Marilynne Robinson | Something Vast and Inexplicable Happened

Robinson:

These ancients are saying, something amazing happened once. And other things happened in consequence. It seems to me as if the first chapter of Genesis does pretty much what an honest person would do now, which is to say we know that in the beginning, something unimaginably intense and vast happened. It continues, and as a consequence, we have butterflies and eggplants and whatever else you want to think of there is no. There is no logical link from one to the other. 

My name is Marilyn Robinson, and my vocation is to write on whatever happens to interest me at the moment.

Stump:

Welcome to Language of God. I’m Jim Stump. 

Marilynne Robinson is indeed a writer—but that undersells it a bit. Her novel Gilead received the Pulitzer Prize, and her body of work—fiction and nonfiction alike—has made her one of the most respected literary voices of our time. From luminous novels to searching essays on Scripture, democracy, and even science, her writing has shaped the imaginations of millions of readers.

[If appropriate. Insert something personal about the first time you read her books?]

Her most recent book is Reading Genesis, published in 2024. Now, for an organization like BioLogos, that’s an intriguing title. Genesis has been something of a focal point for us over the years. It’s often where conversations about science and faith get tense—where debates about the history, size, and even shape of the cosmos tend to flare up. We’re forced to confront interpretation, literalism, the meaning of divine inspiration. So we’ve spent a lot of time thinking and talking about Genesis.

But Marilynne Robinson approaches Genesis differently. She’s not trying to sort out which verses are literal and which are metaphorical. She’s not reading it as a science text or even primarily as a historical document. She reads it the way a great novelist reads any great text—with attention to language, to character, to beauty, to depth.

For her, Genesis is not a problem to be solved. It is a work of astonishing literature. And more than that, it tells a story that is true—not in a narrow sense, but in a deep and mysterious way. The kind of truth that ancient words can hold. The kind of truth that continues to shape how we understand ourselves, our world, and God.

Talk about all that leads us to some of her non-fiction, about consciousness, the limits of science, and what it means to be human — just a few easy topics!

Let’s get to the conversation. 

Stump:

Marilynne Robinson, welcome to the podcast.

Robinson:

Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

Stump:

We usually start these interviews by asking people to tell us something about themselves. Often that involves me asking a guest why they became a scientist. In your case, I suppose I could ask you why you didn’t become a scientist, which you’re free to answer if there’s anything interesting there, but maybe the better question is why did you become a writer?

Robinson:

I have no idea why I became a writer. It was something that I simply craved to do in a way. Words interested me. Fiction, nonfiction, all these things that are language based finally. It never occurred… I mean, it’s what I always really wanted to do. I had no idea that I could do it professionally, really. I had no idea what being a writer meant until I was in college, at least. And why I’m not a scientist, I think in another life I might have been one, but I lived at a time when it was assumed that if you were female, certain things were simply beyond your competence. And I had to sort of find my way into science as a subject in later years because I didn’t do anything with it in college.

Stump:

Can you give us then, instead of the why you became a writer, how did you become a writer? What’s the origin story of your profession in that regard?

Robinson:

I always wrote. When I was a little kid, I wrote bad little poems and so on. I think some people just have certain impulses that are very strong and very formative as much as any external environmental influence. I felt that it was necessary for me to do that, which means that I was very free in doing it and also very in one way or another determined in doing it.

Stump:

What’s the first thing you wrote that you are proud of? First thing you remember writing as a professional writer that you said, “I think I got something there.”

Robinson:

Well, that would be my first novel, Housekeeping. I published that when I was 35, as I recall. Before that… I mean, even that I thought was unpublishable. I didn’t write with any idea of publishing. I had no conception of it really. I just wrote because words satisfied me and putting them on a page satisfied me. But I typically didn’t show what I wrote to anyone.

Stump:

And can you give us anything on your faith background, formative experiences as a young person or the reason you are who you are today as a result of faith or religion?

Robinson:

I feel as though I’m being evasive, but that’s another thing that I always simply felt as true. I was not brought up in an especially religious environment. My parents were not church going until after I left for college. And they were very decent people solidly within the lines of Presbyterian expectation. And we were always told that we were Presbyterians and we had brushes with that culture that were perhaps sufficient to make it true, but we simply were not conventionally religious household.

Stump:

All right. Well, let’s turn to talking about the things that you’ve written and we’ll start with something that is a connection there. Your long interest in scripture resulted in the most recent book you’ve published, I think, Reading Genesis came out in 2024. How did you get involved in that project? What was the impetus for writing a book about reading Genesis?

Robinson:

Well, my real project was writing a book about the books of Moses, but I thought it was more realistic to scale the project down a little bit so that I could make certain things clear in my thinking that would not have been otherwise. I feel as though between various forms of popular religion and various forms of official religion and various forms of academic religion, the feeling for the text had really been lost and the things that are remarkable about it literarily and so on were not visible to people in almost any setting. And another thing that bothered me is this whole idea of an Old Testament God who… I mean, it’s like Marcionism or something, the idea that there is this ferocious other deity that is the opposite of Christ. What sense does that make when Jesus identifies himself very directly and all tradition has certainly identified him with God as we know him from the Old Testament.

I think that from teaching in my church, which I did for quite a long while, I developed a habit of looking up words, the origins of them and the history of them. And there are two words that are used in the Old Testament translations and have been for a very long time that are terribly misleading. One of them is jealous and the other is vengeance or vengeful. If you follow out the etymology of these words, you can see that there was a certain point probably in the middle ages, earlier middle ages, when their meaning shifted. Jealous meant zealous, impassioned. That nasty little feeling of jealousy to impute that to God is a very unrespectable thing. And the word vengeance comes from Latin vindicare, which means to judge. It’s like the word vindicate. It means to also entertain the possibility of innocence, of pardon.

And so when it slid from the Latin into French and became vengeance, we lost the idea that it could be God judging because he is just rather than God acting vengeful because he’s prone to that. I think those are actual slanders on God and the fact that they’re perpetuated in translation because they’re traditional. But it’s a very sad thing that they are traditional and they should certainly be changed.

Stump:

So part of this project then is recapturing the text, saving it from some of its interpreters maybe. I wonder if you might talk a little bit more broadly about the genre of Genesis. So this science and religion work that BioLogos is engaged in, Genesis is a pretty important text and you’re not reading Genesis with those questions primarily in mind, but you do seem to push readers away from treating the text as a science textbook or even a history textbook. And I started keeping a list of some of the words you used to describe Genesis or at least parts of it. And among those were, it’s not fiction, but conceptualizing something true. Here’s a parable. This is a work of literature, not a conventional history, but a sacred history. And another time, a story. Are any of those primary in your mind when you think about the genre that Genesis is?

Robinson:

Genesis, it’s very hard to categorize because it’s so early. It is so early. If you look at earlier ancient texts like Babylonian myth and so on, there really is very little comparison between them in terms of elegance, in terms of meaning, in terms of complexity. All that is utterly on the side of the Hebrew Bible. I don’t know if genre… Therefore, because it’s not really writing within the constraints of established forms as far as we can tell. I don’t know if genre is really the category we want. It does something very, very unique. And that is to create human skilled, realistic human characters. Compare Homer, compare whoever wrote the Epic of Gilgamesh. They are only interested in demigods. What was it about Abraham? He’s patient. He has good manners in a certain sense. God fell in love with him and human history has sort of proceeded from that place. That’s a very, very profound difference. And really, there’s no comparison.

Stump:

What do you do with theological terms like inspiration or revelation as it pertains to the text of Genesis that we have today? Was God involved in the production of the text in any way?

Robinson:

Well, I would say yes, indeed. I think that as a writer, one of the things that I find amazing is how delicately it deals with this sort of merging and parting of identities between Moses and God. You feel as if when you know Moses is speaking, nevertheless, God is speaking, virtually always, not literally always. The given of the Bible, if I can assume that, is that people are sacred. Human beings are sacred, and that’s what that means. Human beings…the whole Bible, the writings are attributed to one person or another in almost every case. And even when there’s no reason to trust the attribution, it’s as if it’s only comfortable with the idea that there was a human hand that wrote this down. You don’t hear often about the humanism of the Bible. But from beginning to end, it assumes that God can somehow invest himself to the point of a kind of identity in human beings or in humanity itself, in his Adam.

The question of who wrote this is, I think, simply not appropriate to this situation. Really, to compare great things with small, as they used to say, when I write a paragraph that I really like, I think where did that come from? And that’s literally true. And in this particular environment, I can say that, but a lot of writers who are completely secular would say absolutely the same thing.

Stump:

Is there anything then that distinguishes Genesis and the other parts of Holy Scripture from inspired writing of other people?

Robinson:

Well, for a long time, I sort of accepted the idea that there would be a sort of salvation of all people and I myself overwriting all the questions because it seemed to me consistent with the nature of God that this should be true. But as history unfolds, I’ve developed a certain tentative interest in the fact of what you’d have to call evil, and which humanity has not outgrown, which it has not modified it. There we are. I mean, I don’t know how I got on that subject, but in any case, I think that what God insists on our virtues, which keep us from being harmful to other people. Basically, after Genesis, he starts out his encounter with humankind, with a community, with a society, which Plato, or Cicero, or any other distinguished ancient… Moses is trying to establish laws that will create a good society.

And God loves society as a group, as a phenomenon, and he also loves individual people. And to reconcile individuality and communalism and so on, it’s very difficult, of course. But I think that in a very great degree, the laws of Moses are meant to limit harm, to make us not kill ourselves. When God speaks in his wrath, which can be daunting indeed, what the wrath is directed toward is our self-destructiveness.

Stump:

Let me have you dip into a few of the stories in Genesis that I find particularly interesting and get some of your commentary on them. Genesis 1 is often a focal point for the science and religion business that I work in. And one side is pretty sure that it says God created everything in six days just 6,000 years ago. And we on the other side are pretty sure it’s not saying that, but we’re not always so good on what it is saying. In your Reading of Genesis, what’s the first chapter saying?

Robinson:

Well, it’s kind of, in a way, it’s saying what we know now that is in the beginning, whatever that was, there was a singularity in effect. Something happened of a unique quality with unique consequences. And these ancients are saying something amazing happened once. And other things happened in consequence, which we know to be true. We know that there are consequences of the Big Bang or whatever we want to call it now, but we can’t describe by any means how it became all the things of the world, all the birds flying through the sky and the whales swimming in the sea. It seems to me as if the first chapter of Genesis does pretty much what an honest person would do now, which is to say, we know that in the beginning, something unimaginably intense and vast happened. It continues. And as a consequence, we have butterflies, and eggplants, and whatever else you want to think of. There is no logical link from one to the other. No one can describe this passage and basically the first chapter of Genesis doesn’t try to make any.

Stump:

And then move on to Genesis 2 in the contrasting creation story we find there. What are the resonances and what are the differences that you see?

Robinson:

Well, I think I myself consider the second creation narrative to be midrash. I hope I’m using the term appropriately. It is narrative that does not have exactly the stature of what it interprets, but nevertheless, it’s authoritative interpretation, especially so in this case. I think that there are questions that were left by the first narrative, which frankly, I know other people say that it has to be later than the second one because it’s more sophisticated. But I would say that the second one has that sort of folkloric tone to distinguish itself from the first, i.e., it’s being a midrash, but it deals with questions that are raised. For example, what does it mean to say male and female created he them? And they say, “Well, it must have been a sort of birth where she is extracted from the body of Adam.”

And the kind of identity that the Bible acknowledges so insistently of people being biologically identified with one another, being brothers, being mother, being… I think that that is a way of conceiving, of presenting a possible meaning for the fact that Adam was male and female, which the first chapter and parts of the second also kind of insist on unambiguously.

Stump:

Adam was not the name of one male figure at that point, right? But the human maybe?

Robinson:

Yeah. The word is used very freely in scripture to mean man. Son of man is son of Adam in the earlier texts.

Stump:

I want to come back to human beings in a little bit, but let’s move to at least the next big Sunday school story and the flood, which looms large in the text. But of course, flood stories are not particularly unique in ancient literature. How do you see the Genesis flood story as drawing from or similar to the other ancient Near East flood stories? And how is it different than those other stories?

Robinson:

Well, it’s related to the Epic of Gilgamesh, of course, and then variants in the Atra-Hasis and so on that come into the other cultures around Babylon. But in any case, those other narratives are much smaller, much more compressed than the Noah narrative. And they are the original form of the story. Obviously the value of the myth or the value of the fable is so strong that it is incorporated into the biblical text, and then reinterpreted so that only Noah’s family go on the arc. And that’s important because all through the Genesis narrative, it is insisted on that people are one family. They have one descent. This is also part of the origins of Eve, why that is important. So you have that, and then you have also the fact that the concession is made or that the revelation is allowed or acknowledged that people are swept away at an enormous scale through floods, and battles, and all the rest of it.

And in the Gilgamesh versions, the gods are fighting with themselves and then they’re irritated with the noise that people make and they want to eliminate the other gods first and then the human race afterward because they’re noisy and they keep those gods from sleeping. God says forthrightly, God does not sleep and that’s not figurative because in any case, the gods unleash this destructive flood and then they terrify themselves with the scale of it and they come very lately, very efficiently to the realization that they are fed by human beings. And if they destroy all the human beings, who’s going to feed them? So again, God says, “I don’t need your sacrifices. If I were hungry, I would not tell you.”

So they make a very much minimized idea of the divine over against the Genesis narrative in which God is truly the God of creation. He creates the flood, that that’s his power. He’s not terrified, but he regrets finally. And he regrets in a very, very recognizable way. It’s like if you have a bad child and then you punish him for being a bad child, and then you think, “Well, he’s a bad child. I can’t really be so harsh on him because that’s who he is.” And so God makes terms with human beings again, removing the blood waters. In other words, they are saying in a limited way what the Babylonians said also, that God can weary of our vices. They’re just much more important vices and God wearies of them, violence most especially.

But in any case, then after the flood, and this is something that has no comparable moment in any of the other versions, and there’s a new covenant made with the earth. And with very few laws, for example, again, allowing capital punishment for killings of human being and so on. But there’s this wonderful sort of new beginning, a new Eden in a certain sense, because he blesses the surviving human beings, the children of Noah and him in this same language of blessing that he uses for Adam and Eve. And all of that is completely Hebrew. There’s nothing like it in the other texts.

Stump:

So it’s often noted that the flood is a kind of decreation or uncreation compared to Genesis 1, the waters come flooding back in. One of the points you made though that I don’t think I’d thought of before was that God could have just started everything over in the flood, but preserved some part of it. And we have Noah as this presumably righteous man, though we find out later, certainly not perfect. But what’s the point of God preserving some part of that initial creation as opposed to let’s just start all over if he was so frustrated with the way people had become?

Robinson:

Well, nothing is insisted on more than God’s faithfulness. And Noah is the relatively righteous man who… It’s Adam that God is faithful to, in that Adam being humankind. You see that even like when Moses becomes angry at the Israelites or when Jesus… I mean, God becomes angry with them. Moses says, well… I mean, God says to Moses, “I will make you a new people. You can be the head…” He says, “No, it has to be human continuity. It has to be something saved out of the dissent from Adam that we all share.”

Stump:

You’ve done a very deep and thorough reading of Genesis here. As a result of that, were you surprised by anything from the book that you had not necessarily gone into thinking this is what you were going to see in Genesis?

Robinson:

More than anything, I was surprised at the fine grainedness of it, the drama of Jacob and Joseph and so on, how much narrative, how much meaning is invested verse by verse. To do that is absolutely extraordinary. And the fact that it is one of the early things that human beings wrote, how long did they have alphabetic language or letter writing before they started keeping these narratives of theirs? And yet, there’s very little prose that has the same intensity of meaning, word by word.

Stump:

I’m part of a Mennonite community, and within that book club that just read Reading Genesis together and had a discussion about it. And in our discussion of your book, there was some of the usual fussing you’ve heard about there not being any chapters, but we all appreciated the fact that you were taking it as one continuous story, right? Rather than the atomized way we’re often exposed to it through the lectionary cycle or whatever. What do we miss in the story of Genesis when we don’t treat it as one work of literature?

Robinson:

Well, the fact that it is one work of literature, that it is self-referential in the richest possible sense of word, that it educates… The earlier writers educate every subsequent writer, and this creates a beautiful aesthetic coherency, and frankly, just a very great depth of thought. I think I’ve never put chapters… Other people have put chapters into my books. I never have. There’s something so artificial about them. It’s like you come to a place where you say, “Now, I’m the author and I’m doing this.” And it just feels false to me, so I never do it.

Stump:

Fair enough. Let me push my Mennonite book club and reading a little bit further here, Mennonites and the theological tradition you’re part of have a complicated history if we go back far enough. But we were particularly interested and enjoyed the way that you highlighted God’s restraint in Genesis over this vengeance. You already talked about the word vengeance a little bit. But highlighting God’s restraint in Genesis is not something we hear enough of, and particularly then seeing this as a model for ourselves. Is that something that jumped out of the text at you in a new way in reading at this, or has that always been the lens through which you read the Hebrew scriptures?

Robinson:

It was a discovery for me. The pervasiveness of it is a phenomenon. Speaking of what we were talking about earlier, I like the idea of creation being an act of God because he could have done otherwise at any moment he can do. Otherwise at any moment, he could have made a creature that was so subservient to him that it did not exasperate him and destroy itself in the way that we seem inclined to do. If he wanted to make a free creature, a creature that actually was in certain sense, an equivalent of himself, then he had to restrain himself from the use of power that he could never have lacked. And that’s very complex because you have to assume that there must be a million instances per minute where God willed otherwise in a certain sense. And yet the overriding consideration is that people, that human beings have to be what they are, have to find their way, have to discover beauty and in righteousness and so on for themselves.

Stump:

That brings up one more topic my book club wanted to hear you expand on a little bit, which is the relationship between God’s sovereignty and that human freedom you just were talking about a little bit there. Particularly given your theological tradition and John Calvin and that nasty word, he himself called it nasty word of predestination. How do you understand the unfolding story? And you make some comments throughout the text on this a little bit, but of whether these characters could have done differently. Could God have accomplished the divine purposes with other characters if Moses hadn’t agreed, if Joseph, if Abraham hadn’t agreed to do what was asked of him?

Robinson:

All we know is that the being of one character is absolutely essential that Abraham had to be Abraham. Moses had to be Moses. There’s no suggestion anywhere in the text that people are interchangeable, nowhere. And again, this restraint, this respect for an individuality that is often clearly disappointing and exasperating. It’s extraordinary, it’s very loving to use a word that we seldom use in certain contexts. But as far as that word, if you look it up in Thomas Aquinas, in Contra Gentiles or the Summa, you will find that he says, “Of course there’s predestination.” And he uses the same proof texts that Calvin does. If you look it up in the leader of the Jesuits, he will say, “Of course there’s predestination, but best not to talk about it.” Calvin just talked about it. He thought everybody had the complete right to know everything that everybody taught.

But Augustine believed in it. Luther believed in it. The isolation of it with Calvin is polemical. If you look at Aquinas or Ignatius of Loyola or whatever, they are very serious about how people act. They are very insistent on instructing people and how they should act. This is not easily aligned with the idea of predestination, right? So every major theologian has agreed to the inevitability of the idea and then acted as if it didn’t exist. And that’s simply true of Calvin, along with all the others. I mean, Calvin is famous for his strict ethicalism. And at the same time, he’s supposed to be afflicted with this belief in a mechanistic predestination. Obviously, things that cannot exist at the same time.

Stump:

Do you have any personal reflection on that and the role of human responsibility in light of all of that?

Robinson:

I think that we live in a moment where people can see around the kind of rigid causality that anyone before us would have believed in. They used to think, all kinds of people thought if you knew the true state of the universe at one moment, you could predict everything that would ever happen. Now we have probability and things like that, indeterminacy, all kinds of things that suggest a living substance of reality rather than a closed shop in effect. And so we can say, yes, there is in the larger sense, a shape, a tendency, a meaning. And at the same time, say that we are free within that, that there is play within that, that God can be active within it, for example.

Stump:

Let’s dig a little further into this question of humanity as a way to bridge to some of the other things you’ve written outside of this, some of your essays. But sticking with Genesis, what does it mean to be human according to the authors of Genesis?

Robinson:

Well, the first thing I think that it would mean for them is that we are in ways that we cannot understand existing in relation to God, and that we are in ways we can’t understand the objects of his passionate love and attention. The most… Abraham, I suppose he was a kind of a slightly distinguished better one, but as the run of the mill ancient people were concerned, he was probably not terribly remarkable. And the beauty of God’s profound, everlasting loyalty to him is that he was human, that he was subject to needing to water his flocks and put up his tent and wait endlessly for his child.

Stump:

What do we learn about what it means to be human from the sciences then? And I’m particularly interested in bringing this into conversation with Genesis. And I can see some scientists that would say, why should we trust what the authors of Genesis said so many thousands of years ago when now we have science to answer that question? Is there anything that science can tell us about what it means to be human that pushes beyond what Genesis says or has Genesis said at all?

Robinson:

Well, I think these are different conversations. I don’t think that science can claim to have arrived at ethical conclusions. I think that we’re now swamped with the reality that science does not deal within ethical limits. The thing about science… I mean, I tend to look at things historically, and the interaction between, quote, unquote, “science” and humanity is not reassuring.

Stump:

What do you mean by that?

Robinson:

Well, I mean, for example, that Darwin could have written his book and it would not necessarily have turned to racism, would not necessarily have turned to eugenics, but science doesn’t occur in a vacuum by any means. It’s profoundly socially created. And so when it brushes aside ethical traditions, it can be profoundly inhumane, even somehow antagonistic to the human. And I think we’re seeing that more and more. We’re brilliant human beings, but we’re often on some kind of wild tangent. We’re hallucinating, they would say, if we were chatbots. If you had asked someone in 1910 what was proved by science, he would prove that human beings evolved in ways that were visible as ranks of humanity in the contemporary world and so on. It’s terrifying conclusions that people are capable of drawing and that science is not innocent in this regard.

Stump:

Your 2010 book, Absence of Mind, I dipped back into a little bit here too. The first line from chapter two was, “The great breach that separates the modern Western world from its dominant traditions of religion and metaphysics is the prestige of opinion that throws into question the scale of the reality in which the mind participates.” Can you unpack that for our audience here a little bit? What’s the scale of reality in which our minds participate and how has that been questioned by the modern Western world?

Robinson:

I take it to be true and observable and how we got there, or the degree to which we’ve ever been anywhere else, I suppose, is an open question. But the thing about science is in the period after, say, 1850, the impulse was to diminish. One of the things that is very, I think, extraordinary is that there’s a diminution of the scale at which people were encouraged to think. If you look at Freud, for example, we should never have left the womb. I mean, really. And you put aside metaphysics. Well, metaphysics is something that attempts to deal with the scale of being, which is phenomenal. We now, having shot things around the universe in every direction, we know that it’s a vast, and amazing, and inexplicable, and Dante probably had a better grip on that than Freud. This sort of personalization of everything, they’re always turning inward.

The idea that people have to elbow their way into an alpha status and all this kind of stuff, and that this is definitive of human behavior, not simply bad manners or something. There’s a sort of… I don’t know why it is, but there’s a resistance to the idea that traits that have been admired can have value, can actually help the world hang together. When I read something like BF Skinner or most of these people, I experience this as small and ugly, earth bound in a very unattractive sense of the word. And within being earth bound, person bound. The only interest I can have is whether I have succeeded as a woman snaring a protective provider sort of thing. No conception that anyone that belongs to my half of the human race could have had anything approaching a serious idea.

And they’re not much kinder to men. They have no interest in poetry, or metaphysics, or anything like that. Those are things that are fantastically characteristic of human beings as a whole. How do you disallow them from the definition of human? It’s ridiculous.

Stump:

In that book, Absence of Mind, you write very eloquently about our consciousness, our self, our soul, these terms that have come under fire by the literature you’re referring to. And I wonder if we can make a connection with your critique of that and some of your fiction and the novels I’m most familiar with and maybe the ones you’re most well known for are Gilead and Home. And in Gilead in particular, the inner life of John Ames is on full display, right? And when you write fiction like that, do you have in mind the objective of showing the reality of our conscious lives or even as a kind of counter example to that parascientific literature you mentioned in your critique?

Robinson:

Well, all these things, of course, would occur simultaneously. But basically, I’ve told this little story many times, but I heard a voice in my head and it was John Ames. I was by myself in an isolated hotel on The Cape, and I had a pen and notebook. I’m very glad I did. And there was simply this voice in my mind, which really surprised me because I’d had that feeling before, but it was a female voice. I thought when I wrote Housekeeping that I would always write from a feminine female point of view, and then here I have this man, what is that? And so I could just follow him through the narrative. Truly, that was the experience. And yes, that would be what I know about him, what I would know if I were privy to the workings of another person’s mind, which is the workings of the mind, obviously, the idea of death and fatherhood and all the rest of it. I sort of distracted myself from the question.

Stump:

No, I’m just asking about the reality of consciousness of that inner life and love how it’s portrayed in Gilead there. I’ve been thinking about talking to you about this and even wondering if you have any thoughts about AI. You brought up chatbots a little bit ago that are so good at the output, the functionalism of producing words. But without any inner life, presumably, without any self, operate more like maybe some of these science writers that you’ve critiqued that they seem to think that humans really do. Is the reality of what these chatbots is, what the parascientific writers that you critique seem to think the rest of us are like too?

Robinson:

Yeah, probably indeed. I think from the things that I’ve read and listened to and so on, I don’t feel that the people that are creating this new reality of ours are the people who are capable of making good decisions about humanity and so on. And frankly, things are generational. They all went to college and were taught the same things that I was taught and rejected, but they didn’t reject. I feel as though I kind of know how they think because I was offered the opportunity to think that way also. I would not call it humane or historically respectable or anything.

Stump:

Well, let’s end maybe on a more positive note here, because I don’t want to give our audience the wrong opinion of your view of science as a whole. I’ve heard you say sometimes that when you need some encouragement, you read science journals and that you’re so amazed by the things we’ve learned and wish more people would read about those. Is that still the case? Do you still find, is that still your reaction to science journals?

Robinson:

Well, my subscription to Scientific American seems to have lapsed. I’m working on this book that is a tremendous project and I’ve kind of cut ties with many of my earlier enthusiasms just for the sake of time, but it is true. One of the things that I love about science when you read what they’re doing is that they are surprised and they would actually be delighted by the possibility of exploding an old idea. And if they’ve done good work, they have a much more interesting idea to supplant it with. But the sort of Dawkins’ view of science seems so flat, so contentless, but real science is just amazing and it doesn’t lead you to closed conclusions about things. It simply says, “Everything you thought you knew, got to think about it again.” That’s wonderful. It feels incredibly human to me. And not only that, but objectively speaking, creation is a very beautiful thing and their nearness to it is enviable in the best cases.

Stump:

Thanks so much for talking to us.

Robinson: 

Pleasure.

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Language of God is produced and mixed by Colin Hoogerwerf. That’s me. Our theme song is by Breakmaster Cylinder. BioLogos offices are located in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the Grand River watershed. Thanks for listening.