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TRANSCRIPT:
Episode no. 143
June 26, 1998
BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Coming up, and man created Cog, the robot. The scientists who are building it hope it will learn the way humans do. Does this mean the machine can become human? And do Cog and its potential undermine any religious beliefs? Our Perspectives on what defines a human being.
Plus, our Profile on this man. In a classroom, he teaches social justice and the Christian message of service. Outside, he practices what he teaches.
JIM LANGFORD (University of Notre Dame): I'm not chasing some sort of glitzy imitation. I've got the real thing.
ABERNETHY: Those stories and the latest news this week on RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY.
Welcome back. I'm Bob Abernethy. It's good to have you with us.
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BOB ABERNETHY: We begin this week with news about the much-discussed and controversial presidential trip to China. As President Clinton continues his visit, which includes a scheduled stop at a government-approved church, there's mounting pressure here at home. More than 250 religious leaders are calling on the President to press Chinese officials harder on religious liberty and other basic rights. And a broad coalition of human rights advocates, labor activists and religious groups urged him to put what they called "American values" in the forefront of his China policy.
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BOB ABERNETHY: Before he left, the President signed the so-called "Tithing" bill. The new law protects churches and other charities from having to give up contributions made by donors who later file for bankruptcy.
When he returns, the President will find waiting on his desk an education bill that allows tax breaks for private school tuition, including private religious schools. The President has promised a veto.
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BOB ABERNETHY: Conservative Christian groups are claiming victory at the Supreme Court. In an 8-1 ruling, the high court said the National Endowment for the Arts can deny grants to artists whose work is considered indecent. The case began in 1990 when a controversy erupted over several NEA-funded works, including a photo of a crucifix immersed in urine.
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BOB ABERNETHY: American Muslims flexed their growing political muscle in Washington this week. Participants in the American-Muslim Council National Convention set aside a full day for lobbying members of Congress on several issues. They also had a closed-door briefing of the White House and a scheduled session with FBI Director Louis Freeh about their concerns that law enforcement officials stereotype Muslims as suspects.
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BOB ABERNETHY: Conservative Republican lawmakers have introduced the Ten Commandments Defense Act, a bill that would allow the display of the Ten Commandments on public property. That's one of the hot issues in Alabama's Republican gubernatorial run-off election this coming Tuesday. The run-off pits incumbent Governor Fob James against Winton Blunt. Paul Miller reports the race has been a key battleground for the Christian right.
Unidentified Man #1: Ladies and gentlemen, let's welcome Governor Fob James.
PAUL MILLER: Fob James is welcomed by some conservative Christians because he campaigns for prayer in public schools and the right of judges to display the Ten Commandments in their courtrooms. He has won votes even as he has lost court battles over the issues. This past week, the Supreme Court dismissed an appeal in a school prayer case.
Professor BRAD MOODY (Auburn University, Montgomery): It reminds folks how out front and center he's been in trying to take the lead on this issue. I don't think it will hurt him at all. It might help him.
Governor FOB JAMES: I thank God for the blessings on the people of Alabama.
MILLER: James' opponent, Winton Blunt, is said to appeal to conservative Republicans who emphasize economic issues, while James appeals to those with a conservative social agenda.
Prof. MOODY: It's not as if Blunt is saying he's against the school prayer or against the Ten Commandments. I think it's more of a different style, a different approach to how to reach the same goals.
MILLER: Blunt calls the governor an embarrassment to Alabama and accuses him of tilting religious windmills while ignoring the state's economy. James threatened to call out the National Guard to protect a copy of the Ten Commandments in a county courtroom, said the Bill of Rights does not apply to states and attacked the Supreme Court. The governor responded to Blunt by calling him a fat monkey.
James latest campaign ads have been more restrained by feature participants from the school prayer and Ten Commandments cases.
MILLER: Religion is nothing new in Alabama politics, but the extent of the candidates' Christianity as an issue is. In Washington and around the country, some leaders of the Christian right have said James' re-election is vital to their cause. They say he's a national symbol of their position. Others say the governor and the conservative Christians will need more than one issue if they want the votes of more Republicans or Democrats.
For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I'm Paul Miller in Washington.
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BOB ABERNETHY: This week, with some reservations, the Vatican welcomed a statement intended to resolve a 450-year-old theological argument. The new statement, co-authored with Lutheran churches from around the world, addresses how human beings receive God's forgiveness. The declaration would resolve one of the disputes that sparked the Protestant Reformation and led to one of Christianity's deepest divisions.
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BOB ABERNETHY: Now our Cover Story -- a robot named Cog. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, scientists and engineers have built a robot they hope will learn to have feelings, consciousness and perhaps even a sense of right and wrong. It's not at all certain such human-like characteristics will develop, but what if they do? Australians science and religion writer Margaret Wertheim reports from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
MARGARET WERTHEIM: For the past century, science fiction has been giving us stories about humanoid robots. Now this dream is moving from the pages of science fiction into real-life science labs. Here at the MIT artificial intelligence lab, Rodney Brooks and his team are building a robot called Cog. Their goal is an ambitious one.
RODNEY BROOKS (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): A lot of us have seen "Star Trek: The Next Generation" with Commander Data, the android robot, which is very human like, except that he doesn't quite have emotions. That's our ultimate goal. We're trying to figure out how to build a robot that is that capable.
WERTHEIM: What makes Cog different from other robots is his actions are not programmed in. Instead, like humans, it is learning from experience.
Mr. BROOKS: We built a robot here with humanoid form, arms, body that it can feel, and eyes that are human like, in order that he can experience the world the same way that we can.
WERTHEIM: This is how Cog sees the world. Scientists here have engineered Cog so that it will learn about the world and interact with it much like a human infant does. One day, they hope that it may even develop what we would call consciousness.
DANIEL DENNETT (Tufts University): Conscious like us in a way that would matter morally. I think that's possible.
WERTHEIM: Philosopher Daniel Dennett is an advisor to the Cog project. He believes it is possible to create human like robots, because in his view, humans are simply complex machines.
Mr. DENNETT: Human beings are made of a trillion or so cells; each one of those cells is a little robot. We take a trillion or so of these little cellular robots and put them together in just the right way, you get a human being -- the capacity for language, thought and culture, for love, and hate and fear.
WERTHEIM: What about qualities like free will, more responsibility or a sense of aesthetics? Would a robotic experience any of that? Theologian Ted Peters is doubtful.
TED PETERS (Pacific Union Theological Seminary): The burden of proof is to say all these things that we experience are really reducible to an automobile accident. And nobody's proven that to me yet.
WERTHEIM: Do you think that the Christian conception of human beings as special is threatened by the emerging materialism?
Mr. PETERS: I think in terms of what the fundamental Christian commitments are, I don't see a problem here. What the artificial intelligence revolution will help us do indirectly is to understand human nature better. We'll be forced to ask questions, "What is a human being?"
ANNE FOERST (Harvard Divinity School): It's my faith that God created us in God's image, and therefore, he made us special and valuable.
WERTHEIM: Anne Foerst of the Harvard Divinity School has been appointed by the Cog team as the theological advisor to raise philosophical and religious issues.
Ms. FOERST: Those things like dignity, value of a person, are not empirical things. They are entirely statements of faith and they are given to us by God.
WERTHEIM: Traditionally, Christianity and other faiths have held that a God given soul is what makes humans special and distinguishes us from other creatures. But the new materialism challenges that view.
Mr. PETERS: If contemporary materialism is right, and I think it is, then the traditional notion, the Judeo Christian notion of a soul is wrong. There is no such immaterial entity which inhabits or animates a living body.
Mr. DENNETT: I think the soul, from a Christian point of view, refers to the relationship that we have with God. It's a shared reality. The soul isn't just an appendage to our body, and it's not just createable in a computer. It's a divine human relationship.
WERTHEIM: A relationship many theologians say gives us our moral sense, but one that Anne Foerst says are not necessarily unique to humans.
Ms. FOERST: I think a robot which interacts with us is capable of behaving as if it can love and hate and interact in a really meaningful way -- it could have a soul. I wouldn't see why it shouldn't be possible -- if a robot is intelligent enough -- why shouldn't God start a relationship with Cog as well?
WERTHEIM: Artificial intelligence isn't the only field that's challenging theologians to redefine religious concepts. New discoveries in neuroscience about the workings of the human mind can also suggest a materialist vision.
Mr. DENNETT: The tremendous growth in neuroscience, in the last decade let's say, has provided lots of evidence for the fundamental soundness of the idea of materialism, not by finding the place in the brain where the soul resides or anything like that, but by not finding impenetrable barriers or major mysteries. I think that we're turning the old mysteries of consciousness into solvable problems.
WERTHEIM (to Mr. Peters): But what does the mystery of consciousness have to do with people's faith?
Mr. PETERS: The revolution in theories of human consciousness -- these things are fascinating, they're interesting, they're even exciting, but no, I do not see them to be a threat to the fundamental faith of Christians or Jews or Muslims who have this relationship with God.
WERTHEIM: Religions have been dealing with challenges from science for centuries. First with Galileo and modern cosmology and then with the Darwinian revolution. Each time, faiths have had to respond and change. How will they respond this time? Is artificial intelligence the ultimate challenge or not?
I'm Margaret Wertheim reporting.
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BOB ABERNETHY: As we noted, there's no guarantee that Cog will develop as its creators want. But if it could, what would that mean to traditional religious ideas about what it means to be human? Nigel Cameron is a bioethicist and former minister in the Church of Scotland, now a professor of theology at Trinity International University near Chicago. Rabbi James Rudin is with the American Jewish Committee and is a member of New York State's task force on such issues as cloning.
Rabbi Rudin, what do you say to scientists and others who claim that the material is all there is to being human?
Rabbi JAMES RUDIN (American Jewish Committee): I tell them first of all to press forward, because there's no war between religion and science. There should always be cooperation. But my belief is that at the end of a long day, even if they break human beings down into single cells, and that's where we started from, it's all mechanical, and we're just machines, that it will not answer the question of values, aesthetics, love, value formation, and ethical decision. So I certainly don't think it's going to shatter or even upset traditional religion. I welcome science advances if it can bring some healing and some cures to the world, but to say it will have the answer to why we're here on Earth, I think, is a far reach for them.
ABERNETHY: Professor Cameron in Chicago, what about this new materialism point?
Professor NIGEL CAMERON (Trinity International University): It seems to me that the new materialism is just the old materialism come back again. I mean, since the ancient world, people have been saying that all we are is these building blocks out of which we're made, and the fact that modern science is much more sophisticated in its science doesn't mean to say it's any more competent to make these philosophical claims about what it really means to be human. So I think that the significance of this project is really being exaggerated.
ABERNETHY: But, Professor Cameron, if there is more to being human than the material, in your words, what is it?
Prof. CAMERON: Well, what it is not is some sort of God of the gaps. I mean the notion, the little bit of our brain that we finally can't explain except to say it's to do with the soul -- I mean, Christians don't tend to say that type of thing. We certainly believe that God created the world, and therefore he put mechanisms in place to make it run. At the same, time what we are saying is when you put all the pieces together, the whole is all together greater than some of the parts. And we're talking about, you know, a human being, which is like Mother Teresa or Beethoven, coming out of these little building blocks.
ABERNETHY: But are you talking something spiritual?
Prof. CAMERON: We are talking about building blocks on what is ultimate, which is what materialists have to say.
ABERNETHY: Are you talking about something spiritual that's part of being human that is in addition to the material?
Prof. CAMERON: I don't think we're talking about something in addition, but we are talking about the fact that when you put the pieces together, you have a human being who also bears the image of God, who can relate to God and finally, has immortality. This is not because there's some sort of hidden something scientists just can't break into when they examine your brain lobe. I mean, the confidence placed in these MRI scopes is, you know, as if somehow this proves nothing else is there. It's like the Russians up in space; they can't see God, so God doesn't exist.
Rabbi RUDIN: I would say that finding the mechanical side -- if that's the word they want to use -- materialistic side to human beings may be necessary, but even when they make that discovery, it will not be sufficient, because I think after millions of years of human existence, we now know there's more to being a human being than cells and blood and even the most minute building block, which they may supply to us. I come back again to the question that, after they do it all and maybe they make a claim of new materialism -- we're left with Peggy Lee's very famous question in her song, "Is that all there is?" And certainly from the Jewish perspective, that's not all there is. There's much more to life than just the building blocks or materialism of our bodies.
ABERNETHY: And could you define that?
Rabbi RUDIN: Well, the definition is a God, or God of the universe. Every person, of course, has different views of that. My own, which, of course, is a leap of faith, is that God is the subject, with a capital S, of the universe. We are the objects of God, we relate to God, but as objects, we can never fully know all there is of our creator. So, we do the very best we can on ethics and on behavior and on teaching, but certainly a mechanicalistic or -- I don't like that word -- materialistic view is insufficient to explain why we're here on Earth and how we reach moral decisions.
ABERNETHY: But again, what I want to come back to here, Professor Cameron, is there anything about this kind of work that's being done on with robot -- is there anything here that challenges or threatens conventional, traditional religious belief?
Prof. CAMERON: I don't think there is, no. I mean, if we go back to the origins of modern science, which of course is the Judeo-Christian world view in the 17th and 18th centuries, we look at Sir Issac Newton, who was a profoundly religious man, and yet he came up with this totally mechanistic model of the operation of the solar system. I don't think I'm any more worried about neuroscience than I am about neutonium dynamics. This is just how God has made the world to work and explore it. But if you think this is all there is, then, of course, you misunderstand the whole project.
ABERNETHY: Professor Rudin, I assume you do not disagree?
Rabbi RUDIN: Not at all, and I would go further and say that what makes us human is the ability to make those choices, make moral value judgements and to transmit to our generation.
ABERNETHY: To both of you, many thanks.
Prof. CAMERON: Thank you.
Rabbi RUDIN: Thank you.
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BOB ABERNETHY: Our Profile this week is about a man, a book and a lot of children. The book tells the tragic story, but it inspired the man to put his beliefs into practice and that has brought happiness to both the man and the children. Judy Valente reports from South Bend, Indiana.
Professor JIM LANGFORD (University of Notre Dame): This is the last class, so I'm going to read...
JUDY VALENTE: Jim Langford has spent his career at the University of Notre Dame teaching social justice and the Christian tradition. With the semester at an end, he spoke to his students about their future.
Prof. LANGFORD: Take it from somebody who waited far too long -- your mission also, your vocation now also, is to do the truth, not just learn it, but do it. People in your own family, people in your own neighborhood, people here, need you.
VALENTE: For the Langfords, doing it meant adopting two children of mixed race, one with a learning disability. A few years ago, Jim and his wife bought this 16-acre farm outside of South Bend. He would retire to write books, she would run a home publishing company. Then Jim read a story about children in Chicago's inner city, kids whose childhood had been stolen from them by poverty and violence. They are children who are afraid to play outside at night, who sleep in bath tubs to avoid stray bullets, whose playground was a patch of weeds along side some railroad tracks.
Prof. LANGFORD: It's a mother saying to the author, "No, there are no children here, because these kids have to be adult by the time they're four." I brought the book home and shared it with Jill and when we finished reading it, we talked about it and we simply said, "Well, we've got 16 acres of grass, all we need to do is bring the children."
VALENTE: These kids live only a few miles from the extreme beauty of the Notre Dame campus, but even in South Bend, many of them live amid drugs, crime and abuse -- big city problems on a smaller scale. It took Langford's own money plus donations and the work of student volunteers to make the day camp a reality. Last year, he hosted 2,000 children, many from Chicago.
Prof. LANGFORD: I mean, it's not a big thing, all this is a ball diamond and sand and some stuff. You've got it's peace. It's peace out here. I wanted the children themselves to be the focus, to have a day of absolute nurture -- in a way, the kind of day that we took for granted when we were growing up.
Unidentified Girl: I ain't got no field where I live.
Unidentified Boy: We can do all kinds of stuff that I can't do at home.
Prof. LANGFORD: I rarely walk when there are children here, if I have my hand at my side, that there aren't two kids that come and grab them. And most often they're little girls. And some of them will say, "I would like you to be my daddy." I can be their friend, but I can't be their daddy. It breaks my heart, but life is life and they've got to find some way to get through it, so friendship is going to have to do it.
VALENTE: Some of Langford's neighbors didn't want his farm to become a day camp. They were afraid.
Prof. LANGFORD: A fear of the children. It might be that something awful like their parents might come out here or adults of a different race might come out to this part of the country and, you know, the crime rate will go up, et cetera.
VALENTE: The resistance faded when one longtime resident with a strong faith of his own stood up on behalf of the day camp.
ELSON FISH (Neighbor): I think this is what Christ would have done. He reached out to children.
Prof. LANGFORD: This is a man who has known some of these people for 40 years, was willing to say, "I am going to stand up now for this relative newcomer because I prayed about it and that's what faith looks like in the real world. And he changed me. That was a conversion thing for me."
VALENTE: Last year, the camp's budget was $11,000. Most work is done by volunteers. And donors will soon add a basketball court.
Prof. LANGFORD: I think in the first five or six months that we had children out here, I would often cry when they left, because it seemed like there had to be more that we could do. I know that a lot of them are going back into very tough situations.
VALENTE: Is Jim Langford simply applying a band-aid to a problem too big to be solved by anyone? This professor's response is to quote Tolstoy, who said that a single cherished memory can sustain a person for a lifetime. And many of the children have sent him thank you notes.
Prof. LANGFORD (reading): Stay cool and nice and sweet and loving. I will pray for you if you need it. I love you.
JILL LANGFORD (Wife of Jim Langford): Anybody can help a child in a different way, whether it's mentoring or foster grandparent, that sort of thing. This was just the way we chose to do it. And it may not be everybody's way, but it's one way.
VALENTE: To his students, Professor Langford quotes the Sermon on the Mount.
Prof. LANGFORD: The thing is, the strongest urge in all human beings is the urge to be happy, and so Jesus said, "Happy the merciful, for they shall have mercy shown to them. Happy the pure in heart, they shall see God."
VALENTE: People would look at you and say, "There goes a happy man." To what do you attribute your happiness?
Prof. LANGFORD: I have my act together. I've been able to put what I believe together with how I act and what I do. I like being happy. I'm not chasing some sort of glitzy imitation. I've got the real thing. One, two, three.
VALENTE: I'm Judy Valente for RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY in South Bend, Indiana.
ABERNETHY: A man who does have his act together.
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BOB ABERNETHY: And that's our program for now. We'll see you next week when we'll meet New Mexico's hidden Jews.
Until then, please write to us at 1333 H Street Northwest, Washington, D.C. 20005, or call our toll-free number, 1 (888) 665-7537. You may reach us online at the Internet address on your screen. Our Web site has information about stories and guests on our program. You may also download our Viewer's Guide. If you wish to receive a copy, we'd prefer you write to the address we'll give you in a few moments. So have pen or pencil handy.
I'm Bob Abernethy. From all of us at RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, see you next time.
We leave you today with scenes from the United Religions Initiative Global Summit this week in California. Participants from all faiths and regions discussed the creation of a worldwide religion forum modeled after the United Nations. Viewer's Guide P.O. Box 245 Little Falls, New Jersey 07424-0245
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