Do Science, Black Theology and AI Mix with Dr. Reggie Williams (Part 2)

Do Science, Black Theology and AI Mix with Dr. Reggie Williams (Part 2)

In the second part of this two-part interview, Ilia Delio speaks with Dr. Reggie Williams about just that black theology. From her Teilhardian perspective, Ilia asks Reggie about the interaction between faith and science, and in particular, how evolution, diversity and technology work together in his theology. Finally, Ilia asks what role, if any, AI plays in social change.

ABOUT DR. REGGIE WILLIAMS

“Bonhoeffer’s experience in Harlem demonstrates that a Christian interpretation of the way of Jesus must be connected to justice for a Christian to see beyond primary loyalties to self and kind, to recognize the needs for justice in another’s context, and to ‘love neighbor as self.’”

Reggie Williams, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Black Theology at St Louis University. His research interests are Black Theology, Black Studies, Harlem Renaissance, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Studies, and Christian Ethics. He is the author of Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance from Baylor University Press, and is currently working on three manuscripts, an ethics project with Yale University Press, a trade book about Christian response to fascism, with Broadleaf books, and a commentary on Joshua and Job with Westminster John Knox. He and his wife Stacy will celebrate their 29th wedding anniversary this month on the 26th, and are the parents of two young adults, Darion and Simone.

Transcript

Robert: Welcome back to Hunger for Wholeness, a podcast from the Center for Christogenesis. I'm your host, Robert Nicastro. Today, Ilia continues her conversation with Reggie Williams. They discuss black theology, the interaction between faith and science, and how evolution, diversity, and technology work together in his system of thought.

Ilia: Where do you see where we are today on the question of racism? Let's just take the US because I think the global thing is, but in the US I mean, where do you see black theology playing a role in moving this question of racism to a new level of dignity of races, of acknowledging the beauty of difference. Where do you see where we are and where do you see black theology can take us?

Reggie: Yeah, great question. I am liking, right now, conversations coming from neighboring fields. One in particular black studies has been adding some pressure which is the intellectual life of black people. It enters the academy as a discipline later than it's existed within black circles as just practices of engagement on the world. So you've got people like W.E.B, Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes. These are figures that you associate with the Harlem Renaissance, but they're doing black studies, black thought on life in the world. And earlier versions of this in say, De Bois, Zora Neale and Langston Hughes and Ken Cullen and so forth, there is an engagement with Jesus, but they're doing it not in terms of like trying to go to church. They know that to interact with the way we understand life together in the Western world, you have to interact with Jesus. There is a theological foundation to the way we understand community, culture and humanity. That's a theological foundation.

When it interests the academy, again, interestingly enough, black studies kind of moves away from religious, but it's not that way from its inception. But then you take in the sixties when James Cone writes his text on black theology and black power, he recognizes black power movement is also a theological movement because it's confronting black suffering and the notion of God's engagement with the world to not simply to suffer for the world, but to suffer because of sin. In addition, it's a response to suffering to say that one from not in this universal conceptual world that you might say white theologies, like to think of themselves as universal, but to be speaking the contextual language of each community, to recognize that that's white theology and not theology.

Ilia: Right.

Reggie: And if they were able to see themselves, what might that do for the way they think about God and their actions in the world? So, black theology thinking first of all, pushing us towards a contextual engagement with self and God in the world. And then black studies recognizing the theological structure, our understanding of being, this is some of the content that I'm working on with this black studies intervention on theology, to recognize that even the very notion of racialization, different races, is related to a particular way of understanding human and human difference.

Where do we get red and yellow, black and white? And how do we understand ourselves as divided in this way? That is a European imagination of human and human difference. And it is also very foundational, this European imagination of human and human difference is foundational for what we are doing in the theological world. How do we understand the human differently than this? And what would that do for our understanding of human flourishing of God and relationship to the world and of togetherness, intimacy, coherence, being what we're supposed to be if we're not, what Europeans have described as human being and human difference?

Ilia: As you were talking, I couldn't help but thank, you know, Saint Augustine, the great Augustine was from—but every church has always portrayed him as a white western looking dude. And Villanova a few years ago actually had an icon written of the black Augustine, and it's much true to who Augustine was. And the truth is—as you were talking, I couldn't help but think, but language, the way language starts to cause representations of images that we fill with content, and then we anthologized these things and we say, this is what a white person is, and this is what a black person is. But up to where language became sort of a, you know, this kind of divisive—if language divides more than anything. But in oral cultures, in different cultures prior to the one that we inherited, where it was about neighbor community shared; I don't think language played the same role it did. We had to have some kind of communication.

I do think the way language has come to dominate the Western mind has played a significant role in shaping this what we might call the construction of racism in this racialization. It's not that there aren't different races. Well, yeah. I mean, that is the beauty of life. Just as nature itself is filled with diversity, diversity is the basis of unity. I think that's the one thing for somehow the Western mind has this, and it comes some out of kind of a platonic thinking of some sort that there's the one and this one is, you know, we know exactly what the one is. Well, no. Oneness is precisely the richness of diversity. If I look at a park with trees and flowers and grass and dirge and stones, and the way each individual element does its own thing, it's its own beingness. That's the beauty of it. And there's no different with humans are nature. That's the part it's really hard to get our heads around. We're pretty dropped here from somewhere else, and that kind of leads me then, I want to go back to the cosmology piece, because not only does it play a role theologically, so you're absolutely right, right. We have a God who comes out of a static universe, a fixed deity who's like a Wizard of Oz who governs things, but that's not God at all. That is a complete construction, quite honestly. And we don't have a good theology for a world that's in evolution, and we have a hard time with evolution.

So, two things I'd like to ask, like, where do you stand? Evolution is just—it's just the way nature works. That's just the way we got here after 140,000 years of Homo Sapien life and just a million other years of homo life, all the australopithecines, rudolfencines, and Neanderthals, you name it, they were all there before us. And the seed of evolution is Africa. That's anthropology at its best. It's nothing else. It's just where it began. I'm just shocked sometimes the way we have marginalized evolution like as a science that we don't really deal with. People in theology or religion. They so marginalized evolution. They don't want to deal with it. They don't want to talk about it. And I'm like, oh my God, this is our reality. So where might you be on the question of evolution and human becoming? So one thing about evolution that says, guess what, we haven't always been this way, and we won't always be this way. We are a species in movement. We're on a journey, a cosmic journey, a biological journey, and I think today we're seeing this journey speed up with artificial intelligence. It's taking us into its vortex, but we don't know where we're going with it. So maybe the question of evolution for you, and where do you see as human becoming, and where do you see the role of artificial intelligence in all of this? Especially in the question of race and racism?

Reggie: Yeah. Well the conversation about artificial intelligence, these artificial intelligences, who knows where they will evolve, how they will grow, but they start with the mind of the people who create them. So they can't help but see human difference in the way that they have been designed to see human difference. And we find that they are oftentimes themselves overtly racist, which is problematic, and who knows what they will become if they become conscious or something? Science is a place of interacting with the ineffable in a way that brings new understanding, new learning, new possibilities for recognizing God's grinder. I find it fascinating to encounter people who are fearful of the interaction between faith and science, because they're wanting to guard something, wanting to keep something, hold onto something as though they're protecting God. God doesn't need our protection. He doesn't need us, or I should say he—God does not need us fighting for God. We will likely, at some point in time, find life in space. How fascinating is that?

What does that do to our understanding of the universe certainly is not what we see in the scriptures today. They didn't know that there were multiple stars and so forth. And it certainly is not 4,000 years old. The earth is not—the young earth just seems silly to me. I was reading something about the presence of lead, debunking the possibilities of a young earth, because lead is a substance that has come about after the decay of certain kinds of irons and minerals and so forth, that it's a very, very, very, very old substance, which shows that we got billions of years here. Who knows what we will be in the next few billions of years. But who knows in the next discoveries with science for people, especially those who were bound by faith and open to the presence of God in creation and God's ongoing work, what we will learn. My mentor who trained me in Christian ethics was a scientist. And he came to faith, actually turned towards the study of theology from physics because of a discovery in the lab. Something he was observing in scientific study just blew his mind and sent him towards theological study.

Robert: The temptation to protect God from science, stymies theological innovation, often leaving us without the powers of vision necessary to see the world anew and ultimately heal our communities. Next, Reggie talks about his experience with racism and what a renewed religious disposition can offer our communities. And later, Ilia asks Reggie, whether AI can help or hinder this social progress.

Ilia: Teilhard de Chardin's idea is that God is being in a sense dependent on our choices and our actions to become fully alive as God. You know, it's like the Iranian idea that glory of God is the human person fully alive. So he has the idea that God is becoming God in us. And that goes back to, in a sense of the Bon Hopper idea. You know, that christic life that emerges when we come to that new reality within us. So it's not the image or the biblical image that God created heaven earth, and we just sinned, we got to fix it up. That's just like too static. It's too narrow. I mean, this is a dynamic God empowers life to become more life. And I just think of it as life becoming more life. I have come, you might have life and have it to the full, and it's always the moreness of life. I see this over and over. I think what Marxist is really transcendence. We always want to go beyond, I see this in sports, in music in our intellectual pursuits. We're always seeking to go beyond, because I think there's something about within us that's not yet fully formed. We're still incomplete humans. We're still becoming something more.

Reggie: You know, back to this conversation briefly about race because it ties into what we were saying about God. On one hand, the ideas of human difference that we have, we hold each other within the meaning of these races. We come to know something about each other immediately upon viewing each other. We know what the different races of people are like, and this is a knowledge that we inherit that's been built for centuries. So I walk into a building or a room full of people, and what do they know about me from looking at me? What they know about me really is, to some extent, has me captive in their minds to a set of logics that are very old—call it an epistemological captivity. Then they come to know me and I don't fit within the boxes that they have and that they have captured me within. They have to, I'm the exception in some way or another, untethered in their epistemological captivity. Theology has the capacity, and religions have the capacity to do the very same thing with God. So, fighting against what you may have in the sciences or in other fields of thought to hold God within this box of knowledge, because I'm comfortable knowing God in that way, but what if God is radically different?

Ilia: Yeah. I love that. That's it.

Reggie: Radically different than anything that you might think theologically or religiously. Are you open to God?

Ilia: We impose on the stained God, what we think God is based on medieval art or the way we read some scripture, or the way our mothers taught us, whatever it was. And then what if God is nothing like that whatsoever? You know. It is like coming to know a person. And everything you thought—well, I can say the same thing, even as a religious sister, you know, people always expect like a sister to be this and that. And I'm like, I break every barrier in every kind of—I'm totally elastic in that way, but it's true, shattering the images that people put on us. It's the difference, in my view, between an idol and an icon. We idolize, whether it's race or religion; this is what God is, this is what a black person is, this is what a sister is, but an idol is, we don't approach the person, we receive the person. It's like you receive the icon. So our Western way is very, you know, we're very aggressive in this way. We're going to, I want to know you. We're going to impose ourself on the other person, rather than receiving from that person just their own beingness in a simple, hello.

So, receptivity to me is the beginning of iconography. You see the divine light that—but we're not there at all. We're not. It the western way of thinking about these things. I don't think that this is a global thing. I do think in other religions, other cultures around the world, it is a very different way of approaching one another and approaching the question of divinity itself. But I guess you have lots of work to do, by the way, in your new job. But we both have work to do, even in bringing science and religion into a new Teilhard's idea was these two disciplines. These are the two disciplines actually, that frame just about all our knowing, our epistemologies. And unless these two areas are brought into an integrative hole in as not reducing one to the other, but seeing how they complement one another, how they can enhance one another for the good of a kind of more unified way of seeing ourselves in the world in light of the way light itself shines through every person and everything that exists.

I want to go back to that question of artificial intelligence, because what I see, you know, there are two ways to look at AI. It's either leveling us out like you said before, AI is, it has built in biases. Clearly it all depends on who's writing the code—who has the job there. I mean, and I think AI actually has the potential to move beyond what has become ontologically fixed in us. You know, whether it's race or religion or the things that separate, not only separate, but cause these deep feelings of animosity and opposition and that you're taking up too much earth and we need to reclaim it for ourselves. And I do wonder if artificial intelligence can move us to a new wordless type of relationship where we begin to receive from one another. You know, the informational flow transcends the language that divides.

Reggie: Yeah. I'm fascinated by AI. I really am. We just, as I'm coming into slue, a new requirements that we're supposed to put on syllabi here about the use of AI in the classroom, and for people like me, I'm starting to feel my age because I'm just learning about AI. My daughter, who when she was finishing her time in undergrad, started teaching me about how I could use AI in either sermon prep or essay writing, that it can help clean up my language. You know, maybe even offer me different ways of saying the same thing that's clearer. I just thought that it's amazing. It's amazing to think of what kind of possibilities AI may, might open us up to. I think you were speaking about evolution as well, and I wonder. I wonder. I mean, the connection between say, AI and the next kinds of societies that we will be living in and creating, the next kind of social relation relating that we'll be doing, I wonder. I don't know, especially post pandemic, what AI may offer to us.

Ilia: I think that would be something we need to keep in mind. Like, what is our vision for the future? So we know what the problems are in the present, but sometimes I wonder if we're trying to solve the problems of the present, or we're trying to envision a new future together. Certainly, you can't be completely separate in these domains, but sometimes we give too much emphasis on problem solving the present when I think the profit and the mystic sees a new future, and how can we do that?

Reggie: You know, new futures, that's a whole discussion to be had. That fascinates me too when we think about new futures. Taking this conversation about AI, for example, what is new about the future that we might propose or we might be envisioning, and does AI move us there? Or does AI take the tools that we have in this world that we're existing in now and create a digital version of that? And it's not quite new, it's not new, it's a technological version of where we're at now.

Ilia: I think we're right in the midst of a radical newness as we speak with AI. And we won't know it. We won't be able to know it until we move beyond it. So it's until that whatever new, and we'll look back and say, "Oh, that's what we were becoming all along." I find that amazing sometimes that what we're becoming, we never recognize it because you only know something in a sense in retrospect.

Reggie: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I see that. I think about there's some work being done on Epistemology, for example, work being done on relationality. You know, Karen Barad?

Ilia: Oh, yeah.

Reggie: Yeah.

Ilia: Entanglement.

Reggie: Yeah. Quantum entanglement type stuff too. Think about not selves as finished, fixed entities that come to interact with each other. I mean, that's what we would describe as moral life or as being and being together. But that when we encounter each other, we are always already entangled.

Ilia: Yeah.

Reggie: Now, how do we envision a future of society with that understanding of, call it human, as opposed to the atomized individual thought that we get out of Europe, which gives us antagonisms and the concepts of race and gender and sexuality?

Ilia: Yeah. No, that's really, really cool. I mean, that's exactly it. How do we think of an entangled humanity? You know, what kind of society would that look like?

Robert: A big thanks to Reggie Williams for joining us, and thanks as well to our partners at the Fetzer Institute. Coming up on Hunger for Wholeness, we are very excited to present a special four-part interview with futurist, writer and one of the founding editors of Wired Magazine, Kevin Kelly. You won't want to miss it. As always, I'm Robert Nicastro. Thanks for listening.