of a sort of a cross between a Franciscan friar and a robot in their going to underprivileged communities. But the goal of social development is that the underprivileged will be changed into privileged. So the goal of the media, I think, is first of all to exhibit that fractured state of society and to give to young people, or media leaders and innovators, an opportunity to reach these people.
Question 6 Answer I want to end with a note of celebration and invitation. Our Youth Futurist Academy is seeking to develop what we call "a million youth power engine", a thousand participating cities, each having a thousand young people, to train themselves as celebrators of the future with the skills to enter into the high-tech world, in computers, the millennium bug, the development of cars, and the mass media of the future. But to do so in a way that honours the best of ethics, the best of futures studies, the best of science fiction, and religion. There are many issues for the Youth Futurists to work on this way. For instance, what is the charter of ethics for outer space?. Programmes like Star Trek raise interesting questions. For instance, there are no ministers of religion in the future according to Star Trek. Possibly, God doesn’t exist in outer space, or in the future, but if that’s a false statement then some young people need to start showing us. Years ago, I was commissioned by the Episcopal church to write a story about the first chaplain on the moon. I am glad to say it was a woman. And a thing we always want to bring in is feminist thinking, when we are thinking about future studies, and that tends to emphasise compassion rather than dominion. And in all that I have said, I want to make it clear that we are looking at a world of ethics including Tao ethics—I personally am working on a book called The Tao of Driving, which looks at the ethics of the Tao and not just Judeo-Christian ethics, in thinking about the future. So our religious communities have to be adept, and fluent, in the ethics of Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Shinto, etc. looking at the integration of science and religion and so on within communities. The final purpose of a religious futurist group is to rid the human race of Neo-Platonism, and thinking that philosophy is about ideas, and producing a theology of action. Because our theology is a theology of persons, we see religious futures as the building of communities of the future of wise beings, young and old. I have another program of senior citizens: I have a seventy year old jazz singer working with me in Seattle, who is going to produce a manifesto for the Wise Beings of Tomorrow empowering older people to mobilise their wisdom. Religious Futurists are also against ageism, whether it be disempowering the old, or disempowering the young. The goal of the Religious Futurists system is to mobilise ethical energies in all age groups, in all communities and to maximise the amount of operative wisdom in the world.
|
 |
