Today's Church in America - Part Two
Presented by Phyllis Tickle

Calvary Episcopal Church
Memphis, Tennessee
January 26, 2003
This talk also available in audio

< Part One 1 2 3 4 5

By 1993, one of the great public brouhahas was Prozac, which is now legal by 1993. The question was, can good Christians take Prozac? That's still a viable question in many Christian communities. Why? What's wrong with taking Prozac? Why should you spend your life miserable with depression? Because the depressed recognize immediately that by taking that pill they become two entirely different people. Go back and read the old books, Prozac Nation, or Peter Kramer's Listening to Prozac, and feel the angst, the anguish, when that question is first raised, because the question really is which one is I? Or colloquially, which one is me? Who am I? Which one? Because the two persons think differently. They perceive differently. They realize differently.

This was not helped by the fact that in 1997 a machine called Big Blue beat Gary Kasparov at chess, and this afternoon at 2:00 our time, 3:00 New York time, Gary is going to take on Little Blue, or Blue Jr., who was built by the Israelis. IBM decided it was bad for their business to be caught making something that could beat the pants off of a human being, and they declined the opportunity to reengage, so Israel took it on. What does it mean when a machine can outthink a man? What it means is that René Descartes was probably wrong. I can no longer say, I think and therefore I am, because the machine thinks (it doesn't really, but we think it thinks. It appears to think). I'm not really sure who I am; I've discovered it, I've got a chatterer in here, and the chatterer isn't me.

In 1981, a fellow named Daniel Dennett wrote a book called The Mind's I, and raised the notion, which is commonly accepted by many in science, that our minds are just part of an extension of our bodies; that even consciousness, which we're so proud of, may indeed have evolved or be a process of evolution. That leads to the question, “Who am I?” You can't answer it in the old way. The only answer I think is Desmond Tutu's answer, and it's his great gift. When the dust is all died down a hundred years from now, we're going to look back at Desmond Tutu and say,“It wasn't South Africa that was his great gift. His great gift was the philosophy brought from Africa—‘I am because you are.’ That is to say, ‘As long as you think I'm here, I am. And therefore, it is in my best interest to keep you projecting me on this screen.’”

That puts a whole new light on the whole business of the golden rule. It makes it less golden and a whole lot more self-advancing or protective. “I am because you are,” but it also has a softer side that says, “You know, I am in order that you may be,” and so it invites a relationship. In its relativism, it matches our thrust toward community. It gives it a redefinition. It changes who we are. What it also changes is soul.

You talk about saving your souls. You talk about the blood of Jesus to save your souls. What the hee haw do you think it is? What is it? Well, a hundred years ago your granddaddy, my granddaddy, your great-great granddaddies would have said, “You know, it's what I think and what I am, and, I mean, it's the whole complex of who I am.” Not unless you want a heaven full of IBMs. What is the soul? The truth of it is, we don't know. We no longer know, nor are we terribly sure what the self is. That's the adventure we're on right now.

When Max Planck postulated quantum theory, he said, in order for quantum theory to work, you must realize that electromagnetic energy moves in quanta. That is to say, light is both a wave and particles. It is not either. It is both. It is one according to who is watching or the other according to who is watching. The watcher determines the watched. Well, so much for the machine, because now it's gone.

What we've got now is a world we're indeed creating, which gives whole new meaning to the statement, if you say to that mountain, get up and go into the sea and truly believe it, it will go. That's the physics of the thing. It's a part of the story we're regaining. Probably the best theology in this country is being done in physics labs.

In 1992, John Moffitt, at the University of Toronto, published a paper on the variable speed of light. That was the last constant left. Planck’s constant is mathematical and is basically 6.6 something or other. (I can't even remember, but it has a little waffle in it.) The last constant was the speed of light, and all our contemporary physics was based on the notion that light had a fixed speed.

In 1992 when that paper was published, everybody said, "Yeah, sure." By 1999, I think it was, the BBC was doing a popular documentary on the theory of variable light. The other day I was reading the New York Times interview of a youngster, a child genius, ten years old, who is going for a Ph.D., and she said, “I am so fascinated by the mathematics of variable light,” and I thought maybe that says something about the theory of variable light. Then I picked up Time and discovered that they, too, did an article on the theory of variable light. It's in the popular culture now. It's the death of the machine concept. Now not even light can be held as a constant. What we have as a constant is God. And I for one have to tell you I like it a whole lot more having that one constant than all that crap—if you will forgive the French. And on that inelegant note, thank you.

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