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TRINITY

The following is not entirely fictitious.


   The private rooms of the Dean of the Chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, are in the north side of Trinity's Great Court, to the left of the Chapel. Within the Chapel itself, even more startling in the pale light of day, for at night he is in shadow, the hawkish gaze of Trinity's most famous jewel, Sir Isaac Newton, is first to meet the eye. A strange commemoration, some think, since Sir Isaac is believed by so many to have dethroned God from his Heavens, but since his day the fellows of Trinity do not shun iconoclasts.
   Whilst their meeting with the Dean could never be thought unusual, it is late one spring evening when his guests of the evening come in by the main gate. All four are well-known to the Porters' Lodge and no-one asks their business. Nor need they fear to be disturbed. With exams less than a month away, even Trinity's students are subdued. They have very little time for revelry just now. Their tutors and the College lecturers are equally busy, and the Great Court is deserted. The last kitchen staff left an hour ago.
   Five are now present. Three are, or until recently were, full professors. One man still is, here in Cambridge. He is also one of the most famous theologians in the English-speaking world. One of the other men was also a Cambridge professor. He now shares a home with two of the ladies. There is nothing peculiar in this, however. He is married to one of them and the other is a life-long friend of his wife and philosophical associate of them both. Their house is one of the fine, large villas in the mostly untravelled streets beyond the Backs, a kind of hinterland in the grander, quieter suburbs of Cambridge.
    Some of these houses are now owned by foreign foundations, some by the nouveau riche of the now numerous commercial collaborations with the University, or independently with its scholars: electronic, cryogenic, bio-tech, cybernetic - all making new millions. These are maintained superbly.
   Others display the grandeur of an earlier era: of a very different kind. They tend to be remarkably dishevelled, unpainted, the putty falling out of window frames, their chimneys adrift, and surrounded by equally untidy gardens in which ancient gazebos are slowly submerged by wisteria and slowly collapse. Except for the last, their house is just like this. It is a mark of supremely academic preoccupation that the front gate is held together with string, the path to their front door overgrown and never used. Some may suspect that this air of dilapidation is cultivated carefully: but it is natural; they really do not notice that the milk bottles at the back door have not and never will be collected. They have not seen the milkman for years. They remember his name but his obituary never appeared in The Times.
   Each of these five people, if not all equally famous, is equally distinguished in their chosen field. At first sight there would appear to be little which might call them together like this, so late on a Spring evening. Only a careful reading of their published histories would discover one common interest that is intensely important to them all. There is now a private interest also. The first might bring them together at almost any time. The second is the immediate cause.
   Their host is a second famous - even an unexpectedly, unwantedly infamous - theologian. He is the Dean of Chapel, the Right Reverend Dr John A.T. (Arthur Thomas) Robinson. When much younger, he was already respected as a distinguished but unadventurous New Testament scholar. A good-looking, fine-featured man, he is normally markedly reserved in his manner, although not quite as emotionless as some may believe, and he is certainly of high intelligence. He is also conscious of his good looks, and these are presently enhanced almost theatrically by a fine deep red, almost purple, cassock, leather belted, with a cross, and embellished with fine white lace at collar and cuffs. He is pouring drinks for the others at an antique oak table against the left-hand wall between his study windows and the inner door. Both inner and the outer doors are now closed: the very definite signal that he is not to be disturbed by anything short of a student insurrection.
   Except for the one remarkable act of insurrection of his own, John Robinson would certainly still be a bishop. He might well have achieved much higher office. Careful in his manners, scrupulous in his speech, he is not the man, one might suppose, to have brought down demands on himself that he be not only evicted from his palace and pursued for heresy. He had achieved all this however by writing - during a period of illness - a little book which sold more copies, in more languages, than any other religious book, except the Bible itself, since Pilgrim's Progress, and which many theologians and priests, if they feared either for their tenure or their living, read behind locked doors.
   This little book he called Honest to God, and it was the first by any church leader, perhaps since Bonhoeffer in Germany, and or philosophers since Spinoza or Tillich, to admit to a gap between his own actual knowledge of spiritual truth and what he - as well, of course, as others - were expected to say that they know by experience to be true.
   One of his biographers has noted that this honesty brought down on his head such an unprecedented storm of execration, even hatred that "[It] made the controversy about Lady Chatterley's Lover look pale by comparison." . 1
   Lady Constance's awful crime, it may be remembered, was not in taking a lover - the British upper-classes have commonly had multiple lovers of either sex; nor was even that her lover was her crippled husband's gamekeeper - a man with a decidedly refreshing freedom from guilt. It was rather for her to become aware of her own lack of sexual fulfilment: then to seek it. Robinson's crime was curiously much the same. At the trial of the publishers for obscenity, he spoke in defence of their book. But to many theologians, priests, and other pious idolaters of the printed word, his own book was far more obscene. It demanded that they explain what the words they worshipped signified. Only the bravest of his colleagues applauded. "One would think the leaders of the churches would have welcomed such an initiative, but that would be to mistake the nature of institutionalised religion. The religious establishment, instead, recoiled defensively. Every would-be theologian rushed into print to denounce this book." .. "It revealed just how deeply John Robinson had touched the hot buttons of religious fear that the traditional defenders of the faith struggle to conceal." 2
   Being somewhat more accustomed to protecting heretics and apostates, the fellows of Trinity, to their eternal credit, had no difficulty in inviting him to become their Dean. He has not recovered his poise entirely, but hides this partly by this show of dignified reserve.
   Seated with their backs to the windows, whose internal shutters are now closed, are two other professors. Dorothy Mary Emmet is a slight, white-haired, bird like figure with a sometimes absent sometimes sharply observant darting look. She had made her own reputation with a far less accidental or deliberately provocation twenty years before called The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking. In it, too, however, she consigned the comfortable conceit to history of many metaphysical philosophers that use can be made of metaphorical descriptions of knowledge which only float on a sea of other metaphors, and which also have little contact with real experience. Less a devotee of that other Cambridge mystery-man, Ludwig Wittgenstein, than her friend, Margaret, she is certainly convinced of the truth of his most famous aphorism: "Was sich überhaupt sagen lässt, lässt sich klar sagen; und wovon man nich reden kann, darüber musst man schweigen."3
   "A generation ago, " wrote one of her followers, "Dorothy Emmet concluded that the future of metaphysics (and thus of theology) depended upon the emergence of a new analogy capable of igniting the imagination."4 Despite her appearance, this is a lady who once taught Welsh miners the philosophy of Plato - and lived; and went on to create the Philosophy Department of the University of Manchester virtually single-handed. Now retired, she will go on working and writing into her nineties. The last paper she will ever write, at the age of 92, addresses the ancient question: "Is God a Person?" If she has doubts about this now, part of the answer may be decided for her - if only by elenchus - in this room tonight.
   On her right is a white-haired man about her own age, but twice her weight. He is Richard Bevan Braithwaite, recently retired as the University's Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy. Born too young for the early carnage of the First World War and having been fortunate to escape the later carnage as well, at first a mathematician, at only 24 he was an elected fellow of King's College, in many eyes the only college equal to Trinity in grandeur, but still below in terms of international academic success.
   His interest seems to have diverted to moral philosophy after the Second World War when he helped to set up the Mind Association. His most unusual contribution to this field has been to attempt to apply the concepts of game theory to ethics, arguing that this should make it possible to define the optimal conditions by which people with different ideas can still collaborate in ways that all may accept as fair. He has also tried to interpret claims of religious truth in a most unusual way too: not on the basis of what people say they believe, but - very much more empirically - on what they do.5
   Sitting across from them in the far corner of the room, ignoring them and the other two, being possibly in a far corner of an entirely separate space and time, is Professor Donald Mackenzie MacKinnon. Professor MacKinnon is described by even his admirers as notoriously 'untidy' and 'unsystematic': and this is just as true physically as intellectually, for like Dr Samuel Johnson he is famous for his sudden tics and antic jerks, for his abrupt entries and unpredictable departures from what Johnson himself would call the sublunary world. His, nevertheless, is possibly the sharpest mind in the room. Sometimes his may also be the sharpest tongue. The others treat him with both respect and caution. They also note the glass at his elbow. At any moment the elbow may decide to project it across the room. He is furiously munching on some private thought, his face twisting this way and that to follow its course; then taking a slurp from his glass and looking suddenly, disconcertingly, and directly at Dorothy, he mutters almost inaudibly but as if for her ears alone: "Quem Deus vult salvare, prius dementat".
   Dorothy is fond of Donald MacKinnon. She knows that this is neither meant for her, nor is about her: or him. She can remember when a young student, an English Lit student called Iris Murdoch, took such a shine to Donald when he was a tutor at Oxford that Mrs MacKinnon had to threaten to pull the covers from them both. That was a long time ago. Iris is now a great novelist, a very great novelist. Sometimes she wishes - she allows irritation to wash away that thought. Oxford was never right for him. Plenty of airs and graces, but not so much bottom. Fleetingly a joke appears she remembers from her own time at Oxford: "Buggers can't be choosers." that was Maurice Bowra: supposed to have been. Her slight smile at this thought is intercepted by Margaret bringing her a glass, and she grins widely in return, her back is to the Dean, mutters: "Getting us all here together: pretty sly - of John, eh?"
   But Tempus - other minds have noticed - fugit. Donald is now Emeritus Professor of Divinity of the University's Divinity School. He has been called one of the most important philosopher of religion of the twentieth century, and one of his biographers has written: "his most obvious achievements lie in the ruthless exposure of intellectual flabbiness in theological writers who venture incautious judgements", yet this praise with a warning of "a seething mass of difficulties presented by [..] the intrinsic characteristics of MacKinnon's work, which is often both brilliant and obscure."6
   Few called his early work obscure:

To some extent the Christian baptised into the death of Christ must always, if he is loyal to his Master, be a disruptive force in society. For in and through his baptism he accepts the verdict of rejection pronounced from the Cross upon man's cultural achievement and is thereby irrevocably committed to the task of pointing the whole social frame to its origin beyond itself. The Church in its members is both involved in, and independent of, the historical cultural moment [..] for it is at the same time the Body of him who is the dissolver of all cultural forms that destroy and impede the attainment by the creature of his true status. 7

   It is only much later - now in fact - that MacKinnon's own theology is taking on a tone that even his admirers call 'agonistic' and 'even agnostic'. In every way a very kindly man to those he feels abused, displaced, dispossessed, he is a very dangerous man to cross in argument. He really thinks that life itself is argument: that it is for argument
   Acting, to his controlled impatience, as the Dean's serving wench in ferrying their glasses to the others is the big, black haired, massively bosomed figure in a belted fisherman's jersey of blue wool. Margaret Masterman is Richard's wife. Mrs Braithwaite as she is rarely known has a big booming voice, a hearty infectious, joyful laugh, and many unfortunates have wrecked themselves on presumption that she only as much as her surface. As an early very active pioneer in the field of Artificial Intelligence she is later conceded to have been 'out of her time by twenty years' ,8 for the machines she has to work with are currently little better that IBM card-sorters, the clattering 'bombes' in Washington and Bletchley Park which broke the German Enigma and Japanese naval codes. Even the huge dedicated code-breaking computers produced since then have nothing like the potential that she and others have already envisaged, but with them she and her team are trying to solve the problem of finding a language that will allow humans to talk intelligibly to machines and - perhaps even more difficult - which will allow machines to reply as if they are intelligent. 9
   Finally everyone is served. Donald is now only staring into space. Margaret has lowered herself - she sees the Dean wince: what a fuss-pot - onto a spindle-legged stool to Donald's right, and then takes a seat himself. His is the solid upright armchair in which he has composed his sermons now for nearly thirty years. It gives him, in this company, a needed sense of security - no; not just that, of continuity. He is the chairman now. Bowra made himself the chair of so many committees at Oxford that his memorial in Wadham College Fellows' garden is only half a man. The lower half has four legs - is a chair. What will they make of John one day? Perhaps half a church: but then, which half?
   "Well," the Dean smiles at them all. Wish he wouldn't be fiddling with that damned lace. Now he feels fully in charge. "Thank you all for coming, at this late hour. I explained to you all the reason. Since this young man is here at Trinity, I felt some particular concern. I know you have all met him. It seems to me that we might meet together this evening to answer just two questions."
   "Or three." Margaret interjects at once. Will he always have to rein in her impatience.
   "The first is; is he real? By that I mean can we accept his own account of himself, of his experience, as authentic? And the second is: if so, what we tell him?"
   "And the third," Now this is Dorothy, to his surprise, but of course she and Margaret - and Richard too, probably - will have talked. "is: what can we do for him?"
JR:    "But that, I suggest, is as may be. Perhaps we may share our first impressions?"
MM: "Or our second, third, fourth, even fifth impressions. We have seen him more than once. Geoffrey Boulton sent him."
JR:"Yes, indeed. Professor MacKinnon: I am sure your view is essential. I understand you met him first. Last year wasn't it: in Scotland?"
McK: "In Oban. He wrote: asked to meet me. I did."
JR: "And also here, apparently, in your School."
McK: "Many times. He has been coming to see me quite regularly. Almost weekly. At my request. Keeping him out - out of other company. The boy's quite naive. Thinks anyone will help him."
JR: Quite so. And your impression?
McK: Hmm. Well, he's not another Coinneach Odhar: another Seer, y'know, of Brahan, although he was the manager, the factor you might say, for a while of Innis Chainnich, over by Mull. All that once was Mackenzie lands. They're mostly MacFadyeans now, Mackenzies as were: Kenneth became Kenzie, d'ye see. Before that it was MacChoinnich; Iain of Kintail, he was called John by the English, succeeded his father Kenneth - that was in thirteen-ought-four - and his son was another Kenneth. Mackenzies all however they are named. He's a fine young man, I found him: nothing wrong with him at all. He doesn't know much, mind you, except what he has to tell. But there's nothing wrong with him, nothing all. Nor with what he says. That was after Kenneth Og, of course - Buchanan sent his head to the Fifth James - and that was the end of them.
JR: Yes. But what do you make of him?
McK: It's just what I've been telling you.
JR: Ah. Well now, Professor Emmet?
DE: He is nice young man, not unintelligent. He's not trying to fool us. He's puzzled by the experience, that's quite certain; but he's also quite immovable about what it was. Margaret and I got him to write it all down for Theoria, and what he told us at first and his written account varies hardly by a syllable. I think he is real. He just wants us to tell him what to do.
JR: Or he memorised it? Got it by rote? As we know, there are any number of accounts, verified historical accounts, that he might take as a model; although I admit some details are -
MM: You can't just suppose that he trumped it all up. What ever would be the point of that? This is not another mediaeval God-blind hysteric, whatever you may say. He's modern. He has a science degree! He was an officer. In the Army. Anyway, he'd've had'terruv boned up on the Qu'ran too.
DE: That embrace, Dean; do you see - that very close embrace. The sheer physicality of it! It's so very evocative of, you know - of Mohammed, you know. Is that what you mean? And, equally, there's this quite extraordinarily florid OBE. What a risk to include them both! No, I can't believe he's faking it.
MM: The big difference is he wasn't frightened. Mohammed confesses he was. Bags.
JR: I may tell you now that I invited him here to dinner: just the two of us. The later I also met his wife. But she is very frightened, so very frightened, I would say, by the whole thing.
McK: And Jacob at Peniel. Isra-el: he who wrestles with God.
JR: Ah, but surely we agree that is - well, well: allegorical?
DE: You might not if you'd had his experience. He hasn't thought of that either.
MM: Just typical of the Army - to lock him up in a madhouse. They would have done the same to Sassoon. He was only saying the Army had no business in Ireland, except to stop the Protestants being evicted. That's what he said their man told him: 'We just want the Prods to go back to Scotland. It's just you English soldiers who're in our way.'
McK: The Church of Rome: I am speaking only of the Romish Church -
RBB: I have never met him - I took care, in fact, to keep out of his way; but from what Dorothy and Margaret have to say it's also clear - and what they have collected as evidential, and will publish - and I would suppose they have met him, with the greatest respect to you, Donald, at least as often as you have - that there is enough reason to accept his report, as a report. This is to say nothing definite about him.
JR: I assured him, for my part, it is entirely in the Christian tradition.
DE: Not Christian only. But he is the messenger. Has not the messenger also the right to be heard?
MM: Not if he is just a post-box: a mailman. You get a letter; the letter contains news of importance. You don't then place a crown on the postman's head and call him Messiah. Or anyone else.
RBB: Margaret!
DE: Is that all Christ was?
MM: Probably. You struggle and you struggle with this problem: that Christ was a perfectly ordinary man, a perfectly ordinary man with an idea: and yet you want him also to be your God. Why not just accept that he had a message from God and was just an ordinary young man who had to fight for his life? He lost it. This is just another ordinary young man. When your friend, my goodness, your lover, talks to you over the 'phone you do not suppose that the 'phone is your lover, do you?
McK: It's just these cultural confusions: all partial; all selfish; all exclusive, excluding. Infantile identity neuroses all of them.
JR: Professor, Donald: excuse me! The question before us is still whether what he has to report is authentic. I have already told him that his experience, as he recounted it to me here in this study, is, was, entirely within the Christian tradition. He came here and I had supper sent over from Hall. I could not do more.
MM: Or anyone but your lover..
JR: Or several others. That is the point. Margaret, thank you. Now what shall we tell him after this?
RBB: Nothing.
McK: We cannot know. We do not know. Unless we have first - I have said this before: unless there is found a way from God to man, a reliable, universal address of God to man, outside of culture, there is no way of finding a way from man to God.
RBB: Well, I agree: a very general way: a way as open and generous to all, just as mathematics, for example, is open and generous to all, a way that man and women equally may enter -
DE: Try and test -
RBB: Exactly, try, test, and prove: find responsive to their own intelligence, inquiry -
McK: Inquiry is a soul's adventure for God. Kierkegaard called it, the Incarnation, God's attack on man. Strange man, harrowed. But the Cross is the sign of God's contempt, the rejection of all human cultures, the endlessly dividing; traditions; traditions, endlessly dividing. We always come back to this, to understand the nature if the intersection of history and the eternal living. God attacks man with His mercy, man replies with hate. There's ever the battle.
JR: And battlefields are not for contemplation.
McK: Only place, the only place.
MM: Why not a soldier? Why ever do you say: do 'nothing'?
RBB: It seems to me that you - and, I may say, we - all in somewhat different ways wish to help this young man, to guide him. My advice is then that the best help we may give him will be do nothing. Nothing at all.
DE: But here he is, now - he's come in, in from the cold as says Carr, that writer, -
RBB: Carré: le Carré.
DE: Yes, le Carré says his chap came in from the cold. And then you say we should just send him out again, into the cold, without even telling him - anything? Without any support, without any encouragement, help? Richard?
JR: Professor - with the greatest respect; excuse me, Richard - I really do not see that there is anything we can do to help. He has an honours degree already, in engineering. But this is still not someone whom - who - I see that Trinity - or I - can help. Besides he has no vocation. He actually distrusts the Church. Talks to me, I am sure, only - well, I may say, only as a courtesy to you all, mostly to Donald. And then - there is a wife. He must have an income.
McK: Hooch, Dean. It is surely not for us to dibble-dabble over the instrument. He is chosen. What has he to say?
JR: Very little, that is true
RBB: Very little. He says so himself. Sometimes it can happen - I mean, clearly it must sometimes have happened that we - Let us say, we have an intelligence service
MM: Fair old cock they make of things. Nearly always.
RBB: Margaret: no! Not always. Imagine our service is approached by an agent, some chap, completely unknown, and he says he has access to some pretty wonderful stuff. We do not know what. We do not know if we can trust him. He may be a plant. He does not know if he is or if he is not. We don't either. It may be that he has access to much more that we do not know. He may be a complete dead-end.
DE: So, you just want to let him go. Let him run, I suppose you would say
JR: Well, no, no, not exactly: we can keep in contact.
RBB: But you cannot, don't you see. Anyone of us - you, me, the Dean, Donald - could keep in contact, but then inevitably we would corrupt the link with - well, whatever it is that he has still to find. To be useful he has to be left entirely alone. No promises, no help, no favours. If he is real, if he is real, we have to trust him to come back to us with much more: very much more than just two words.
DE: I don't agree it is just those two words, But, even if this were the case, it is probably worth pointing out, since no-one appears to have noticed it before, that it is precisely this prescription: of how to honest before God; honest about God, about our knowledge, about our ignorance of God, about the pretensions and the vanity. It is just this which unites all of us here.
McK: We think we know: Lord, teach us what we do not know. We can't chose the instrument. He speaks to us in His language. When He made Himself a man, He was not still understood. Even worse today. Charismatics. Pooh-sticks. Floating down the stream. Each one thinks he's the one that's swimming faster.
JR: Well, not quite all pooh-sticks, Donald, although as you say. Tradition - I know you will agree - is still comfort and inspiration to very many. It does appear to me that although we all have philosophical points to make - of great value - this is a problem that the Church has had to deal with many times before -
MM: We can't just burn him, this time.
DE: Oh, Margaret, really.
JR: I was going to say deal with sympathy, compassion, understanding. The visitation at Lourdes, Saint Bernadette -
MM: Dean Robinson! This is not another 14 year old girl! He is thirty!
DE: Margaret, please now be quiet.
MM: No, I have been quiet. I will not be quiet. I have sat here, for nearly an hour, and listened to you all talk as if this is just your problem. It isn't just your problem. It's much more like mine that anyone of you can possibly imagine. Donals is right. This is a language problem. It seems to have defeated everyone for half a million years. Now we humans have the same problem - because we have made machines, and we want to talk with them.
RBB: Yes, and that is wh - .
MM: No, no, it is exactly the same. Suppose you really do have this God of yours, this wonderful intelligence, out there somewhere that, possibly on a different plane we can scarcely imagine who wants, sometimes, or even all the time, to communicate with you. But you are created primarily to consume power. We plug in our machines, or we give them batteries. They take the power. They have no idea, not even the capacity to think, how this comes to them. You are at first only able to survive, to fight and survive. You are not meant to converse. We have this problem. We have made machines which will do certain things, perform certain tasks, quite limited tasks. They can talk to us, in a limited way: we have given them lamps and dials and so on - but we cannot talk to them in any intelligent way. Directly, as a direct speech you might say, we can only give them the most basic instruction - of which the most basic is: Live. We've switched them on, do you see. And then, for a limited period, and you do not know how long - I'm talking now as if to the machine, but of course it can't understand me - you may think this time is endless, but we can always switch you off, you can think. about this or that very limited problem: you can think.
JR: I see the analogy. Humans as machines. This is not really new. There is free will.
MM: Pah. When you philosophers finally decide what it is, we will give it to machines as well. The human mind may never think like a machine; but one day we will make a machine that thinks as well as the mind. Perhaps better.
JR: Well, personally, I must find that - really - is somewhat far-fetched.
MM: What we can do right now is to leave them with instructions to be carried out. A programme. We give them a programme. We build it into them. This was Turing's idea: that was his genius, his idea. 10 And then we can leave them alone, even for years and years and that is just what they will do.
DE: You didn't say any of this before.
MM: I only thought of it - realised it - just now listening to you all puzzling about this young man, our young man. He's been programmed, you see: switched on, and programmed.
DE: Programmed? To do what?
MM: As Richard says: we don't know; can't interfere - must just let him run. May be it's just to keep inquiring. Come to think of it, that's just what he says he wants to do.
RB. But that's also just what Turing's idea was about. He said that if any problem has a solution, and there is a formal, that is a way to reach it step-by-step, then eventually, if one of his machines is programmed to find that solution, it will stop. Then you know there is a solution.
JR: But isn't that what faith is. Using free will, we can choose faith.
McK: Contradiction, contradiction: inquiry stops; no theology that is worth calling a theology CAN AFFORD TO STAND STILL!
DE: Puts a padlock on your thinking, Dean, and then where are you? Bedlam. Closed minds. Idiots fighting other idiots. Donald, please put that down.
JR: I know, I know. It's Newton, of course. Only a copy, really; the original's in the Fitzwilliam. But really, Professor, I would also rather -
RBB: No, no, no, you still haven't got the point.
MM: Turing - you must have known him, Dorothy, he was at Manchester before the War. Turing also showed - well, he used Cantor's ideas, and Gödel. of course, that there will be - no, there must be - problems which cannot be programmed in any way so that his machine will stop.
RBB: It will just go on and on, just looking. Undecidable, he called them. Gödel, too. There used to be just the two possibilities: true; false. Since Gödel, since Turing even more so, there is a third - even a fourth: undecidable and, or if you like, but true; undecidable but false.
JR: I rather think we are straying very far from the point.
MM: My dear Dean - forgive me: John, not at all, not at all. He does not want to prove that God exists. Undecidable for us - some of us - it's not his question. He wants to show that there is a process, a universally valid process, by which others can decide whether God exists.
JR: But however does he expect to do that?
MM: First he consults other machines. That's us. That's what he's been doing.
DE: Margaret, all right. He'll draw a blank with us. We can't help him. After that?
MM: Either his programme is sufficient - or it is not. Fix faxo. Only he can find out.
DE: Donald do sit down. Why ever are you capering about like that? Oh! You have.
JR: No matter; really, no matter. It's just his head has come off. I bought it in the High. Twelve and six. I can get another.
McK: Hahah. Don't you see: Are you are! Capek, 1921. We are switched on: born. All start to think. Some stop, many stop: faith. Others go on and on: theology, science.
RBB: Mathematics.
DE Morality, ethics.
McK: Dean, I've - oh - I have broken your Newton. A thousand, thousand apologies, a most valuable piece, priceless -
JR: No, no, Professor MacKinnon, not at all. Do not mind it please. But what is this about are you are?
McK: Ah, yes. R.U.R. Rossum's Universal Robots: robota, Czech - Russian, really - 'forced labour'. If Margaret's right it's what we are too, you see. Rossum's first Law was no robot may harm a human being. We're not too well programmed there: murder, murder, always more murder. Look at Ireland now. Despicable. What was left out in our case was sticking to programmes that stop! There's your free will: free will is NOT sticking - oh, dear, this porcelain is really not very strong. I had thought it porcelain. Dean! this seems to be very poor quality - not porcelain at all! It's new! It's just pot! Quite modern.
DE: Donald.
McK: Free will. Ah, yes: so free will is NOT sticking to programmes that STOP!
DE: Which I suppose is more or less what all of us have been saying for years and years.
JR: Professor MacKinnon, let me relieve you - ech, and the arm too! of all the bits; and the base too, I think. It was bought in the High. Original too valuable to keep here. Just twelve and six. Things do tend to get knocked over. But, Professor Emmet I am only too happy to agree with you. Doctor, ah, Margaret, I am most grateful for that fascinating idea. I doubt that many colleagues will welcome it.
MM: Poo! Have they ever? Stick-in-muds. Middle-roaders.
RBB: In which case there's nothing for us to do.
McK: He's to be a teacher, he told me. Of mathematics. School mathematic.
MM: Hah-hah-hah. I told him: "Just teach mathematics in a school for a few years and no-one will ever be able to call you mad!"
JR: I believe none of us thought that. I shall try to relieve his mind. That was never the issue here. I am only glad, for his sake, his wife's sake, that we have reached a unanimous - unanimous? yes - a unanimous conclusion.
DE: To send him out in the cold again.
MM: Turn his loose.
RBB: Let him run.
DE: And wait.
JR: It remains only for me to thank you all, most sincerely, for coming. Oh no, Professor, please: that's not necessary at all. It was a copy, from the High Street. Well, thank you, thank you. Perhaps I may get another. Always been admired.
McK: He's a good young man. I hope I may live to see him - I mean his success. Whatever it may be. Speaking for my own part, I have a faith - I have my belief.
DE: Amen.

All of the above, most regrettably, are now dead. To them all, however,
wherever they may now be, I offer my most sincere and grateful thanks. You helped me most all by doing nothing; I like to think it was for the reasons given here.

 

1.    John A.T. Robinson Remembered, Rt.Rev. John Shelby Spong, Bishop of Newark, VOICE, Sep 1995.
2.    ibid.
3.    Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922. The ODQ translates this as: ‘What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’, which seems to me unduly precious: with ‘whereof’ and ‘thereof’: forsooth! What I think he really meant also might be said more clearly: “If you cannot say what you mean so clearly that anyone will understand you, you forfeit the right to be heard.”
4.    Cited by Professor W. Paul Jones, St Paul School of Theology, Kansas City, in Theology Today, no date.
5.    “In accordance with the criterium of verification (that) he recognised, he tried to set forth a non-cognitivist interpretation of religious assertions as the declaration of the acceptance of certain moral modes of life.” from www.kul.lublin.pl/efk/angielski/hasla/b/Braithwaite.html
6.    Richard Roberts, in Christ, Ethics, and Tragedy, CUP, 051234137X.
7.    God the Living and the True, CUP, 1940.
8.    The Finite String Newsletter, Computational Linguistics, Vol 13, 1987
9.    At the at the CLRU, the Cambridge Language Research Unit, which she largely created and kept funded.
10.  Alan Turing (1912-54), English mathematician and early computer scientists, described the working of what are now called ‘Turing machines’, now the basis of all digital computers.

 

Colin Hannaford,

"Soldier."
13/02//05


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