Chris Suellentrop on "The Talos Principle"

The Talos Principle

Croteam

NYT

Chris Suellentrop, a video game critic for The New York Times, describes a video game - The Talos Principle - in his article "Enticing All to See the Bigger Picture" (New York Times, January 27, 2015), from which I offer the following digest version:

Play enough video games and . . . you'll start to wonder what it all means. Is there a point? . . . [The game called] The Talos Principle . . . takes . . . [such] inquiries a step further[,] . . . prompting . . . meditat[ation] on the meaning of life . . . . [It] quotes Milton, Blake, Kant and Chesterton, among others, and expects you to piece together why any of it matters . . . . [It] begins with an amnesiac who awakens in a new world and tries to make sense of it . . . . The game [is one] of puzzles, [such as] . . . uncovering who you are and why a disembodied voice is speaking to you . . . . [Much] is opaque at first, [but] . . . core concerns - the nature of consciousness, the existence of God - are clear . . . . "Behold, child, you are risen from dust," a sonorous voice declaims before telling you he is Elohim, your maker. There are references to a temple, a garden, a covenant, the promise of eternal life . . . . [The Hebrew word] Elohim is the first . . . [reference] to God in the Hebrew Bible, but the mysterious voice of The Talos Principle clearly isn't meant to be That Guy.

No? He certainly sounds a lot like "That Guy." But Suellentrop has played the game and must know what he's talking about. Perhaps the game has a gnostic twist to it? But let's read on:

Uncovering exactly who . . . [this Elohim] is and why he has put you there requires solving a series of puzzles[, i,e.,] . . . hidden Tetris-shaped sigils behind locks and gates of escalating complexity. Beams of light, and later cubes and fans, must be arranged in intricate geometric webs to reach the sigils, . . . then . . . rotated and assembled into rectangles . . . [to] open doors that lead . . . to evermore [difficult] brain teasers . . . . [T]hese challenges are [pleasing], [but] The Talos Principle is as much a game about reading as . . . about puzzling through logic exercises. A series of computer terminals . . . placed throughout Elohim's world . . . . [offer] texts . . . [of] poetry, philosophical digressions or Internet chat logs . . . . [T]hese readings are routinely engaging, clever and thought-provoking[,] . . . [but e]ven more rewarding are . . . encounters with the Milton Library Assistant, the game's rough equivalent to Eden's serpent.

This is where the game begins to sound gnostic. A 'serpent' named after John Milton would surely offer good advice . . . right?

Elohim forbids . . . climbing a tower . . . contain[ing] knowledge of the world beyond. The assistant . . . [says] to ascend anyway. Like Lucifer in "Paradise Lost," the Milton Library Assistant is . . . more fascinating . . . than the remote and inscrutable Elohim[, and a]s the player . . . types on the game's virtual keyboards, . . . [the player's] fingers . . . [appear] robotic, and the assistant begins a series of questionnaires that ask the player to prove . . . [itself] a conscious being. The game partly functions as a reverse Turing test - a computer asking a human to prove its capacity to think, rather than the other way around . . . . [T]his game is deeply interested in the nature of artificial intelligence and the potential of machines to reason.

Suellentrop adds that in Greek mythology, Talos was a giant made of bronze. Maybe this is the game-makers' allusion to a robot brought to life (and consciousness?) by a supply of ichor - the blood of gods and other immortals - flowing through its single vein, but we should perhaps also note that this giant died from loss of ichor when the single vein was opened. Whether this is useful in understanding the game, I don't know - nor do I know what the Talos "principle" refers to.

But I wonder if being "conscious" is identical with being able to "reason." Does a Turing test - original or reversed - conflate these two? And is that important in playing this puzzling game?

Whatever the answers to these questions, The Talos Principle sounds interesting.

Fallenness in a Darwinian World?

St. Augustine

Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510)

(Wikipedia)

The painting above dates to 1480 and is said to depict St. Augustine at prayer, though his eyes are open. They are, however, directed upward, as though contemplating spiritual realities. This saint, however, also observed earthly realities, such as the radical evil of human beings, which he thought due to the enslavement of the human will by our sinful nature, which he argued was biologically inherited from Adam and Eve, who had fallen from innocence into evil by their violation of God's command not to eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

My cyberfriend Bill Vallicella has been blogging on human evil, as I noted in a recent blog entry of my own -- "Fallenness as the Human Condition" -- on an article about "original sin" in the journal First Things:

I'm indebted to my friend Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, for the link to the First Things article. Bill has been discussing several of the logical conundrums confronting those who take original sin seriously, and he would be well worth reading on the subject, though I've had too little time lately to do so myself, being immersed in teaching and editing.

I emailed Bill to let him know of my implicit 'hat tip' to him, and in noting an intriguing argument presented in the First Things article, I posed a query:

I liked the interesting argument that the consequences of belief and nonbelief in original sin are both bad and thus evidence of our fallen natures. But I do wonder what either original sin or fallenness mean in a Darwinian world . . .

Bill has since responded to my query with another blog post, titled "Original Sin in a Darwinian World." I cannot do justice to his argument by a summary, so I urge interested readers to go directly to his own post, but I can indicate some of his argument as it relates to my query.

Bill rejects Augustine's view that guilt is inherited, so he absolves us of any guilt due to inheritance, what he calls "originated original sin" (following Kant), basing his view on our moral intuition that we are only morally culpable for actions or inactions over which we have control, i.e., libertarian freedom. In place of Augustine's view, Bill offers what he calls "originating original sin" (again following Kant), by which he means that the fact of our evil actions or inactions can be understood as due to our fallenness -- and Bill cites Kant explicitly on this point -- "as though the individual had fallen into it directly from a state of innocence." This distinction is presented in more detail in Bill's post on Kant's distinction "between originating original sin (peccatum originale originans) and originated original sin (peccatum originale originatum)."

Bill also rejects a literal reading of the Genesis account of Adam and Eve, for he takes seriously the evidence for evolution. Hence his response to my query radically reinterprets the meaning of the Biblical account, and he follows Kant in this:

Man enjoys dual citzenship. As a physical being, and thus as an animal, he he is a member of the phenomenal world, the world of space-time-matter. In this realm determinism reigns: everything that happens is necessitated by the laws of nature plus the initial conditions. But man knows himself to be morally responsible, and so knows himself to be libertarianly free. Since everything phenomenal is determined, and nothing free, man as moral agent is a noumenal being who 'stands apart from the causal nexus.'

Kant sees with blinding clarity that nothing imputable to an agent can be caused by factors external to the agent: only that which the agent does or leaves undone freely and by his own agency is imputable to the agent. It follows that sinfulness, guilt, and desert of punishment cannot be inherited: there is no originated original sin. For what is inherited is caused to be by factors external to the agent. So . . . [the claim that there is a universal propensity to moral evil in human beings that is not inherited] is true. But the predisposition to moral evil is nonetheless innate in the sense that it is not conditioned by events in time. It is logically prior to every action of the agent in the time-order.

How is the predisposition imputable? It is imputable because it is the result of a free noumenal choice. And so there is originating original sin. Each of us by an atemporal noumenal choice is the origin of the radical evil which is at the root of each specific evil act. So . . . [the claim that there is a universal propensity to moral evil in human beings that is imputable] is true.

If I understand Bill, then our fallenness, which follows from original sin, is to be understood as a state into which we have fallen due to an originating original sin that each one of us commits by acting (or 'inacting') wrongly at some first time in our lives, an action (or inaction) over which we had free control.

If I have understood Bill correctly, this seems to leave open a question that still requires an answer: Why do we, in our original innocence and freedom, choose evil? Admittedly, the same question can also be posed about the traditional story of Adam and Eve.

Bernar Venet: Artful Figures?

Parabole de la fonction y=2x^2+3x-2 (left)

and

Gold Saturation with four N (right)

Bernar Venet

(Image from JoongAng Daily)

A couple of days ago, I mentioned that "I like to read articles on things that I know nothing of to see if they spark ideas on things that I know something about," and I've now come across the French artist Bernar Venet, who has a similar method for seeking inspiration:

"I confess, I don't understand math well . . . . I get fascinated by what I cannot understand. As I cannot understand math, I can express it as abstract paintings."

Being an artist, Venet would undoubtedly know something about painting, and I can see how mathematics as inspiration would lead to abstraction in painting.

Though Venet is renowned, I learned of this French artist only yesterday in an article by Moon So-young, who often writes fascinating articles on art for the JoongAng Daily. Yesterday's was titled "Making art of numbers and figures" (March 14, 2011) and alerts readers to the Venet exhibition running until April 14 at the Seoul Museum of Art near Deoksu Palace in central Seoul. Moon usually offers something to reflect upon in her art reviews, and she doesn't fail to do so here in this exhibition announcement, either:

American art critic and poet Donald Kuspit wrote in his book Bernar Venet Art and Mathematics: In Search of the Sublime that Venet's mathematical murals "are more sublime than mathematical, or rather use mathematics as a springboard to the sublime."

To put this statement into context, Moon adds:

The 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant said the feeling of the sublime, unlike the feeling of the beautiful, is accompanied by awe, fear or some kind of displeasure from an object due to its overwhelming and unfamiliar qualities.

This suggests that those individuals with math anxiety who visit the exhibition should be able to enjoy an experience of the sublime in Venet's mathematical paintings. But I wonder what mathematicians might make of such paintings.

Anyway, for those intrigued by the idea of math as inspiration, visit the exhibition, read the short JoongAng article, or -- even better yet -- click over to Bernar Venet's own website and explore on your own.

Rémi Brague's Longer Reply on "Cosmology as a Postulate"

Rémi Brague

(Image from Nexus Instituut)

Some readers might recall a previous post on a fascinating interview that the two medievalists Christophe Cervellon and Kristell Trego conducted with Rémi Brague as a sort of introduction to his book of essays, The Legend of the Middle Ages. In that post, I called into question the heading that I thought that an editor had provided. The heading, followed by the passage, came upon the heels of Brague's remark that for modern people, "Nothing in the physical world responds to man's ethical demands":

Cosmology as a Postulate

"To be sure, for premodern man, the presence of the world, which he felt as a kosmos, was not a model to be imitated in any literal sense. Pretending to believe this to be the case is unfair, as it might be amusing to explain by the use of Kant's concepts. The role of the cosmic order is analogous to that of the postulates of practical reason. Those postulates -- liberty, the existence of a just God, and the immortality of the soul -- are of no use as a basis for moral law, which is sufficient unto itself and draws its obligation from an intrinsic authority that it has no need to borrow from elsewhere. Such postulates serve to guarantee the possibility of the supreme Good -- that is, the agreement between what the Law demands and the order of the real world. One might say that the kosmos was less a model demanding conformity than an example that shows, from the simple fact that it exists, that ethical conduct is possible. The major difference between the premodern vision of the world and Kant's morality is that realization of the good is for Kant only postulated. It remains, so to speak, in the domain of faith and hope. For men of ancient and medieval times, on the other hand, the sovereignty of the good was already given in the cosmic harmony. One only need acknowledge it."

At the time that I blogged on this, I stated that a cursory reading of the passage seemed to allow for the heading supplied, namely, "Cosmology as a Postulate," but that a closer reading led me to think that Brague would reject the heading as utterly counter to his point. I commented as follows:

True . . . [Brague] says that "The role of the cosmic order [for premodern men] is analogous to that of the postulates of practical reason [for Kant]," but this is not the same as calling cosmology a "postulate." Kant's postulates of "liberty, the existence of a just God, and the immortality of the soul" all "serve to guarantee the possibility of the supreme Good -- that is, the agreement between what the Law demands and the order of the real world." The similarity is thus that "the kosmos was . . . an example that shows, from the simple fact that it exists, that ethical conduct is possible." But cosmology was not a postulate because "For men of ancient and medieval times, . . . the sovereignty of the good was already given in the cosmic harmony." Since it was already given, it had no need to be postulated.

Well, as things turn out, I was utterly wrong in my construal of Brague's words -- though I take comfort in the fact that I am accustomed by now to being wrong -- for I wrote to Brague last summer, inquiring as to his meaning, and he replied with a cordial email letting me know that he was currently on vacation in the hinterlands of France but that he would reply upon returning to Paris. Here is that more recent reply:

I am back in Paris, and not really twiddling my thumbs, for I'll have to resume teaching in three weeks. Nevertheless, I keep my promise: not being a gentleman, I must pretend to act as one. The title "Cosmology as a Postulate" is not to be laid at the door of some editor. I am responsible for it. What I meant is, more or less adequately, what follows: For ancient man, moral life did not require properly speaking the well-ordered character of the world, its deserving the name of a kosmos. There are ethical theories that draw the parallel between morality and cosmological phenomena, like Plato's Timaeus or the Stoics; but others do not even mention them, which does not prevent them from building a highly respectable moral teaching: the Atomists are a good example, although Aristotle deserves pride of place among those people. The orderliness and beauty of the physical universe was a not a reason for the Ancient man to do good and avoid evil; conversely, the hypothesis (a nightmare for the ancient world-view) of a total lack of order would not be an excuse for an unlawful behaviour. See Marcus Aurelius, quoted in Wisdom . . . , p. 76-77. In the same way, moral law, according to Kant, does not need a divine Legislator. What is needed is to postulate that morality and the happiness that morality makes us worthy of, but can't guarantee us, somehow meet. Nevertheless, the beautiful order of the world shows us that Being and Goodness coincide. Perhaps I should have compared the part played by the ancient kosmos with another Kantian doctrine, i.e. his christology. For Kant, Christ is not so much a model to be imitated (President Wilson's "What would Jesus do if he were at my place?"), but rather an example that shows us that absolute conformity to the Moral Law, i.e. holiness, is possible.

Appended to this passage was Brague's "hope that this will be helpful." Certainly, it helps me to understand his point -- namely, to understand that I had seriously misunderstood and that Brague's point was almost entirely the opposite from my understanding . . . a rather humbling experience, to be sure, but I often run up against my limitations. Fortunately, like a proper Clint Eastwood character, I do know my limitations. Or at least, I'm willing to recognize them for what they are: my limitations.

Anyway, if I do now understand Brague's point, it is this: the moral law would hold for the ancient philosophers even if the cosmos were to display no such order, much as the moral law would hold for Kant even if there had been no incarnation of the Son, but both the cosmos and the Son display an excellence that is not so much to be imitated as to serve as a demonstration that an exact conformity to God's law is possible. Allow me to apply this understanding to a passage from the Brague interview that I had previously quoted only in part:

In my Wisdom of the World, I began with four ideal-typical models: the "Timaeus" model (broadly speaking, the main current of ancient philosophy from Plato to Proclus, including the Stoics), Epicurus, "Abraham," and Gnosticism. Building on generally similar descriptions of the world, each of these proposes a different response to the question "What we are doing on this earth?" Are we imitating the beautiful order of the heavenly bodies; comfortably settling in on an island of humanity within an indifferent universe; drawing ourselves closer to the creator of a good world, but obeying his law or following his Son; or, finally, fleeing, not, as Mallarmé invites us, là-bas, but to on high, toward an alien God, escaping an imperfect or prison-like world? The ancient and medieval model, which held firm for a good millennium and a half, emerged out of a compromise between "Timaeus" and "Abraham." What interests me is not so much its description (even if I have had to pursue a description in some detail), but rather the problem posed by its disappearance with the modern age. It left us alone. Nothing in the physical world responds to man's ethical demands.

The medieval "worldview" -- a term designating a perspective broader than merely a 'view of the world' -- was an unstable compromise between Plato's description of a more-or-less perfectly ordered world and the Christian one of fallen-but-still-good world. That 'compromised' world served not as a model to be imitated but as an illustration that conformity with God's law was possible. With the modern age, this understanding of the cosmic order has collapsed, for the world does not seem to correspond, even as illustration, to our ethical needs.

I might need to obtain a copy of Brague's Wisdom of the World and read it carefully, comparing his views on the emergence of modernity with those of Hans Blumenberg in Legitimacy of the Modern Age.

Dostoyevsky's Kantian 'Proof' of God

Immanuel Kant

'the immortal Kant'

(Image from Wikipedia)

Some readers may recall that I recently re-read Mikhail Bulgakov's magnum opus, The Master and Margarita. If so, those readers will surely recall the passage that I cited on Kant. Berlioz and Bezdomny had been speaking of Christ just before the novel's opening scene, when they were suddenly joined by the devil, i.e., Woland, who was extraordinarily interested in their atheism:

"But, may I ask," resumed the guest from abroad after a moment's troubled reflection, "what do you make of the proofs of God's existence, of which, as you know, there are five?"

"Alas!" answered Berlioz regretfully, "all of those proofs are worthless, and mankind has long since consigned them to oblivion. Surely you would agree that reason dictates that there can be no proof of God's existence."

"Bravo!" exclaimed the foreigner, "Bravo! You've said just what that restless old sage Immanuel said about this very same subject. But here's the rub: he completely demolished all five proofs, and then, in a seeming display of self-mockery, he constructed a sixth proof all his own!"

"Kant's proof," retorted the educated editor with a faint smile, "is also unconvincing. No wonder Schiller said that only slaves could be satisfied with Kant's arguments on this subject, while Strauss simply laughed at his proof." (Bulgakov, Master and Margarita, translated by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor, pages 7-8)

Kant's proof, proposed in his Critique of Practical Reason, held that even though one cannot demonstrate the existence of God as an idea of pure reason, the idea of God is inextricably bound up with the link between happiness and morality, for only God can guarantee immortality as reward for moral virtue. Therefore, absolute morality, the gift of immortality, and the existence of God are all essential postulates of practical reason even though they cannot be grounded in pure reason. Or something like that.

Bulgakov may have been reflecting not only upon a passage in Kant but also upon a scene in The Brothers Karamazov, for in an early passage in the novel, Dostoyevsky -- or, at least, his omniscient albeit mortal narrator -- has Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miüsov recount something that Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov had said a few days earlier:

"I will tell you instead, gentlemen, another interesting and rather characteristic anecdote of Ivan Fyodorovitch himself. Only five days ago, in a gathering here, principally of ladies, he solemnly declared in argument that there was nothing in the whole world to make men love their neighbours. That there was no law of nature that man should love mankind, and that, if there had been any love on earth hitherto, it was not owing to a natural law, but simply because men have believed in immortality. Ivan Fyodorovitch added in parenthesis that the whole natural law lies in that faith, and that if you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism. That's not all. He ended by asserting that for every individual, like ourselves, who does not believe in God or immortality, the moral law of nature must immediately be changed into the exact contrary of the former religious law, and that egoism, even to crime, must become not only lawful but even recognised as the inevitable, the most rational, even honourable outcome of his position. From this paradox, gentlemen, you can judge of the rest of our eccentric and paradoxical friend Ivan Fyodorovitch's theories." (Dostoyevsky, The Brother's Karamazov (New York: Random House, 1950), translated by Constance Garnett, page 78)

Obviously, Ivan -- and therefore Dostoyevsky -- had in mind Kant's sixth proof of God's existence, the moral argument in which God is a postulate of practical reason necessary for guaranteeing the ground of morality, namely immortality. Thus does Ivan hold that "whole natural law [of love for others] lies in . . . the belief in immortality," without which, "nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful."

Dostoyevsky may also have been alluding to the legendary founder of the mysterious but ruthless Assassians, Hasan-i-Sabah, a rather unorthodox Muslim who reputedly stated, "Nothing is true, everything is permitted," perhaps based on an extreme interpretation of Surah 3:54 (cf. 8:30) in the Qur'an, which according to some translations states that "Allah is the best of deceivers" ("Allahu khayru al-makireena," the lexical form of makireena, i.e., makara, having as one of its meanings "to practice deceit" [cf. Miim-Kaf-Ra; also Edward William Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon (pdf)]).

But God knows best . . . even if He isn't telling.

Hirsi Ali: "Islam is hostile to reason."

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Philosopher of Tempered Reason

Also with "Downcast Eyes"?

(Image from Wikipedia)

For some reason, perhaps in part due to this blog, I end up on all sorts of mailing lists and therefore receive a lot of emails, most of which get consigned to my spam folder, but occasionally, I receive materials that I find useful and interesting.

I'm therefore not sorry to regularly find emails from The Spectator, an old (since 1828) conservative British magazine published weekly, for it sometimes has articles that catch my interest. Recently, this one by The Spectator's assistant editor, Mary Wakefield, attracted my eye:

Mary Wakefield, "'We are at war with all Islam': An interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali," The Spectator (November 28, 2007)

I found most interesting Hirsi Ali's views on reason and religion as she and Wakefield discuss the differing character of Christianity and of Islam:

'Christianity is different from Islam,' says Hirsi Ali, 'because it allows you to question it. It probably wasn't different in the past, but it is now. Christians -- at least Christians in a liberal democracy -- have accepted, after Thomas Hobbes, that they must obey the secular rule of law; that there must be a separation of church and state. In Islamic doctrine such a separation has not occurred yet. This is what makes it dangerous! Islam -- all Islam, not just Islamism -- has not acknowledged that it must obey secular law. Islam is hostile to reason.'

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's eyes are now aglow. She is a terrific believer in reason. For her, Western civilisation is built on the bedrock not of Judaeo-Christian values, but of logic. After seeking asylum in Holland, she spent five years at Leiden university studying political science, absorbing the Enlightenment philosophers -- Spinoza, Hobbes, Voltaire -- and she mentions them fondly, as if they're family. But there's a steely side to her atheism, which says with Voltaire: Ecraser l'infâme! During a recent debate with Ed Husain, as Husain was explaining his moderate Islam, she began to laugh at him, saying: 'When you die you rot, Ed! There is no afterlife, Ed!' And it makes me wonder whether, for Hirsi Ali, Islam's crime is as much against reason as humanity; whether she sees the point of spirituality at all.

Are you so sure you understand what is at the heart of Islam? I ask her. Isn't there a peaceful prayerfulness -- apart from the politics -- that an atheist might not understand? 'I was a Muslim once, remember, and it was when I was most devout that I was most full of hate,' she says.

OK then, you talk about your conscience, and how your conscience was pricked by 9/11. But if there's no God, what do you mean by a conscience? And why should we obey it?

'My conscience is informed by reason,' says Hirsi Ali, surprised I should ask. 'It's like Kant's categorical imperative: behave to others as you would wish they behaved to you.'

Although Hirsi Ali may be unaware -- for I'm not certain how informed she is of Christianity -- Kant was secularizing and sharpening (albeit insisting that his categorical imperative was logically prior to) a teaching of Jesus that has come down to us in two forms:

Matthew 7:12: "So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets."

Luke 6:31 "Just as you want others to do for you, do the same for them."

This so-called 'Golden Rule' occurs in various religious traditions and probably in secular ones as well, so it's certainly not unique to Christianity. Interestingly, Hirsi Ali's formulation of what she refers to as Kant's categorical imperative ("behave to others as you would wish they behaved to you") comes closer to Matthew 7:12 ("do to others what you would have them do to you") than to any of Kant's formulations, e.g.:

"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." (Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, translated by James W. Ellington [1785], third edition Hackett Publishing Company: 1993, page 30.)

Hirsi Ali may have spent half a decade studying political science at Leiden University and learning about the Enlightenment philosophers (though Spinoza and Hobbes are, to be precise, usually considered pre-Enlightenment), including a dose of Kantianism, but her formulation of Kant's categorical imperative sounds more biblical than Kantian. In fact, it doesn't sound like Kant at all. I'm not ridiculing Hirsi Ali, for I find that Matthew's formulation of the Golden Rule comes more readily to my lips than does Kant's secularized and sharpened reformulation of it in his categorical imperative.

I don't know that this particular point is, strictly speaking, an issue of reason and religion, but it's mildly intriguing that Hirsi Ali's appeal to reason as having informed her conscience actually gives biblically informed listeners the impression that she's paraphrasing the Matthew 7:12.

Nevertheless, we should take seriously her claim to appeal to reason, for she is a brave woman under threat of death at the hands of Islamists for such statements as "Islam is hostile to reason." Her critique of Islam is not leveled at present-day Christianity, but her praise for Christian tolerance is tempered:

'Christianity is different from Islam,' says Hirsi Ali, 'because it allows you to question it. It probably wasn't different in the past, but it is now.'

This raises the question of Christianity's relation to reason, an issue broached by Pope Benedict XVI in his Regensberg lecture and also one that interests me, but I'll save this, perhaps for tomorrow.