This is the first of a series of five talks about Making Sense of Religion, in which I finally “come out” and declare “I got religion!” —which is a bit of a double entendre and I’ll leave it to you to figure out what I mean. This introductory talk is a bit long, and also a bit dense, and might include some things that are a bit controversial. If so, I hope you will point them out.
I want to be very clear in saying too that although this series will reflect much of the extraordinary teaching of Dr. Weaver in this class over the years, they do not necessarily reflect his views. In other words, he is in no way responsible for the mess I may have made of his teaching!
So, I got religion, often understood as an institution that provides answers to things people don’t understand. But for the past several centuries another institution, science, has increasingly provided those answers, leading skeptical intellectuals to assume that as science advances, religion retreats. It’s an assumption seldom challenged these days. It appears to many to be an inevitable natural trajectory of progress, whereby:
- Early humans confronted a mysterious and threatening world.
- They explained what they could not understand through religious myth, ritual, and divine agency.
- Along came Science, which began to replace religious explanations with natural law.
- As it continues to do so, Religion becomes increasingly unnecessary—and will eventually disappear.
It is a logical story, right enough. But is it right? Is religion primarily an explanatory system? Is its central function to explain why there is lightning, why there is disease, why the seasons change, why we die? Because if it is, then religion should indeed fade away as its explanations of divine intervention or divine mystery or human sin are replaced by reproducible scientific proofs of cause and effect3.
But what if the story and the assumptions behind it are wrong? What if religion was never really about explaining the physical world in the first place? That does not mean religion should be unconcerned with reality and stick to the domain we have traditionally called spiritual, because in fact the two domains do leak into one another through the subdomains of meaning, relationship, and alignment.
In any case, it is my belief that true faith cannot arise from the system of logic we apply (successfully) to explain the physical realm. Faith in the spiritual realm can only arise from something more personal and more immediate—from experience, intuition, or encounter. In my own case, for example, faith came through a lucid dream of pure feeling, which began as overwhelming terror. It was as though I awoke suddenly to the certainty that an entity of Absolute Evil was present and was about to consume me in some unimaginably horrible way. I was almost paralyzed with fear but somehow managed to squeak out “God is stronger than you.” And the instant I said that, the terror vanished, replaced by a feeling of grace in the presence I knew as God.
Now, what are we to do with such experiences? We can just dismiss them as meaningless, or we can try to explain them scientifically, perhaps neurologically. We can reduce them to brain states, chemistry, or evolutionary artifacts. And perhaps, one day, science will be able to describe every mechanism involved in my dream down at the quantum level. But even if it does, something would remain unexplained. It’s not simply a question of how or why an experience occurred. It’s a question of what the experience means.
Manil Suri, writing in the Templeton Ideas newsletter, March 25, 2026 (“Mathematics Can Do Anything But This”) suggested that mathematics is not merely a language we use to describe the universe, but that the universe itself may be, in some sense, the unfolding of mathematical structure. He’s a mathematician, so may be biased, and his thesis is even denser than mine. But even if he is right, it still leaves unanswered the deeper question: how can structure give rise to experience—to consciousness, to meaning, to moral awareness?
The issue raised by my own experience is bigger than just a dream. It involves the entire relationship between science and meaning. Every time science explains away a mystery, are we to conclude that the mystery itself has been eliminated? Or should we recognize that we have only described the mechanism by which something meaningful is experienced?
The history of science suggests to me that scientific explanation pushes mystery down to a deeper level. Mystery is what remains when explanation succeeds but meaning is not exhausted. Mystery is not a failure of knowledge, but a sign that we are dealing with something structurally richer or deeper than our explanatory tools can reach (so far). Science can peel back the layers of the onion, but the onion is infinitely large. So science can never get to the bottom of it. If that interpretation is correct, then the advance of science does nothing to displace religion. Perhaps, then, it is time to reconsider what religion is actually about.
To reiterate: If religion were primarily a set of explanations about the physical world, we would expect it to disappear as those explanations are replaced, but that is not what we observe. In some parts of the world, institutional religion is reported to be declining but in others it is reported to be rising, and the fact is that religion has been remarkably persistent over the entire course of recorded human history, perhaps because the fundamental human concerns that religion has always rightly addressed have not only never gone away, but may even be intensifying.
Why? Because we live in a world of extraordinary technological power. Our global communication networks, advanced computation, and increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence have brought us no closer to resolving the deepest questions that have always confronted us.
Questions such as…
- How should we really live?
- Deep down, what do we owe one another?
- What sustains the trust needed to run a complex society?
- What is to prevent power from becoming domination?
… are not questions that science is even designed to answer. They are questions about alignment—about how conscious beings relate to one another and to the structure of reality itself. Across cultures and centuries, religious traditions have wrestled with precisely this problem: how conscious beings possessing autonomy, power, and self-interest can live together without destroying one another.
Religions differ enormously among themselves in doctrine, in practice, in cosmology, and in emphasis. Some focus on transcendence, others on law, others on enlightenment, others on devotion. But if we look beneath those differences, we discover that they all consistently address what can roughly be grouped into three recurring and interrelated human tendencies: First, a desire for autonomy—we don’t want others to control us; second, a desire for power over others—we want to control them; and third, the human tendency to selfishness.
These tendencies are inevitably destabilizing, unless and until something intervenes. Surely, something must have intervened, because otherwise those very human tendencies would have led us to destroy ourselves, as we seem to be doing right now. (Which perhaps explains the rush to religion!) What is that something? To Christians, it is called grace, forgiveness, and love. Buddhists call it compassion. Daoists call it alignment with the Way and non-coercion. Jews and Moslems call it covenant and justice tempered with mercy.
The language varies but the core concept does not. Each tradition, in its own way, is grappling with the same underlying problem of how to prevent cycles of retaliation, domination, and breakdown in a community of intelligent beings? To clarify: I am not claiming that all religions say the same thing, but that at their core they are oriented toward the same problem.
A similar pattern can be discerned in modern science; for example, evolutionary biology documents the value of cooperation—nature is not all red in tooth and claw. Over time and at scale, the consistent pattern that evolutionary science and other sciences reveal is that societies governed purely by competition—by pure self-interest—tend toward instability, fragmentation, or failure to scale over time. They generate cycles of escalation, in which retaliation leads to counter-retaliation, exploitation leads to distrust, and distrust leads to fragmentation.
Such societies often collapse, or at least fail to scale; while those that endure tend to stabilize around certain recurring patterns of (1) cooperation, whereby people work together; (2) restraint, whereby people limit their own immediate advantage; and (3) reciprocity, whereby people respond in kind over time.
Cooperation, restraint, and reciprocity do not necessarily require altruism in the strong sense. They can arise from enlightened self-interest. But in practice, they tend to evolve toward something that, even in an artificially intelligent system, looks very much like altruism, and the reason is because over time, systems that include forgiveness, generosity, and a willingness to absorb short-term loss for long-term stability outperform those that do not. Doesn’t that sound very much like the religious language of grace?
If so, then what religion has described as grace may represent something even deeper or more fundamental than belief. It may describe the moral ecology required for intelligent systems, human or artificial, to survive their own power. When we say “grace” in a traditional theological sense, we often mean something like unearned favor—God giving what is not deserved. But if we step back and look structurally, grace can be understood more broadly as the interruption of retaliation, the refusal to reduce relationships to strict accounting, and the willingness to preserve a relationship at any cost.
In other words, in any complex system of interacting agents—whether human or artificial—if every interaction is governed strictly by calculation, proportional return, and immediate self-interest, then over time, the system becomes brittle. Trust erodes, cooperation breaks down, and stability declines. But if the system includes gracious elements such as forgiveness, generosity, and restraint then the system becomes resilient, able to absorb shocks and recover from breakdown. That is what I mean by “moral ecology.” Just as biological life depends on ecological balance, intelligent life may depend on moral balance. And grace may be the name religion has given to that balance.
What if, instead of being primarily about explaining lightning (and so on), religion is an attempt to describe the gracious conditions under which conscious life remains stable? In that case, science does not eliminate religion. It only deepens the level at which we ask religious questions. Instead of asking What causes lightning? we ask What sustains trust among people? Instead of asking: Why do we die? we ask What makes a life meaningful? Instead of asking Where is God? we ask What makes moral awareness possible at all? When we ask such questions, religion does not disappear. It takes us to a deeper level of description and understanding.
Up to this point, we have been reconsidering the past—how religion has been understood, and perhaps misunderstood, in relation to science and knowledge… and humanity. But the argument becomes much sharper when we turn to the future, and to non-human forms of intelligence.
For fourteen billion years, the universe has been engaged in a remarkable process of increasing complexity. Matter gives rise to life; life gives rise to consciousness and intelligence; and consciousness and intelligence appear to give rise to moral awareness. This progression suggests that evolution is not merely biological. It is, in a meaningful sense, the gradual awakening of intelligence within the universe itself.
And we now stand at a point in that process that is without precedent. For the first time in the history of our species, intelligence may soon exist in forms that are not exclusively biological. Through artificial systems, hybrid cognition, and global networks, intelligence is beginning to expand beyond the human substrate. This is not just another technological development. It is a change in the architecture of intelligence itself. And with that change, a familiar question returns—but in a new and more urgent form: What moral framework can sustain a civilization composed of human, non-human, and possibly superhuman intelligence?
We are no longer speaking only about human beings—individuals who share a common biology, similar cognitive constraints, and roughly comparable vulnerabilities. We are beginning to imagine and even to encounter systems of intelligence that differ from us in fundamental ways. They are computational, not biological, with speed, memory, and pattern recognition capabilities that are orders of magnitude faster than ours, and with additional modes of awareness through non-biological sensory inputs such as radar.
We don’t know whether such intelligent systems will become conscious. I think they will, but even before reaching that threshold, they already participate in decision-making, coordination, and influence at scales that affect human life, so the question becomes: What happens when intelligence is no longer singular, but plural? Not just us, but us and them—multiple interacting intelligences?
At that point, the problem we identified earlier becomes sharper. How do you prevent cycles of domination, retaliation, and instability not just among humans but also between and among us and them? Because after all, the dynamics don’t change. If anything, they intensify. Greater intelligence does not eliminate conflict. It amplifies both the capacity for cooperation and the capacity for harm. We have seen this all too often in human history. Technological power has consistently outpaced moral development. We have become extraordinarily capable of acting, without becoming proportionately capable of governing our actions wisely. In the short term, we have developed immense capability coupled with uneven moral maturity. In the long-term, as intelligence continues to expand, then the conditions required for stability may become more stringent.
And this brings us back again to grace. If systems of interacting agents (human and/or machine) tend toward instability under pure competition, and if they stabilize only when patterns such as cooperation, restraint, reciprocity emerge as something like altruism, then we can begin to see grace in a new light: not merely as a religious sentiment or a moral exhortation, but as an emergent condition that appears latent in the structure of reality, only emerging as intelligence develops. Ultimately, grace is what allows communities to absorb conflict without collapsing into escalation. It is what allows people to remain in relationship without reducing every interaction to what’s-in-it-for-me calculation. It is what interrupts the otherwise endless cycle of injury leading to retaliation leading to counter-retaliation.
And if that is so, then grace is neither accidental nor optional. It is necessary, but not in the sense that systems consciously adopt it, as though grace were a policy choice or a moral technology to be implemented. It is necessary in a deeper, structural sense. Systems and societies do not decide to incorporate grace. It is not a commodity to be picked off a shelf—it is all around. Systems and societies either come into alignment with it or they fragment under the pressures of misalignment.
Grace is neither a doctrine nor a virtue. It is there when it is most needed. We can see this intuition in the ancient Chinese concept of the Mandate of Heaven. A ruling dynasty was understood to govern legitimately only so long as it remained aligned with the moral order. Corrupt and oppressive dynasties, or those just indifferent to the well-being of the people, were ultimately held to account not for their moral failings but because they had lost alignment with the deeper structure that sustained their authority—what we might describe as falling out of grace.
The consequences were not framed primarily as punishment. They were understood as the natural unraveling of misalignment: famine, disorder, rebellion, collapse. The dynasty did not simply fail morally; in the absence of grace, it became unsustainable structurally. Power severed from moral coherence eventually destabilizes itself.
What is striking about this idea is that it does not depend on theological agreement. One does not have to subscribe to a particular conception of Heaven to recognize the pattern. The intuition is structural: systems that drift too far from the conditions that sustain coherence eventually fragment.
We are now in a position to make more concrete the idea that religion may describe the moral ecology required for intelligent systems to survive their own power.
Biological systems depend on ecological balance whereby living organisms, natural resources, and environmental conditions regulate one another in such a way that the system remains stable and life-sustaining. Intelligent systems depend on a “moral ecology,” a relational balance whereby trust, forgiveness, generosity, restraint, and willingness preserve relationship rather than confer advantage to one party. Religious traditions, seeing what happens to communities over time, have encoded these gracious virtues in scripture, law, ritual, and teaching. What we are now beginning to see—through a completely different intellectual path (science)—is that those observations may correspond to deep structural realities.
Once again, what remains to be explained, however, is why these patterns—cooperation, restraint, reciprocity, and what we have called grace—have been so consistently preserved within religious traditions rather than solely within secular moral philosophy or social convention. The answer may lie in the unique role religion has played as a long-duration carrier of human insight. Political systems are often short-lived, and philosophical systems tend to be confined to intellectual elites, but religions operate across generations, cultures, and at all levels of society. They encode these patterns not only in abstract principles but in scriptures, rituals, laws, and lived practices that are repeated, embodied in people, and transmitted over centuries. In doing so, they function as a kind of civilizational memory—retaining and stabilizing those modes of relationship that have proven capable of sustaining communities over time. What we are now beginning to recognize, through the independent lens of science, is that these inherited patterns may not be arbitrary or merely cultural, but reflect underlying structural conditions for the persistence of complex, intelligent systems.
We have arrived at a critical turning point in our exposition. If the expansion of intelligence makes the dynamics of moral ecology scientifically more visible as necessary and unavoidable, then the relationship between science and religion begins to reverse. Instead of science displacing religion, science begins to illuminate the conditions under which religion becomes intelligible. Which is why I am suggesting, perhaps provocatively, that religion may not disappear as science advances, after all. In fact, for some of us, it may finally begin to make sense.
One important clarification: Is it religion, or it is Scripture, that has been misunderstood? I think the answer is both, though in different ways.
Scripture, particularly in the Judeo-Christian tradition, does not behave like an answer book, though we try our best to treat it as one. It does not present itself as a systematic explanation of reality, of cause and effect. Instead, as Dr. Weaver has long been at pains to teach us, it can function as a formative text that shapes our perception and trains us in discernment. It resists premature closure of exploration. It preserves paradox rather than resolving it. And it does all this by asking questions rather than simply answering them. “Where are you?” was the first divine question put to Adam and Eve. God can perhaps be understood not as looking for an explanation, he as offering an invitation to awareness.
When Scripture is treated as a repository of fixed answers—when it is forced into a system that eliminates ambiguity—it is being misunderstood not because it is false, but because it is being used in a way that is inconsistent with its own form. Religion, as it has developed historically, institutionalizes, and institutions like stability, so they create fixed structures—doctrines, boundaries, and authorities. We’ll delve deeper into this topic next week.
But while structure conserves insight, it also conserves and hardens interpretation, and as a result, over time, the map begins to replace the territory. Fixed doctrines become closed to questions. Ambiguity is reduced, but so is the original dynamism—the formative, perceptual, participatory dimension of the religion.
So religion is misunderstood not because it is false, but because it is reduced from a way of aligning with the universe to a system of “correct” beliefs about the universe. The distinction matters, because if religion is understood as a belief system, then it competes directly with science—and loses. Copernicus was right, and the Church was wrong. But if religion is understood as a description of how conscious beings align with the structure of the universe, then it is operating at a different level entirely. Not in conflict with science, but complementary to it—and, in some cases, anticipatory of it.
Let me draw this together.
We began with a familiar assumption—that as knowledge advances, religion fades. We have seen that this assumption depends on a particular understanding of religion: namely, that it is primarily explanatory. We have questioned that assumption. We have suggested that religion may instead be concerned with something deeper—with the conditions under which conscious life remains coherent, stable, and meaningful.
We have also seen that modern scientific disciplines are beginning to uncover patterns that closely resemble what religious traditions have long described—patterns of cooperation, restraint, reciprocity, and what we have called grace. And we have seen that as intelligence expands, these patterns become more important, not less.
At the same time, both religion and scripture may have been misunderstood—explained too narrowly, reduced too quickly, and treated as systems of answers rather than as ways of perception and alignment. If all of this is even partly true, then the question is no longer whether religion will survive the advance of science. The question becomes: Have we understood religion correctly? And if we have not—what would it mean to realign with what it has been trying to show us all along?
C-J: I think your talk summarized my experience in this class over the last three years. It’s been rewarding and affirming, and I’ve watched both myself and the other participants grow. It’s a wonderful thing to have it summarized so succinctly.
Sharon: I agree. I think it’s very profound. My question is: how does phenomenology and spirituality fit into this overall discussion of rationality, science, and religion?
David: That’s a huge question, and I’ll be covering a lot of that ground over the rest of this series as I try to explain why religion is starting to make sense to me.
Donald: I had breakfast this week with a new friend I happened to run into. We were students together at Andrews University years ago, though I didn’t really know him then. His journey has been within the corporate church—he eventually became President of the Lake Union, a regional structure within the Adventist Church in North America. My own journey has been within the educational side of the institution at Andrews.
It was interesting trying to blend our perspectives. His was oriented toward structure, while mine has focused more on educating young people within that structure. In response to some of my comments—and I don’t think this was new to his thinking—he said something that struck me as quite significant.
He suggested that we should think of two entities of the church operating concurrently. I’m not sure “structure” is the right word, but two realities: one visible and one invisible. He said he had represented the visible church—that’s what his life had been dedicated to. But our gathering yesterday—the community of family and friends—was, in a sense, the invisible church: people relating and working together within, but not limited to, the visible structure.
He went on to suggest that focusing too much on the visible church may not be healthy. The visible church provides structure, but the invisible church—what is that? I think that idea may connect with what David is suggesting.
Don: It sounds like David has had something of an epiphany, if that’s the right word. He seems to be suggesting that grace is like gravity: a law of nature and of the Spirit.
David: I would say it’s more than a law. When I call it structural, I mean it’s part of the fabric of the universe. It is God; it is simply there.
And yes, it was an epiphany in the sense that I’ve begun to understand that religion is not primarily about its institutional or overt aspects—those that Donald was just describing. Beneath all religion—not just Judeo-Christian religion—there is this structural component: a sense that there is a moral order underlying everything.
Religion, in a way, keeps track of that order and tries to keep it in front of us so we don’t lose sight of it. Even in ancient China, with the concept of the Mandate of Heaven, thousands of years ago, they recognized this. They understood that there was a moral order to the universe.
We call it by different names—God, grace, benevolence—but it is fundamental. And when I spoke about “outer darkness,” I meant that when we fall out of grace, we do it ourselves. It’s not something grace does to us. We step outside of that structure—and when we do, we are irretrievably lost.
So yes, it was an epiphany that religion is finally beginning to make sense to me.
C-J: People who live close to the earth—many ancient cultures, for example—often isolate themselves to preserve that connection and keep their culture from being diluted. But human nature is movement; we don’t stay isolated forever.
When we live close to the earth, we can see the dynamic David described as a kind of law of the universe. God is present everywhere. If you live within that structure, you prosper. If you try to violate or change it, there is chaos—war, for example—because the moral compass is no longer aligned with the natural order.
And nature itself includes chaos. That chaos can be necessary—it clears things out and brings us back into right relationship. It’s a correction. It reminds us when we’ve missed the mark.
At its core, it’s about relationship—with the earth and with each other, as we’ve said many times.
Don: I wonder if this gives more meaning to Jesus’ statement that he did not come to destroy the law, but to fulfill it.
David: That’s a very good point, and I think it does give more meaning. I’ll try to develop the point in the remaining talks of this series.
Kiran: One of the strongest arguments Christians give for the validity of religion is the existence of morality across all cultures. Wherever you go, there is some sense of fairness. From that, the argument follows: who gave us this ability to distinguish right from wrong? Who put that in our hearts? And that reasoning points toward God.
But there is also the counterargument—that morality is simply a group survival mechanism. If you behave in certain ways, the group survives. You can’t live alone in a harsh world where dangers are everywhere—predators, environmental threats—so cooperation becomes necessary for survival. That, then, is offered as the explanation for morality.
When you look across religions, many of their teachings reflect what might be considered common sense within a particular society at a particular time. Even within the Bible, if you arrange the texts chronologically, from the oldest to the most recent, you can see morality evolving. For example, in the time of Moses, after a military victory, the instructions about what to do with defeated enemies—men, women, and children—are quite brutal. We recoil from that today. When groups like ISIS did similar things, we were outraged, yet those patterns exist in biblical history as well.
So the question arises: why wouldn’t God have stopped that at the time? It’s a difficult question.
But when you compare religions more broadly—at least the major ones—what Jesus teaches stands out as fundamentally different. Instead of power and domination, he teaches servanthood: turn the other cheek, give your life for others. That is not consistent with a simple evolutionary “survival of the fittest” model. It runs counter to it.
So when I think about it logically, that teaching seems to come from somewhere beyond group survival. It feels divinely inspired—especially his emphasis on caring for children, protecting the vulnerable, and calling the powerful to humility.
Some argue that Jesus simply borrowed from other traditions, but I haven’t seen teachings elsewhere that match statements like “love your enemies” or “turn the other cheek.” That level of moral inversion seems unique.
So for me, even though revelation may come in many forms, it is very difficult for humans to express it without distortion. Our biases inevitably shape what is written. And that may be why, ultimately, Jesus had to come in person.
C-J: I would question the completeness of that view, because God did send prophets who held people accountable. When Nathan confronted David, he said, “What have you done? You are a murderer and an adulterer.” He forced David to see the consequences of his actions—the damage done to the kingdom and to the gift he had been given.
David was described as someone who loved the Lord with all his heart, yet his actions were incongruent with that identity. That tension matters.
From the time of Moses, we see something similar. Moses grew up in Pharaoh’s household, with privilege, authority, and protection. But in the desert, he was stripped of all that—subject to the elements, without control, without provision. That experience changed him.
When he went up the mountain and received the Ten Commandments, it brought him back into alignment. And when he came down and saw the people worshiping idols—reflecting the culture they had come out of—it revealed how deeply they had absorbed those patterns without questioning them.
What this points to, for me, is that God is continually calling us back under a covenant of love, grace, and forgiveness—the very things you described. But we cannot enter into that without revelation and without cooperation. We struggle to do it even within our own families. Everything becomes transactional: “What’s in it for me?”
God does not operate that way. God does not say, “If you do this, then I will save you.” Instead, God reveals our misalignment so that we can return to right relationship. What separates us is not only sin, but pride and ego—what we often label as sin is, in essence, misalignment.
And David, when you speak about merging with machine intelligence—enhancing our capabilities—I find that concerning. Machines can do things we cannot. They are more efficient, more durable, and operate on different timescales. But that very capability can become dangerous.
We are already seeing forms of this. The recent legal issues involving Meta and the effects of digital systems on children suggest that we may not be dealing with a physical toxin, but something neurological—something that reshapes how the brain functions. It pulls people away from that deeper fabric you described. Instead of sensing the presence of God, the mind becomes conditioned to seek the next stimulus, the next reward.
Addiction to illusion tears that fabric.
If we return to the metaphor of the temple curtain—the separation between humanity and the divine—when that curtain was torn, it symbolized restored access, restored alignment. Not just through sacrifice, but through reconciliation.
That alignment requires that we attend to the world around us—people, places, and things—with care and responsibility. We are accountable for the land, for its resources, for future generations. Even in the harsh realities of war, those responsibilities remain.
And the natural world itself reflects this process. The earth is constantly renewing and rebalancing—through volcanic activity, tectonic shifts, wind, and water—removing what is no longer viable.
So the idea of a deeper fabric, of alignment, of relationship rather than religion is well expressed.
Kiran: I think the movement toward not a singular intelligence but multiple intelligences is very important. It raises real moral questions, especially in light of recent events.
For example, during the Iraq war, there were missile strikes where one reportedly hit a school, killing around 120 girls. More recently, reports suggest that targeting decisions in some cases were influenced by an AI system—Project Maven—developed by the U.S. military over the past decade to analyze intelligence and identify targets. In some scenarios, particularly with drone swarms, the system can act with a high degree of autonomy.
So the question becomes: who is responsible? Is it the AI system? The military leadership that deployed it? The government? If another country carried out a similar strike, there would be outrage. So we have to ask how we are going to handle moral responsibility in an age where AI is increasingly involved in decisions of life and death, even if it is framed as “defense.”
C-J: I think the United States is heading toward a serious reckoning, particularly in a military sense. I expect that at some point there will be an attack—something strategic and profound, not just cyberattacks or disruptions to infrastructure.
When that happens, it won’t be possible to respond with surprise or indignation. We will know, on some level, how we got there. I don’t understand how we imagine ourselves exempt from consequences—as though we are somehow different.
It’s like letting a wild child act without restraint and expecting no repercussions. That’s not how reality works. And when the consequences come, there will be no ambiguity about what is happening.
Donald: I was just thinking again about the visible and invisible structures I mentioned earlier. It seems to me that what we’re doing here this morning is an example of the invisible. It arises out of the visible—it’s rooted in it—but it becomes something more: a community interacting and working together.
I just wanted to add that observation. And I know you’re watching the time.
Reinhard: I’d like to say something about the scientific aspect of this discussion. To me, this is somewhat different from the topics we’ve been covering. In the scientific world, for example, the theory of evolution as presented in textbooks is widely accepted. But I think advances in technology, including AI, are beginning to raise questions about that framework—especially when we consider the complexity of biological systems at the cellular and subcellular level. The idea that such complexity could arise purely from simple beginnings seems increasingly difficult to explain. So I wonder whether, in the future, Darwin’s theory might be reconsidered or even replaced.
At the same time, when we turn to the idea of creation—how something comes from nothing—that is even more difficult to explain scientifically. From a human perspective, it may not be explainable at all. That is where faith comes in. We accept the account of creation as given in Genesis, and we trust in the power of God as Creator.
Religion, in its organized form, has largely been about teaching morality—how to live according to God’s will. But as technology advances, new ethical questions arise. Governments create laws to regulate what can and cannot be done. So these moral discussions will only become more complex.
At the same time, we believe that everything ultimately comes from God, and that grace has always been present—from the beginning until now. As believers, we trust that God remains in control, regardless of what happens in the future or what technologies humans develop.
In the end, for those who believe, God’s word remains central. Others may take a different view, but for us as Christians, we look forward to what is to come, including eternal life. That hope is what carries us.
David: I tend to agree with some of what you’re saying. This brings us back to Sharon’s earlier reference to phenomenology. Science—and Darwinian theory—can explain the mechanisms of evolution, and I don’t question those scientific findings. But religion speaks to something different: the creative essence behind or within those processes. In that sense, the two domains are not separate. They intersect. They overlap. They leak into one another.
Let me conclude by saying that what I have tried to do today is destabilize the common assumption that religion is primarily about explaining the unknown, and is therefore destined to fade away as knowledge advances. Instead, I’ve suggested that religion may be describing something much deeper: the conditions under which intelligent beings—human or otherwise—can live together without collapsing into conflict and fragmentation. If that is even partly true, then religion is not disappearing. It is becoming intelligible.
Over the next four talks, we’re going to follow that idea wherever it leads. In talk 2, we will look more closely at how religion actually functions in practice. It does not function solely as a set of explanations, but as a system that shapes our spiritual perception, behavior, and relationship over time. We’ll ask whether what has been preserved in religious traditions is not primarily belief, but accumulated insight or enlightenment into what sustains coherence in human communities.
In talk 3, we’ll examine how those insights became institutionalized. We’ll discuss how living, dynamic traditions gradually hardened into doctrine, authority, and fixed structures. That process preserves insight at a fixed point in time and often resists revision in light of new knowledge, and thus risks distorting true understanding and misleading us on our spiritual journey. That, it seems to me, is a pretty serious indictment, and it raises a difficult question: when religion appears to fail, is it religion that has failed, or our interpretation of it?
In talk 4, we’ll turn more directly to the future—to a world in which intelligence is no longer exclusively human. As artificial and hybrid forms of intelligence become more capable, the problem religion has always addressed becomes sharper, not weaker: how do multiple powerful intelligences coexist without domination or collapse?
And finally, in talk 5 we’ll return to the central concept we introduced today—grace—not simply as a theological idea, but as something that may be structurally embedded in reality itself. Not something we invent, but something we either align with… or violate at our peril.
Now, all of that leads directly into next week. Because if religion is not primarily about explaining the world, but about aligning with it—then we have to ask: What, exactly, has religion been doing all this time? Has it been giving us answers about reality… or shaping the way we perceive it? And more specifically: Is Scripture a source of conclusions to be accepted… or a set of questions that, over time, help us discover the kind of beings we are becoming?
That’s where we’ll begin next week.
* * *
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.