So when you say that these are-- there's a lot of clearly intelligent input into a lot of these, these simulations and, and models, can you, can you just give us a few examples to help people understand what you mean by that?

Yeah.

One example, there's a very famous, uh, example from Richard Dawkins' book, "A Blind Watchmaker," where he evolves the phrase, "Methinks it is like a weasel." Uh, and you know, that might be impressive except for the fact that what he did is just say, well, phrases that are more similar to methinks it's like a weasel, no matter how dissimilar they are, but if they're a little bit more similar to that, you know, natural selection would favor that and then very quickly converges on methinks it is like a weasel.

But, you know, that required that sort of idea, the target phrase to be pre-programmed into the, that simulation and to define all sense of selection based on similarity to that, uh, which very much, you know, not really what an evolution would do realistically.

Um, but you can look at other cases like, uh, there's a paper I wrote on, uh, Steiner trees, and someone had written this simulation.

It was very loudly proclaiming that it demonstrated the power of evolutionary processes, but then when I would look through his code, I'd find things like they had overridden how many points there were in their Steiner tree to away from randomness to something that would better fit what they were trying to accomplish, and they would restrict the locations of points and have these, all these extra rules in there, uh, which served no purpose but to aid the evolutionary process towards the goal he was trying to reach with it.

So anything else you wanna say about that or, or the halting, uh, problem, or just in general support of your sympathy towards, um, human cognitional ability being a, a sophisticated algorithm before we move on to some of the implications?

Um, yeah.

Let's start making your

case, Winston.

Where do we begin? So I think that what we begin with is discussing what I called the Uber task.

So computer scientists, we study something called the halting problem.

And the basic idea is if I give you an algorithm and I ask you, if you were to follow this procedure, would you ever actually finish? Or would you keep following a procedure forever and ever? So I think I have an example in the chapter where it's like, you know, step one, dance a jig and step two, go back to step one.

And if you were to follow that procedure, you would never stop dancing your jig because you'd keep going back to step one and just repeat itself forever and ever.

And so that's, of course, a very trivial example.

Do you have an example or way that you like to illustrate this or get this across to people?

And how did Christian thinkers engage that scientific picture, especially given the biblical claim that the heavens were created and could change or pass away?

Yeah, so Christians very consistently always said, no, the heavens are not eternal.

They've not always been here.

God made them.

How they actually tried to fit that with the science of the day varied.

So early on, you will find people who will basically say no.

This science is wrong.

Do the stars determine our actions? Why did astrology once seem like a scientifically plausible explanation for human behavior rather than mere superstition?

Now, how does the influential early church father, Augustine, figure into the journey of how you came to write this book?

Yeah, so there's a quote from Augustine that gets trumpeted out.

Let me see if I can just find it here.

Yes.

Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics.

And we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.

All right.

You have a specific way of kind of going about each chapter.