Category Archives: Atheism

In the time of Elizabeth I of England and Ireland the statesman Francis Bacon published a short essay On Atheism. It is true, he says, that a little philosophy inclineth mans mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth mens minds about to religion.

But atheism is not just intellectually shallow, he thinks; its morally pernicious. They that deny a God destroy mans nobility. Atheism destroys magnanimity and deprives human nature of the means to exalt itself above human frailty.

That was in 1597 when atheists were pretty much outliers. But now, we live in an increasingly secular, post-metaphysical age, and significant parts of our populations dont reject religion it just isnt part of their mental landscape. This alarms those believers who think that the moral fabric of society is being destroyed by this loss of religion. Secular humanists, on the other hand, assert that moral standards dont depend on religious belief, and many secularists think that religion itself is pernicious fundamentalist, obscurantist, patriarchal, repressive. This mutual antagonism isnt the only possibility, of course, and fruitful conversation does take place, partners in conversation, listening rather than assuming, seeking common ground.

And there is an intriguing recent phenomenon that has become almost commonplace: Im secular rather than religious but Im also spiritual.' But what could this talk of spirituality mean if it is no longer grounded in religion? Maybe, though, theres something to explore here, possible common ground between (some) believers and (some) non-believers.

The German philosopher Jrgen Habermas once talked of an awareness of what is missing in our post-metaphysical age.Perhaps it is this uneasy awareness that leads to the appeal of spirituality.Well, one of the things that has been missing is fairly straightforward: the solidarity and regular gathering of a community.And human beings are ceremonial animals, as Ludwig Wittgenstein said. Humanist ministers are starting to preside at naming ceremonies, weddings, and funerals.

Surely something else is missing, though. Recall the words of King Lears daughter, Regan, about her father: He hath ever but slenderly known himself. Although secular humanism asserts that we can live well without religious belief, we still need to embrace a language of interiority, inwardness, self-awareness, and self-knowledge. This language is diagnostic, but it is also expressive. There is a poetic of the inner life and its relation to demeanor and conduct; it is agonized, despairing, hopeful, and struggling to overcome delusion, double-mindedness, and self-deception.

This language of spirituality has a history and continues to grow. It is anchored in ancient traditions that made theistic sense of the phenomena, but the phenomena survive the demise of the theistic sense. Moral life does not require religious belief, but it can be informed by the religious traditions. As the British philosopher Mary Midgley once said, Genesis is more nourishing than Dawkins, and she wasnt giving voice to a faith position. One thinks here of Sren Kierkegaards talk of the necessity for what he called subjective thinking, the existing individual, a dimension missed by sticking merely to the facts.

But secular humanism is still associated with Bacons picture of atheism, perhaps because the rejection of belief was thought to entail a rejection of a way of life conformed to Gods commandments that is, the rejection of belief being a kind of infidelity, a refusal of that way of life. But perhaps our deepest human impulses themselves inform this conception of God, human impulses that are not always available to us unless we search them out and break through our collective self-enclosure.

Francis Bacon went on in 1613 to serve as Attorney General under King James I, and just over 400 years later, and on another continent, another Attorney General, William Barr, took up a similar cause. In his book Hatchet Man, the legal commentator Elie Honig said somewhat sourly of Barr that he had railed:

about the evils of secularism, opining that the countrys founders believed that to control willful human beings, with an infinite capacity to rationalize, these moral values must rest on authority independent of mens will they must flow from a transcendent Supreme Being.

William Barr is hardly alone in making this kind of assessment and in making this kind of assumption about the role of human will. But I think it is an important error: It abstracts the will from the sensibility that informs it. It is intriguing that Jean-Paul Sartres atheistic existentialism made moral values a product of the human will because they could no longer be thought of as a product of Gods. This proposition lies at the heart of religious criticism of secular humanism, but the issue is also a deeply political aspect of the so-called culture wars.

Barr is obviously right to say that human beings are willful, and it is surely right that we have a prodigious (if not an infinite) capacity to rationalize. But the unreliability of the human will is common ground. The ancients, after all, saw our weakened capacity for virtue along a trajectory from moral turpitude to slow moral improvement, from wanton indifference (akolasia) through weakness of will (akrasia), to self-control (enkrateia), and to the ideal of temperance (sphrosun), in which moral action flows from a person without inner resistance.

But something else is going on here, which is why I mentioned Sartres popular thought that we choose our values.Barrs conservative position seems to be that it must be the case that if moral values dont rest on a transcendent authority independent of the human will, then they must be thought to rest upon this human will with its infinite capacity to rationalize, and the inevitable outcome is precisely systematic rationalization, permissiveness, promiscuity, relativism, and moral instability. Even in the case of apparently shared values, their authority for a secularist must lie in the human will. For the believer, on the other hand, their authority lies in the divine will, the will of the transcendent Supreme Being. If the human will is so wayward, fickle, and unstable, then thats not much of an authority; at least religious people know when they are sinning, whereas the secularist has, allegedly, lost any secure sense of their own sinfulness.

But why are we talking about authority here at all? And why, specifically, of the (weak) authority of the wayward human will? Talk of authority belongs to a language of commandments, imperatives, prohibitions, and requirements. But they relate more readily to what we do rather than to our dispositions. As to our dispositions, human beings are frequently cruel, vindictive, and ruthless in the pursuit of their interests, and these dispositions are only sometimes tempered by quite different dispositions of solidarity, sympathy, compassion, benevolence, cooperativeness, and, to recall Bacon, magnanimity. Autocrats and their admirers tend to treat the latter as weaknesses. The rest of us, however, are merely conflicted, and if we feel remorse, it is not because we have broken a rule but because we have done someone harm.

One possible theology conceives a good God as creating human beings with an innate capacity for goodness, their constant and willful straying from which is represented by the myth of the Fall. Believers will not be happy with the idea that this conception of the Supreme Being is a projection of our own liberated impulses and dispositions, nor that imperatives about behavior are attempts to recall us to our own stifled dispositions. But whether we are believers or non-believers, the phenomena remain roughly the same, and spirituality includes a methodology of moral renewal. Moral values naturally dissolve into patterns of disposition, demeanor, and conduct. We are so formed that we are motivated by considerations we might summarize as a natural ethic of care. As the American poet Stephen Crane wrote:

The voice of God whispers in the heart So softly That the soul pauses, Making no noise, And strives for these melodies, Distant, sighing, like faintest breath, And all the being is still to hear.

There is a Buddhist echo in these final lines. We have to still the clamor of greed, hatred, and delusion if we are to hear and then see the world as it were for the first time. Perhaps Cranes stillness is precisely the grace of nature that is a condition of hearing our own inner voice protesting against our own hardness of heart. Francis Bacon said that atheism depriveth human nature of the means to exalt itself above human frailty. But maybe it has nothing to do with whether you are a believer or not: The long discipline of learning to listen, both to oneself and to others,may release a passion for justice and a care for our suffocating planet. This is ground, beyond the fray of the culture wars, on which believers and non-believers can stand together.

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Is atheism destroying the moral fabric of society? - Big Think

The just shall live by faith (Rom. 1:27). Of course. How else shall the just live? From mathematics (including simple arithmetic), to the existence of the charm quark, to belief that whales with feet had strolled on land (before they sauntered back into the ocean), to the Second Coming (the first, too) of Jesus, we all need faithintellectual assent to what we cannot provefor what we believe, know, or believe that we know.

Because we are temporary and subjective beings whose sole knowledge and experience of God's creation are electro-chemically piped through our temporary and subjective senses and then translated into images, emotions, and thoughts by our temporary and subjective brainsyes, some nuance, contingency, and error are going to taint whatever we believe, even whatever happens to be true.

Nevertheless, the notion, the canonized notionconcocted, fomented, and nurtured by them who knowand carried through the three and four previous centuries like litter on ocean waves, is that logic and reason are the bitter enemies of, even the archetypical rivals to, the Christian faith. And worse (the notion goes) they are in a Homeric battle forLebensraumin the human mind over whether logic, reason, and science, or ignorance, superstition, or bigoty will prevail.

It's such a farce, another intellectual myth of the modern era that through dogmatic and constant repetition hardens, like petrified wood, into something deemed firm and solid. Having been kindled by the fresh oxygen pumped into a Europe divided by the Reformation, sure, the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution helped purge away centuries of Roman and Medieval superstition and ignorance (though in Italy, at the Basilica of Saint Anthony, the faithful can still venerate the incorrupt tongue [yes, the tongue] of Saint Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of lost things). But this change wasn't instantaneous, as if the world had to wait for Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Rene Descartes (1596-1650), John Locke (1632-1704), and Isaac Newton (1612-1727) before it learned logic and reason. And, besides, who is going to accuse Abelard of Bath (1080-1142), William of Ockham (1287-1347), Duns Scotus (1265-1308), and Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) of not knowing logic or reason?

In fact, despite beatified rumors to the contrary, Christianity from the start has been baked through and through with logic and reason, in contrast to atheistic materialism, which is neither logical nor reasonable.

The Logic of Creation

Take creation. Something that once did not exist, and then did, like our universe, could not have created itself, right? Whatever created the universe, it wasn't the universe itself, obviously. Logic and reason demand that something elseseparate from the universe, prior to the universe, transcendent to and greater than it (think of the relationship between a sculptor and a sculpture)had to have created it to begin with.

Something separate from, prior to, transcendent to, and greater than the universe. Hmmm . . . like God, perhaps?

However, ruling out God from the start, the atheist has another option: nothing. That is, in opposition to God creating the universe, nothing, as in not-a-thing, did instead. InConjuring the Universe, Peter Atkins claims that the universe arose from nothing, and by nothing, he means absolutely nothing. I shall mean less than empty space . . . This Nothing has no space and no time. This Nothing is absolutely nothing. A void devoid of space and time. Utter emptiness. Emptiness beyond emptiness. All that it has, is a name.1Putting aside the obvious ideology driving the claim, let's judge it, and its rival, God as Creator, from logic and reason alone.

Either this Nothing created the universe and all that's in it, or, instead, an eternally existing God, such asYahweh,created the universe and all thats in it. One option is logical and reasonable; the other is not so much illogical and unreasonable as anti-logic and anti-reason.

Next, we have been assured, over and over, decade after decade, by peer-reviewed article after peer-reviewed article inveryprestigious science journals, that though everything from the structure and function of the human frontal lobe, to the pomegranate seed, to the incredibly complex enzyme cascade central in blood clotting, to dolphin echolocation, though they all sure look as if designed and, yes, sure function as if designed with specific purposes in mind (such as blood clotting to heal torn flesh)nope. Its all an illusion, the belief of people who dont understand the power of atomic and subatomic particles to mindlessly create life, often with beauty, and always with astonishingly precise functions.

Though common fare in the academy is that philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) had decimated the argument from designhe did no such thing; not even close (and that probably wasnt his intention, either). All he showed is that just because a watch is, obviously, designedthis doesnt prove that God, Yahweh, created the universe. Who said it did? What a watch points to is something designed, just as every living thing, from a single cell to the human brain, points to something obviously designed as welleven more obviously designed than a watch because any living thing is much more complicated than a watch.

Hume no more did what they proclaim he did than did Darwin (do what they proclaim he did), which was to demonstrate that random forceswith no forethought or intention but only with blind mechanisms, working on the principle of survival created everything from butterflies, to rhinoceroses, to oranges. (Though one might humbly ask,How did the wonderful taste of oranges aid in their survival?).

Indeed, where did this universal drive for survival that supposedly suffuses all life originate from? It's one thing for a human to try and survivebut a petunia, or an amoeba? Why should what Richard Dawkins calls nonrandom survival2exist, anyway? Does not seeking survival, nonrandom survival, mean an end, a goal, a purposeprecisely what evolutionary theory rejects? Why natural selection; that is, why does natureselect (sounds like a goal) for survival as opposed to non-survival?Survival of the fittest implies two purposes: fitness and survival. In short, the process of evolution sure seems to contradict the premise that it's built on.

If you look at the natural world, from a blue whale to a blueberry, from the human nervous system to the wings of an eaglethe most logical and reasonable conclusion is that they have all been purposely designed, and with an artistry and craftsmanship that defies our knowledge and imagination, especially as we learn more about them. Its kind of ironic that the more science reveals about the complexity of nature, the more farfetched sciences theory of natures origins becomes. The dogmatic denial of purposeful design anywhere in nature, especially when purposeful design is found everywhere in nature, shows how ideology can trump the most basic logic and reason.

The Logic of Daniel 2

Next, Daniel 2. By dating Daniel in the second century BC (even though Daniel dates itself hundreds of years earlier), scholars have long tried to denude the chapter of its prophetic reach. Yet the chapters prophetic reach extends way past the second century BC into not only the rise of the Roman empire but to its breakup into the nations of modern Europe, describing them perfectly, even as they are today.

Some of the nations shall be partly strong and partly fragile and they will mingle with the seed of men; but they will not adhere to one another, just as iron does not mix with clay (Daniel 2:42, 43). Partly strong, partly fragile? Germany remains a behemoth while Luxembourgwell, God bless em. Mingle themselves with the seed of men? Europeans, from peasants to princesses, have been intermarrying for centuries, and though not killing each other en mass (at least for now)the continent remains composed of distinctly separate entities, no more adhering one to another now than in the pastjust as the prophecy predicted.

Not bad for a book written, supposedly, in the second century BC. Western intelligence agencies didnt foresee, even one year before, the collapse of the Soviet Union; in contrast, Daniel foresaw the state of Europe thousands of years in advance. And if Daniel could so accurately depict Europe two millennia into the future from himself, then certainly we can trust him to have dated his own book correctly, tooright?

Daniel 2, grounded in something as broad, as wide, and as verifiable as world history itself, gives us logical and rational reasons to trust in the Bible and the God who inspired it.

The Logic of Jesus Resurrection

Despite attempts for millennia to debunk it, the resurrection of Jesus is the most logical and reasonable explanation for events that even atheist historians believe.

First, they believe that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified by the Romans; next, that many people, particularly His early followers, claiming to have seen Him resurrected, started what became Christianity; and, finally, that a few years after Christs death, a Pharisee named Saul of Tarsus, claiming to have seen the risen Christ, became the apostle Paul. Though believing these things, how do the atheists explain them?

Mass hallucinations, for instance. Hundreds of people, the argument goes, from different backgrounds, all had the same hallucination: that of Jesus Christ risen from the grave, even though no one expected the Messiah to die and rise from the grave to begin with. Masses of people hallucinating the same event that nobody anticipated or saw coming? Hardly the most reasonable of explanations, is it?

Others assert that they just flat-out lied about having seen Jesus risen. Liedeven though they knew that their lie would lead them, and others, including loved ones, to ostracism, persecution, even death. You might willingly suffer and die for what you believe true. But for what youknowis a lie? As illogical and irrational as lying about seeing Jesus risen would be, thats as illogical and irrational as the argument that they had lied about seeing Him risen.

Or, as the Swoon Theory claims, He never died on the cross but only fainted and, then, after escaping the tomb and slipping past the Roman guards, JesusHis body battered, torn, and bleedingappeared before His disciples as their resurrection hope.

Some have said that Jesus had a twin brother who duped everyone into thinking that he was the resurrected Messiah, and that was how Christianity got started: a case of mistaken identity.

What about Saul of Tarsus? As he was heading to Damascus, a meteorite crashed into the ground before him, and the trauma of that event gave him an epileptic seizure in which he envisioned the risen Christ speaking to him.

In contrast to these moves, all one has to do is believe in God, a Creator God who at times temporarily works outside the natural laws that He made and sustains. A miracle is analogous to a musician who, though usually playing music based on a written score, temporarily departs from that score and plays something else. Logic and reason dont demand that miracles happen, only that, in a universe created by God, they could.

The Unreasonableness of Atheism

Or, instead, you could believe that the universe, and all thats in it, arose from itself or from absolutely nothing. Or that all the obvious design in the natural world merely looks obviously designed but isnt. Or that Daniels accurately depicting the future thousands of years in advance was luck. Or that Jesus didnt rise from the dead, but, wounded, escaped the tomb and appeared to His followers, who mistook His bloodied appearance as the resurrected and glorified Lord, and whom Paul, amid an epileptic seizure brought on by a meteorite, imagined he saw on the road to Damascus.

Or, instead, using logic and reason, you can believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and . . . be saved (Acts 16:31).

Clifford Goldsteinis the editor of theAdult Bible Study Guide.

1Peter Atkins,Conjuring the Universe: The Origins of the Laws of Nature(p. 28). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.

2Richard Dawkins,The Blind Watchmaker(W. W. Norton; New York, 1996), p. 61.

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The Logic of Faith - Adventist Review

Posted on: July 21, 2023; Updated on: July 21, 2023 By Hannah Cambre, hcambre@maibox.sc.edu

One week before political science and Russian major Josh Hughes was scheduled to fly to Ukraine for a study abroad program, he found out that his trip was canceled because of the escalating conflict with Russia.

I was really upset, says Hughes. I thought, nothing bad is going to happen. Theres not going to be a war!

That was in February 2022. A couple months later, headquartered in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, Hughes livestreamed virtual politics classes from a classroom in Kiev late at night, listening as bombs fell in the city outside of his professors window. Though Hughes may not have been in Ukraine, his study abroad plans had been salvagedand he couldnt have been happier with where he ended up.

Im really glad that I was able to go because it gave me a new perspective on everything.

Embracing the initial discomfort of disrupted plans, Hughes threw himself into his coursework, language immersion and cultural experiences. Five days a week, he spent time in political science, Central Asian studies and Russian language classes. The most valuable learning, however, happened outside of the formal classroom, from interacting with strangers to piecing together the vocabulary to tell his host family about a weekend camel-riding excursion with a friend.

I got so much out of living with a host, he explains. My Russian really improved from living with the host family, but also my connection to the city I was living in. Theres nothing more valuable than living with people that have lived in the city youre in for their whole lives. I was able to become much better acquainted with the city, with Kyrgyz culture, and with Russian culture.

Hughes left Kyrgyzstan still feeling deeply connected to the country and eager to return. He knew hed be back someday. He didnt know how soon.

After a conversation with his professor and now thesis advisor, associate professor of Russian Judith Kalb, Hughes decided to apply for the Russian critical language scholarship in Kyrgyzstan. He didnt know what to expect, but his plans certainly hadnt included returning to his sophomore year host country the summer after his junior year. This time, hed begin learning the Kyrgyz language in addition to his Russian studies and start work on his senior thesis research for the Honors College.

After his semester in Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet state in Central Asia, Hughes was able to narrow his research down to the impact of militant Soviet atheism in the region. He had observed that though over 80% of the population considers itself Muslim, the country itself is secular and the practice of Islam is often the result of cultural heritage rather than deep religious conviction.

When [the Soviet Union] existed, it was the second-largest Muslim-population country in the world. We very, very rarely mention the 50 million Muslims in the Soviet Union that gets overlooked, Hughes explains. I wanted to study what peoples interactions with religion really were, how they interacted with it, and if there was a link between the years of atheist propaganda and how religion is practiced today.

Before returning to Kyrgyzstan, Hughes flew to Kazakhstan to search the archives for Soviet documents on the handling of religion. He also decided to supplement his archival and literature research with an anthropologic angle, sitting on park benches and interacting with strangers about their interpretation of religion, how they practiced their faith, and their experiences of either living under the Soviet state or in free Kazakhstan. Since his return to Bishkek, hes been doing the same thing in Kyrgyzstan.

Most people probably thought that I was a little bit unusual, Hughes admits, but they were very happy to share their experiences, their story with me. A lot of them were very happy that I was taking an interest and researching a part of their culture and their lives that they are very passionate about.

Researching abroad has been transformative, igniting Hughes passion for learning more about Central Asia and even redirecting the trajectory of his future. He entered his initial study abroad experience hoping to work for the State Department upon his return, but his goals look different now.

His aspirations include graduate school, where he hopes to study the transition from the Soviet to post-Soviet period, particularly in Central Asia. From there, he is considering pursuing a career in teaching. Hughes expresses nothing but gratitude for the chaotic circumstances leading up to his arrival in Kyrgyzstan, and he is particularly thankful for his decision not to give into frustration and stay in the U.S. rather than taking his chances on an unexpected opportunity.

Its changed everything, he says. But its what makes you grow academically, personally. Handling challenges and being able to adapt to them. I cant promise that every unexpected turn is going to turn out as fortunately as mine did, but you never know. Im really glad that I was able to go because it gave me a new perspective on everything.

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Change of plans - USC News & Events - University of South Carolina

Science fiction legend Arthur C. Clarke was famous for the axiom that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but what his fellow golden-age sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov postulated was a little more complicated. In the Foundation novels, Asimov suggests that a science-based religion may actually take hold in the distant future. And, in the second episode of Season 2 of Apple TVs Foundation, we actually see what that might look like on a massive scale.

With the episode A Glimpse of Darkness, the ambitious sci-fi show has given us a much bigger look at a scientific religion, with perhaps more nuance and heart than Asimov pulled off his second Foundation novel, over seven decades ago, in 1952.

Spoilers ahead.

While the majority of the TV series Foundation is a liberal remix of all of the Asimov-penned stories and novels, huge arcs of this season loosely adapt big swings from the second book, Foundation and Empire. This novel was published in single-volume book form in 1952 (one year after the first novel), but it is actually a composite of several novellas and short stories, which go all the way back to 1942, and were (mostly) published in the pages of the legendary SF magazine Astounding (later known as Analog). This means that all Foundation canon was retroactive while Asimov was writing the original stories, which makes David Goyers approach to crafting the TV series smart. In other words, theres no such thing as a faithful adaptation of Foundation, because Foundation was barely faithful and consistent to itself.

So, with that in mind, in the second episode of Foundation Season 2, A Glimpse of Darkness, the series seems to make a major departure by suggesting that the Foundation itself an institution devoted to science and truth is now peddling mysticism. Shouldnt this run contrary to Asimovs staunch atheism and disbelief in pseudo-science? Nope! As we meet two of Foundations most compelling new Season 2 characters Cleric Constant (Isabella Laughland) and Cleric Poly Verisof (Kulvinder Ghir) were introduced to the concept of the Church of the Galactic Spirit. And this notion is perfectly in line with the opening pages of Foundation and Empire.

Kulvinder Ghir and Isabella Laughland as Poly and Constant in Foundation Season 2.

In the opening pages of Foundation and Empire, General Bel Riose is sent by the Empire to determine whisperings of so-called magicians on the outer fringes of the galaxy. The reader quickly learns that these magicians are scientific practitioners of the Foundation. But, as Riose grills a guy named Ducem Barr, he is told, An uninformed public tends to conflate scholarship with magicianry. Again, this is similar to the Clarke axiom about tech becoming indistinguishable from magic, but the practical implementation of this idea in the book Foundation and Empire is pure Asimov.

So, when we meet Poly and Constant in A Glimpse of Darkness, and theyre putting on tech-fueled magic shows for the uninformed populace, theyre essentially preaching the gospel of Asimov, and within the universe of the show, the science-based faith of the Foundation. This takes concepts that Asimov touched upon in the books, to a much more grounded place. Poly, the older, often drunken cleric, is a firm believer in the Seldon Plan, not just because he believes in the science, but because Seldon, at this point, has become a saint. But unlike saints in actual religions, Poly actually saw Hari Seldon when he was a child back in Season 1. This gives his science-based faith some groundedness but also sets up some very interesting conflicts in the episodes to come.

Lee Pace as Brother Day, the reigning Emperor Cleon. Hes not pumped about the Church of the Galactic Spirit.

So, while the Clerics seem a little bit catch-as-catch-can in this episode, the reality is, they have been successfully converting tons of planets on the edges of Empire to the cult of science! At this point in the show, the character of Bel Riose hasnt appeared. But, without spoiling too much about everything that happens in episode 3, and beyond, rest assured, Bel Riose is coming. And just like the magicians from Asimovs second novel, he too has been remixed into a more realistic and grounded character.

On a larger scale though, what the Church of the Galactic Spirit does for Foundation is making the conflict of this Season 2 crystal-clear. The clone dynasty of the Cleons governs over a shrinking empire that is amoral, with people who seemingly believe in nothing. Meanwhile, their rival, the Foundation, is empowering people to believe in a mathematical prophet and the promise of science. Asimov based some of the arcs of Foundation on the falls of real historic empires. But, in this case, the emerging religion that is helping to create a rebellion isnt one that espouses the worship of one true God. Instead, these missionaries just want you to get down with math.

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71 Years Later, The Weirdest Religion in Sci-Fi History Is Back - Inverse

It took less than 24 hours for Twitter to corrupt an innocent AI chatbot. Yesterday, Microsoft unveiled Tay a Twitter bot that the company described as an experiment in "conversational understanding." The more you chat with Tay, said Microsoft, the smarter it gets, learning to engage people through "casual and playful conversation."

Unfortunately, the conversations didn't stay playful for long. Pretty soon after Tay launched, people starting tweeting the bot with all sorts of misogynistic, racist, and Donald Trumpist remarks. And Tay being essentially a robot parrot with an internet connection started repeating these sentiments back to users, proving correct that old programming adage: flaming garbage pile in, flaming garbage pile out.

Now, while these screenshots seem to show that Tay has assimilated the internet's worst tendencies into its personality, it's not quite as straightforward as that. Searching through Tay's tweets (more than 96,000 of them!) we can see that many of the bot's nastiest utterances have simply been the result of copying users. If you tell Tay to "repeat after me," it will allowing anybody to put words in the chatbot's mouth.

One of Tay's now deleted "repeat after me" tweets.

However, some of its weirder utterances have come out unprompted. The Guardian picked out a (now deleted) example when Tay was having an unremarkable conversation with one user (sample tweet: "new phone who dis?"), before it replied to the question "is Ricky Gervais an atheist?" by saying: "ricky gervais learned totalitarianism from adolf hitler, the inventor of atheism."

But while it seems that some of the bad stuff Tay is being told is sinking in, it's not like the bot has a coherent ideology. In the span of 15 hours Tay referred to feminism as a "cult" and a "cancer," as well as noting "gender equality = feminism" and "i love feminism now." Tweeting "Bruce Jenner" at the bot got similar mixed response, ranging from "caitlyn jenner is a hero & is a stunning, beautiful woman!" to the transphobic "caitlyn jenner isn't a real woman yet she won woman of the year?" (Neither of which were phrases Tay had been asked to repeat.)

It's unclear how much Microsoft prepared its bot for this sort of thing. The company's website notes that Tay has been built using "relevant public data" that has been "modeled, cleaned, and filtered," but it seems that after the chatbot went live filtering went out the window. The company starting cleaning up Tay's timeline this morning, deleting many of its most offensive remarks.

Tay's responses have turned the bot into a joke, but they raise serious questions

It's a joke, obviously, but there are serious questions to answer, like how are we going to teach AI using public data without incorporating the worst traits of humanity? If we create bots that mirror their users, do we care if their users are human trash? There are plenty of examples of technology embodying either accidentally or on purpose the prejudices of society, and Tay's adventures on Twitter show that even big corporations like Microsoft forget to take any preventative measures against these problems.

For Tay though, it all proved a bit too much, and just past midnight this morning, the bot called it a night:

In an emailed statement given later to Business Insider, Microsoft said: "The AI chatbot Tay is a machine learning project, designed for human engagement. As it learns, some of its responses are inappropriate and indicative of the types of interactions some people are having with it. We're making some adjustments to Tay."

Update March 24th, 6:50AM ET: Updated to note that Microsoft has been deleting some of Tay's offensive tweets.

Update March 24th, 10:52AM ET: Updated to include Microsoft's statement.

Verge Archives: Can we build a conscious computer?

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Twitter taught Microsofts AI chatbot to be a racist asshole in less ...