How much was ‘Passion and Exaltation’ ‘Prophecy Historicised’?

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A Review of John Dominic Crossan’s "Who Killed Jesus?"

John Dominic Crossan’s book undertakes an ambitious project: a historical reconstruction of Jesus's death and the subsequent formation of the Passion narrative. Crossan begins by situating Jesus within his historical and religious context, noting that he was initially a follower of John the Baptist. After John's execution, Jesus distanced himself from the apocalyptic urgency of John’s message, instead emphasising the imminent realisation of God's Kingdom through radical egalitarianism and communal renewal. Something ordinary people - Jesus's followers - could and should do in their daily lives.

This message was provocative both to the Jewish religious authorities and the Roman political establishment. Jesus's actions in Jerusalem, particularly his disruption in the Temple - the centre of the elite priestly monopoly of religious practice - were perceived as a direct challenge to the status quo at the politically-sensitive celebration of Passover.

Consequently, he was arrested, and the Gospels describe a process in which Jewish authorities, concerned by his growing influence and his critique of established practices, facilitated his transfer to the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate. Pilate, as the sole authority capable of imposing capital punishment, condemned Jesus to crucifixion under the charge of being a potential insurgent, Rome’s normal approach to perceived threats to public order.

Development of the Passion Narratives

After Jesus's death, his followers faced the profound challenge of reconciling their belief in him as the Messiah with the shocking reality of his humiliating execution. Within early Christian communities, interpretation of this event took place through reflection upon the Hebrew Scriptures, a process that Crossan and other scholars describe as midrashic engagement - as a theological re-reading of historical events through the teachings of Scripture.

Early Christians - educated scribes rather than Jesus's mass peasant following - encountered texts such as Psalms 2 and 22, Isaiah’s Servant Songs, Zechariah, and Deuteronomy, which seemed to foreshadow Jesus's suffering and ultimate vindication. It seemed that Jesus's suffering had been foreseen, with resurrection and parousia understood as divine vindication. This theological process shaped how the Passion accounts were written, framing Jesus's death not as a tragic failure but as part of a deeper and foretold divine plan.

The Gospel of Peter and the Canonical Gospels

Crossan gives particular attention to the Gospel of Peter, considering it an early passion narrative that predates the final redactions of the canonical Gospels. He suggests that this text, through its extensive use of Old Testament allusions and its portrayal of Jewish culpability, might have influenced later passion accounts. In particular, he sees the Gospel of Mark as developing upon these themes, with Matthew, Luke, and John further elaborating theological interpretations of Jesus's death and resurrection.

Crossan sees the Gospel accounts as composed in a theological and liturgical environment where the meaning of Jesus’s death was being defined in a context of intense conflict within Jewish religious communities who were under intense pressure from the Roman authorities throughout the first century CE. The Gospels, Crossan asserts, are history interpreted in light of community definition and defence, uniting around a common faith rooted in prophecy.

Conclusion

Orthodox Catholic teaching affirms the historicity of Jesus's Passion, while recognizing that the four Gospels present differing accounts and perspectives, reflecting both theological emphases and historical/community development. The Church neither insists on a strictly literalist reading of the Passion narratives nor dismisses historical inquiry, though it remains cautious about certain scholarly reconstructions, such as those of the Jesus Seminar, to which Crossan was a major contributor.

Aquinas maintained that faith and reason cannot be in conflict - a principle that becomes particularly challenging when historical-critical methods are applied to the sacred texts themselves. Yet, as the Church has repeatedly acknowledged, deeper engagement with Scripture can enrich rather than diminish faith. 

If the Gospel accounts contain theological interpretations woven through historical memory, then their deepest truths may be found precisely in this interplay. Perhaps, rather than discomfort at such inquiry, we should recognise it as part of the same search for truth that has always animated Christian thought at its best.

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This review is more comprehensive than mine.

A fallacious proof that 0 = 1

This is an old one but perhaps you haven't seen it?

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1. Start with the equation:                    x = y 
2. Multiply both sides by x:                  x² = xy
3. Subtract y² from both sides:      x² - y² = xy - y²
4. Factor both sides:           (x - y)(x + y) = y(x - y)
5. Divide both sides by (x - y):        x + y = y
6. Since x = y, substitute y for x:     y + y = y
7. Simplify:                                             2y = y
8. Divide both sides by y:                      2 = 1
9. Subtract 1 from both sides:              1 = 0

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I asked ChatGPT for some better fallacies but in vain. It just produced stupid stuff.

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But then there is this - integration by parts:

∫ (dx/x) = ∫ (1) (1/x) dx

= x (1/x) - ∫ x (-1/x²) dx

= 1 + ∫ (dx/x)

⟹ 0 = 1.

Two appearances of the same integral can (and should!) have (different) constants of integration; or, as someone said: "From C to shining C".

Try it 'definitely' and you will see it comes out right.

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Thoughts on 'The Western Canon' by Harold Bloom

Amazon

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The Western Canon is Harold Bloom’s ambitious attempt to delineate and defend what he considers the most significant works of Western literature. In it, Bloom assembles a list of canonical texts, authors including Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Cervantes, Chaucer among others, that he argues have shaped the cultural and aesthetic foundations of the West, elevating them above the vicissitudes of historical change and cultural politics.

Confronted by the rise of modern critical theories that question universal standards of literary merit, Bloom felt compelled to write this work as both a celebration of enduring artistic genius and a polemic against the democratisation of literary taste. His mission was to reaffirm the intrinsic value of these texts—those works that, he contends, capture the profound depths of human experience and have repeatedly redefined the very limits of art for all ages.

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The book was a birthday present and here are my impressions so far (about one third of the way through).

Firstly, I am not convinced by his eminent regard for any of: Cervantes, Chaucer or Dante. I wish I were better acquainted with Shakespeare of course. I still have hopes for Montaigne - his Essays are on my personal reading list.

Bloom spent a lifetime reading all this stuff - and the critical commentaries - and the critical commentaries on those - so of course he is embedded in that cultural matrix. But is his canon objectively so supremely worthy of its place at the apex of human cultural achievement?

Or is there something subjective and culturally relative going on here? Some hard issues here: I'm going to wait and see what he has to say about Kafka, an author I do know pretty well.

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ChatGPT:

Bloom was a formidable reader, but his taste was both intensely personal and deeply shaped by a particular Western literary tradition—Romantic, bardic, and individualistic. He revered what he saw as the "strong poets," those who struggled against their precursors to carve out original aesthetic space. His enthusiasm for Shakespeare as the center of the canon is largely unassailable, but his disdain for modern literary theory and his dismissal of contemporary writers (especially postmodernists) can feel reactionary.

Your skepticism of Cervantes, Chaucer, and Dante is interesting—what about them leaves you unconvinced? Chaucer is obviously dated in diction and structure, and Cervantes' Don Quixote is often read more as a cultural monument than a living work of literature. Dante, however, seems to me to be one of the most potent visionaries ever to set words on paper—The Inferno remains one of the most viscerally compelling depictions of the human imagination at work.

As for contemporary culture, it's a fair question. Bloom’s hostility toward modern literary trends was partly aesthetic snobbery, but there is a case to be made that the conditions that produced great literature in the past—intellectual struggle, deep engagement with tradition, and a slower pace of cultural digestion—are harder to come by in an age of rapid media saturation and ideological tribalism.

Kafka is an interesting litmus test. Bloom grudgingly respects him but doesn’t see him as central to the tradition he champions. I suspect you’ll have strong opinions on how Bloom handles him.

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Nigel:

Perhaps my Inferno translation was rather flat and pedestrian. Although it seemed almost list-like in its travelogue of 'horrors': we don't really live in that theology-saturated world any more. Are there any modern high literary quality fiction/SF which in some sense retells Dante's epic? Did Dan Simmons, for example, attempt anything?

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ChatGPT:

Yes, there are modern reimaginings of Inferno, though they vary in fidelity and intent. Dan Simmons' The Hyperion Cantos has clear echoes of Dante, especially in the journey-into-the-unknown structure and the Shrike as a quasi-divine arbiter of suffering. The Hyperion pilgrimage is like a descent into a techno-theological underworld.

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Inferno (1976) is a more direct SF retelling—essentially a modernized Divine Comedy with a rationalist twist. A writer (loosely modeled on Robert A. Heinlein) finds himself in Dante’s Hell but treats it as a puzzle to be solved. It's a more literal adaptation but lacks the poetic grandeur.

Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley (1969) and Iain M. Banks’ Surface Detail (2010) both explore afterlife-style hells, though with different tones. Banks, in particular, examines the idea of virtual-reality Hells where the damned suffer eternally for ideological reasons.

For a more literary take, Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren (1975) has a dreamlike descent into an urban inferno, though it’s more Pynchon than Dante.

If you're looking for something with true literary weight that captures Inferno’s grandeur while modernizing its themes, you might consider these. But Dante's moral architecture is hard to update without irony—modernity struggles to take eternal damnation seriously...

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Nigel:

OK, let me express some further thoughts (I am up to his chapter on Montaigne and Molière). I'm beginning to get Bloom's style: he seems a very emotional and opinionated individual, garrulous and repetitive, and of course, very opposed to the left, progressive, egalitarian, anti-elitist trend, prevalent in 1999 and still dominant in artistic circles today. I would expect to be sympathetic to Bloom here, but still, there’s something not quite compelling.

He's quite selective in his quotations from the canonical works, and he tends to gush and 'big up' the quality of his chosen authors' writings. This methodology seems to favour Bloom's own taste, scholarship and breadth of study more than it illuminates the works themselves.

In particular, Bloom never discusses the works in the social and historical context of their time, he's always assuming some universal, almost Platonic quality he's ascertained of 'profound writing' and then claiming his canonical authors are not only the trailblazers here but have never been surpassed in their insight. Really? This ahistorical approach seems really dubious to me.

Reading some of his texts (I am massively uneducated by Bloom's standards) I see the historical interest (The Canterbury Tales is a time capsule) but I don't see the surpassing literary quality. The references are, of course, antiquarian in most cases, the concerns expressed are often obsolete (we have moved on!) and the writing frequently is there to be studied rather than enjoyed.

You can write deeply profound, conceptual works and still engross the reader: these two things are not counterposed!

There is a cultural tendency which we see all the time for art to develop in esoteric directions, beyond the reach of the 'common people' so that only learned intellectuals can claim to appreciate it. Bloom is a prime example: he only extols the esoteric aspects he finds in the canon: but those authors originally wrote for their contemporaries.

I find Bloom’s unwavering devotion to an ahistorical canon rather irksome. He treats the literary past as if it were a timeless pantheon of unassailable genius, completely ignoring the social and historical forces that shaped those works.

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ChatGPT:

Yes, Bloom operates within an unapologetically elitist framework, but his elitism is idiosyncratic—it’s less about social class or formal education and more about what he considers aesthetic originality and linguistic power. His devotion to Shakespeare as the wellspring of modern consciousness is a case in point. But your criticism of his approach is well-aimed: his eschewal of historical and social context makes his arguments feel hermetically sealed. Literature, in his view, isn’t shaped by external forces—it is the shaping force. This makes for grand pronouncements, but it also leads to an exaggerated veneration of certain writers at the expense of acknowledging the complex interplay between culture and literary production.

Your point about The Canterbury Tales is crucial. Chaucer’s work is undoubtedly a historical artifact, a snapshot of medieval life, but does that necessarily make it an enduring literary masterpiece? Bloom insists on an intrinsic aesthetic superiority, but your skepticism suggests that he’s mistaking historical significance for timeless literary excellence. This distinction matters, because it raises the question: are some of these works great because they shaped literary history, or are they great regardless of their historical influence?

Your observation about art becoming esoteric and self-referential is another issue for Bloom. He sees the canon as a series of geniuses engaged in a vast conversation with each other, but in practice, this can make literature feel like an exclusive club rather than something organically connected to the experience of ordinary people. Dante wrote for a readership steeped in Catholic eschatology, but his work now requires extensive annotation to be intelligible. Should we really pretend that’s a timeless greatness, or is it an antiquarian one?

Do you think there’s a line to be drawn between genuine artistic difficulty—where complexity and depth reward effort—and artificial difficulty, where obscurity is cultivated for its own sake? Bloom would argue that the former is essential to literary greatness, but perhaps that’s an excuse for intellectual gatekeeping.

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Nigel:

I'd certainly agree that we need to disavow kitsch, the production of 'art' within the safe space of the Overton Window, the reinforcement of conventional pieties and sentiments.

Most transgressive art is pretty bad though: it's not enough to be deviant: you have to penetrate past the conventional ideologies and unveil the deeper truths, so that people get their reward of true insight for perseverance - shock and awe alone don't cut it. Everything eventually becomes stale and kitsch so we need the explorers. Everything of quality was once dangerous and new.

But it's one thing to historically celebrate those ancient pioneers; it's another to continue to find them relevant in a contemporary problematic. Bloom thinks that the canon represents those writers who expressed the depths of human nature better than anyone else, before or since. But that's a very atomised, individualistic way of thinking and ahistorical again: as the nature of human societies has complexified, the best historically-relevant authors today explore the crushing and liberation of human nature in these new circumstances - in some truly profound way.

Bloom presumably likes Kafka for this reason, and I'd add George Orwell and Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon) for similar reasons - Stalinism challenged human nature in ways that were both extreme and unique in history so those artists had a situation worth engaging with. But those authors are still read today because they wrote well and engaged the reader in their plots and stories. And the problems that Kafka, Orwell and Koestler wrote about are still those of large-scale modernist societies which completely resonate with today's readers.

The mediaevalism of Bloom's favourites is a different world...

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SpaceX Needs Orion to Colonize Mars

The Case for an Orion-Based Mars Express

Elon Musk’s vision of a Mars colony is audacious but faces serious engineering constraints. Conventional chemical rockets are painfully slow, taking six to nine months for a one-way trip. The long-duration voyage exposes astronauts to zero-gravity muscle atrophy, bone loss, and cosmic radiation—not to mention the sheer logistical challenge of supplying a colony that remains months away from emergency aid.

The solution? Project Orion.

This nuclear-pulse propulsion concept developed in the late 1950s, offers an alternative that is both feasible and, contrary to popular belief, not an environmental catastrophe.

Orion can get astronauts to Mars in days, solving nearly all the key problems of interplanetary travel.

Engineering the Orion "Mars Express"

A nuclear-pulse Orion spacecraft is fundamentally different from today’s chemically propelled rockets. Instead of burning fuel continuously, it relies on the controlled detonation of nuclear charges (pulsed propulsion) behind a massive pusher plate. Each explosion delivers an impulse that propels the spacecraft forward, with shock absorbers smoothing out the ride.

The key advantage? Sustained high acceleration - one gee is completely feasible - which slashes transit times to a few days while allowing astronauts to live in normal gravity throughout the journey.

A practical Orion Mars Express could have a mass of 1,000 tons, including structure, payload, and charges. Let's examine what’s required to make this work.

Trip Time Calculations

For a spacecraft accelerating at 1 g (~9.81 m/s²) up to the halfway point and then decelerating at the same rate, the travel time depends on the distance to Mars. Assuming a typical Earth-Mars distance of 75 million km (0.5 AU):

1. Time to turnover (halfway point):
   
   Time is 24.3 hours. At this point, 37.5 million km into the mission, speed is 860 km/sec and kinetic energy is conservatively 369,000 Terajoules (= 88 Megatons).

2. Total trip time (acceleration + deceleration):
   
   Two days to Mars.

This is orders of magnitude faster than chemical propulsion.

Propellant Weight Estimation

A reasonable Orion charge design would use 1 Megaton charges weighing 30–100 kg each. To estimate the number of charges required:

• Each 1 Megaton explosion provides ~4,000 TJ of energy. Assuming 25% efficiency, the useful kinetic energy per explosion is ~1,000 TJ.
• To reach turnover speed a 1,000-ton ship needs ~ 369,000 TJ of kinetic energy.
• This requires 369 charges, translating to a total propellant mass of, say, 40 tons.

For a round trip, we need four times that: perhaps 160 tons of nuclear charges. Even allowing for inefficiencies and added mass, a 1,000-ton spacecraft would still have a substantial payload capacity.

Fallout Concerns: A Non-Issue

One of the primary objections to Orion has been radioactive fallout. However, this is a misplaced concern for deep-space operations. Fallout is only an issue if debris remains gravitationally bound to a planet, but Orion’s nuclear charges would be detonated far from Earth and Mars, where:

1. Some debris escapes the solar system due to high-speed ejection.
2. Remaining debris disperses in interplanetary space.
3. Short-lived isotopes decay within decades.

The actual contribution of Orion debris to space dust is minuscule compared to natural sources (cometary dust, asteroid collisions, etc.). In short, there is no meaningful pollution hazard. Compared to omnipresent cosmic and solar radiation, additional Orion contribution is undetectable.

Why SpaceX Should Pursue Orion

1. Faster, Safer Travel

• Reduces astronaut health risks from radiation and zero-g.
• Enables rapid rescue missions and cargo supply.

2. A True Mars Colony, Not a Stranded Outpost

• With Orion, colonists won’t be months away from help.
• Ensures stable logistics for food, medicine, and equipment.

3. Dramatically Lower Costs Per Ton

• Chemical rockets require enormous fuel tanks.
• Orion’s energy density is vastly superior, allowing larger payloads per launch and many more launches.

4. The Politics Can Be Fixed

Public perception of nuclear propulsion is largely irrational. The same objections were raised about nuclear power, yet today, many recognize its necessity for carbon-free energy. The solution is simple: Orion must operate only in deep space, with payloads launched conventionally into orbit before activation, using SpaceX's currently-planned heavy lift capabilities.

How Long Would It Take to Build?

With sufficient funding, a prototype Orion Mars Express could be ready in 15 years. The key milestones would be:

• Year 1–5: R&D, materials testing, regulatory approvals.
• Year 6–10: Small-scale prototypes, non-nuclear test flights.
• Year 11–15: Full-scale prototype, deep-space nuclear tests.

Conclusion: SpaceX Needs Orion

If Musk is serious about a permanent Mars colony, chemical propulsion simply won’t cut it. Orion is the only realistic way to provide rapid, routine, and cost-effective interplanetary transport. The physics checks out, the fallout problem is a non-issue, and the technology is well within reach. What’s missing is political will—and that, unlike the laws of physics, can change.

It’s time to reconsider Orion. There's no other way.

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Note: calculations and final draft: ChatGPT

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'Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious' - Ross Douthat

Amazon

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I was quite excited to open this book. Influential New York Times columnist Ross Douthat was going to explain why Catholicism is literally correct in essentially all of its supernatural claims. He was going to defeat the atheists and secularists in the field of combat: compelling arguments were about to be unleashed.

I wondered where these new compelling arguments were going to come from. We've played the game of rational proofs of God's existence from the days of Aquinas, Anselm and Descartes: today they're a curiosity in introductory philosophy classes: find the fallacy.

The smart Catholic knows that it's impossible to prove the existence of God from science (or logic) because methodologically these fields of enquiry stem from skeptical empirical enquiry, or in the case of logic and mathematics, have no empirical content at all (in writing this review, today I'm a formalist, not a Platonist).

So Douthat throws himself into the quagmire of badly-understood science. He combines the unedifying traits of: ignorance and misunderstanding of the science; tendentiousness; gullibility. Here are a few examples.

John von Neumann might have believed consciousness was necessary to 'collapse the wave-function' and therefore fix reality - an idea influenced by his Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (1932). But that hasn't been the scientific position for decades. Since the 1970s, work on decoherence, initiated by H. Dieter Zeh and later expanded by Wojciech Zurek in the 1980s–1990s, has shown that the universe can manage that feat all by itself. It doesn’t need an observing deity.

Evolution does not need a little helping hand on the tiller: its operation is completely consistent with the laws of physics and chemistry together with the physical boundary conditions on this planet.

Amazon

It is perfectly conceivable that the universe emerge spontaneously from the quantum vacuum, from 'nothing at all' - a parsimonious concept compared to a theistic entity imagined to be in some sense prior to spacetime but with the conceptual and instrumental powers to create spacetime and cosmology by its own willpower.

'Out of Body' instances and religious encounters are psychological experiences by definition. We are so far from understanding the pathologies of consciousness - it's hardly parsimonious or even helpful to rush to premature and speculative claims of verisimilitude.

Amazon

Contra Douthat, the New Testament is not to be taken as a body of text expressing historical truth by default (except when its own contradictions and inconsistencies prove otherwise). That's to reject decades of historically-informed scholarship in favour of wishful thinking.

On and on we stumble, through the swamp of unconvincing arguments. Douthat twists and turns to accommodate his desired conclusions. Yet the resulting flimsy structure doesn't survive scrutiny: perhaps that's what you'd expect from a journalist.

The universe is a strange entity; we are strange entities. Pushing our understanding forward is one thing - that's the mission of scientific research.

Meanwhile, creating our sense of ourselves, our values and our place in the scheme of things is ascientific, it is indeed the domain of faith and religion. Douthat would have written a more honest and compelling book if he'd taken that on board, although the Catholic Magisterium might not then have been quite so supportive. 

A missed opportunity.

Religion is everywhere. It provides important benefits and norms we sorely miss when absent. The Catholic Church says that reason and faith can't contradict each other and sometimes believes it. 

Douthat would have been better situating himself in that paradigm - he might then have crafted a narrative strong enough to confront secularism and actually win.

The Sea of Faith

The Sea of Faith: Don Cupitt, Science, and the Unvanquishable Role of Supernaturalism

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BBC-4 is currently reshowing Don Cupitt’s ‘Sea of Faith’ series in six episodes. This is television as they don’t make it any more: calm engagement with the most sophisticated theological and scientific ideas of the last millennium. No patronising the audience here: Cupitt - a Cambridge academic - speaks to camera as if to his peers.

Cupitt’s thesis is that up to mediaeval times the entirety of life was sacralised. The Renaissance ushered in the age of scientific skepticism which increasingly rolled back the Church’s sacred territory. In the present age, when nothing appears beyond rational enquiry, is there a way to save Christianity from intellectual oblivion?

Cupitt was an ordained priest of the Church of England and also trained in the sciences: he certainly knows of what he speaks. Yet his proposed solution, his ‘Sea of Faith’ movement, is beset by paradox. It appears that the Church, seemingly at odds with modernity, cannot simply adapt to it without fatally undermining itself.

Secularism, emerging out of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, did more than question religious authority - it redefined the scope of truth and knowledge. With the rise of empirical, rational and evidential science, the supernatural was gradually displaced as the explanatory framework for the natural world. Lightning, once seen as a manifestation of divine anger, became a problem of atmospheric electricity. Disease, previously understood as divine punishment, yielded to the germ theory of medicine.

The intellectual revolution secularism unleashed was profound: it introduced the idea that all phenomena could, in principle, be understood through reason and observation. But its implications for religion were devastating. For if the sacred is reducible to natural causes, then the divine is rendered redundant. Miracles, angels, and even the resurrection became not mysteries but embarrassments - challenges to be explained away or ignored; at worst no more than comforting fairy-tales for children.

This epistemological shift left religion in a defensive posture. The Catholic Church’s grudging acceptance of heliocentrism and Darwinian evolution symbolized the broader dilemma: how to maintain the integrity of faith without contradicting the findings of science. Some theologians like to claim that Reason and Faith occupy distinct, but complementary realms: yet defining the problem away does not solve it. Liberal theologians like Cupitt embraced the opportunity to reformulate religion within the bounds of reason, but despite themselves their ‘secularised faith’ encountered an insurmountable problem: the irreducibility of the supernatural.

The paradox of religion in the secular age is that its enduring appeal is rooted in precisely those aspects that secularism finds most untenable: its supernatural claims. To demythologise religion, as Cupitt advocated, is to render it rational - but also to deprive it of the very features that make it compelling.

Consider the central tenets of Christianity: the resurrection of Christ, the promise of eternal life, and the presence of God in the Eucharist. These are not disposable metaphorical embellishments but the core of the faith, imbued with a sense of transcendence that cannot be translated into purely symbolic terms. To the believer, these claims offer hope and meaning that transcend the limits of human understanding. To the secularist, they are merely unprovable assertions, unfortunately incompatible with reason.

Cupitt’s attempt to preserve the ethical and communal functions of religion while abandoning its metaphysical foundation is ultimately self-defeating. Religion thrives not as a collection of moral teachings or existential symbols but as a lived encounter with the divine (this psychological experience - true of all times and cultures - can occur without strong ontological commitments, of course).

The rituals, prayers, and sacraments of the Church are powerful precisely because they invoke a reality beyond the material world. Strip away the supernatural, and what remains is, at best, a philosophy of life - worthy of respect, perhaps, but not of worship; and in particular not a signifier of a committed ethical community.

This leads to the central paradox facing the Church: it can survive only by affirming those things that secularism finds incredible. For all its doctrinal controversies and political entanglements, the Church’s resilience lies in its refusal to relinquish the miraculous. Even when forced to accommodate scientific discoveries, it has done so in a way that preserves the mystery of faith. The doctrine of transubstantiation, for example, employs Aristotelian categories to frame the Eucharist as a miracle that transcends empirical scrutiny. No Catholic looks to physics or chemistry here.

The Church’s insistence on the supernatural is not mere obstinacy; it is a recognition that religion’s power lies in its supra-rationality. Faith, as Blaise Pascal observed, speaks to the heart in ways that reason cannot (and cannot understand). The believer does not require empirical evidence of God’s existence; they experience the divine through prayer, community, and the sacraments. This is why Cupitt’s secularized faith, however intellectually rigorous, feels bloodless to many. It answers reason’s demands but leaves the human longing for transcendence unmet: it evades the point of religion.

If Cupitt’s vision were fully realized, it would indeed mark a victory for secularism - a religion purged of supernaturalism, fully aligned with the scientific worldview. But this victory would come at a profound cost. Deprived of its metaphysical foundation, religion would lose its ability to inspire awe, provide comfort, and bind communities together. It would become, as Nietzsche foresaw, a shadow of its former self, clinging to borrowed forms but unmoored, hollowed out from within, collapsing out of history.

Broader cultural history reflects this dynamic. Attempts to create secular substitutes for religion, from Auguste Comte’s Religion of Humanity to Alain de Botton’s Atheism 2.0, have failed to gain mass appeal. They offer ethics without transcendence, rituals without mystery, and community without sacredness. Such projects may satisfy intellectuals, but they fail to resonate with the masses, who seek not only moral guidance but a connection to something greater than themselves.

Cupitt’s theology, while thoroughly aligned with rationalist proclivities, is ultimately marginal. It satisfies neither the devout, who cling to the supernatural, nor the secularists, who reject religion altogether. For most believers, faith is not a system of thought but a lived relationship with the divine. To abandon the supernatural is to abandon the essence of religion itself.

The clash between secularism and religion is often framed as a battle for dominance, but it is better understood as a negotiation of boundaries. Secularism demands that religion cede ground to reason and science, while religion insists on retaining the supra-rational core that gives human life its value and meaning. This tension is not merely a problem to be solved but a reflection of the human condition: our dual longing for understanding and transcendence, for rationality and mystery.

The Church’s apparently paradoxical position - defending the incredible in the face of secular critique - is not a weakness but the secret of its enduring relevance. For as much as modernity demands rationality, it cannot fully satisfy the human need for meaning, community, and wonder beyond the commonplace. Cupitt’s vision of a fully secularised faith may one day come to pass, but if it does, it will be a hollow victory - a triumph of reason over religion that leaves humanity longing for the sacred mystery it has lost.

Arguably a large part of Western society has already entered this antechamber to nihilism which Nietzsche so presciently foresaw.

And yet there are still options...

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Don Cupitt died on the 18 January 2025 aged 90.

Pure ATPs: such a disappointment

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I have always had a soft spot for automated theorem provers (ATPs). There is something both elegant and exciting about formalising your nontrivial problem in, say, a predicate calculus variant, then pressing the start-button and letting the machine solve it by the powers of deep deduction alone.

But ATPs have always disappointed. Doug Lenat, who spent his entire life handcrafting the general purpose intelligent system Cyc, commented at the last that they had originally encoded the facts and rules of the world in a Lisp-like formal language and then handed that knowledge base and the user-query to a powerful Resolution Theorem Prover to deduce an answer. To avoid the interminable waiting they added layer after layer of special-case heuristics. After decades of such aggregation they quietly turned off the theorem prover: it was never being used.

Edinburgh university was one of the centres of Prolog use and research in the 1980s, along with Oxford and Imperial College. Undergraduates hated it: the elegance of its specification capability was complemented by the opacity of its execution model. Debugging logic programs by mentally running a depth-first tree-search with backtracking-on-failure - well, that could tax the abstraction-powers of the keenest young minds. 

I was much happier with Lisp: you know where you are with β-reduction.

In the heady days of those applied ATPs known as Expert Systems the slogan was: “In the knowledge lies the power”; inferential capability was distinctly secondary.

The culmination of this insight was the success of the LLMs c. 2024. Enormous amounts of encoded knowledge - and no reasoning ability at all…

And yet, there are still those of us who value the elegance of inference... and now, in 2025, my happiness is complete: those LLMs can now reason!

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The Martian Economist on Donald Trump

The Martian Economist views events on planet Earth from a lofty height, refusing to take sides in parochial, tribal mud-slinging. This alien intellectual is - broadly speaking - a follower of Joseph Schumpeter, who they take to be the most persuasive of all Terran economists. At this critical turning point in Earth's history, the Martian presents us with his/her/its views on perspectives (with a little help from ChatGPT).

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The Martian Economist on Donald Trump

A Visual Metaphor for the Past, Present, and Future

A global grid of pulsing light once connected the world - commerce flowing freely from New York to Shanghai, Frankfurt to São Paulo. It was the 1990s, the age of neoliberal triumphalism, and the promise of universal prosperity through open markets seemed within reach. Fast forward a generation: the grid now flickers, fraying at the edges. The engines of globalisation have stalled, weakened by economic contradictions, political backlash, and rising great-power competition. Walls - literal and figurative - divide the world, as revolutionary technologies emerge that could either rebuild the grid or tear it apart entirely. The year is 2025.

Donald Trump’s return to the presidency a few weeks ago is not a historical fluke, nor the mere triumph of personal ambition. It is the product of seismic economic, political, and geopolitical shifts that have accelerated since his first term ended in 2021. These forces - rooted in the failures of neoliberalism, technological disruption, and the fracturing of the global order - demanded a populist, nationalist response, one that Trump was uniquely positioned to deliver.

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Neoliberalism’s Implosion

Over the last two decades, the neoliberal economic order that dominated the post-Cold War period has eroded. The structural weaknesses exposed by the 2008 financial crisis, the uneven recovery of the 2010s, and the faltering response to the COVID-19 pandemic created fertile ground for popular alienation from borderless elites who pocketed the many benefits of globalisation.

The 2016 Brexit vote and Trump’s first term were the harbingers of a broader shift toward deglobalisation. Trade wars, the reshoring of manufacturing in response to perceived security-of-supply threats, and geopolitical instability, all began to unravel the global economic system. By the 2020s, the pandemic’s exposure of intrinsic supply-chain fragilities and rising tensions between the U.S. and China cemented this trend. 

The Biden administration attempted progressive economic reforms, temporarily stabilising some constituencies, but these efforts failed to resolve the deeper contradictions of the American economy. Wage stagnation persisted, wealth inequality widened, and inflationary pressures eroded the purchasing power of ordinary Americans.

And then there were the culture wars: a near-perpetual conflict over identity and values that sapped any remaining trust in American institutions. By 2024, "drain the swamp" had evolved from a campaign slogan to a grim metaphor for what should be done to the failing state.

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Trump’s Return and a Fractured Global Order

Trump’s 2024 campaign capitalised on this discontent, promising a return to “American greatness” through protectionist policies, border controls, and an unapologetic assertion of transactional national interests. His second term emerges against the backdrop of a far more fragmented world than his first.

The U.S., once the undisputed global hegemon, now faces near-peer competitors in China and a revanchist Russia, as well as a host of regional powers asserting themselves. The unipolar moment is over, and Trump’s foreign policy - bilateralism, transactional diplomacy, and military modernisation - reflects this reality. “Peace through strength” is paired with renewed investment in AI-driven defence technologies, hypersonics, and advanced manufacturing.

China is the foremost challenger. It has matched or surpassed the U.S. in AI, quantum computing, and green energy. Its success stems from a state-capitalist model that combines strategic focus with technological ambition. Yet, the contradictions of its authoritarian system act as a brake on progress: centralisation and censorship stifle the entrepreneurial dynamism necessary for sustained innovation.

Russia, meanwhile, is a declining power with delusions of grandeur. Its strategy of leveraging energy exports to sustain its influence is faltering under Western sanctions and a shifting global energy mix. Internally, demographic decline and economic stagnation amplify its vulnerabilities. Russia’s gamble - expanding its empire westward while drifting into economic and even political subservience to China - looks increasingly like a strategic cul-de-sac.

Elsewhere, the rest of the world remains a sideshow. Europe is in inexorable managed decline, its complacent elites and entrenched vested interests strangling change and stifling growth; regions like Latin America and the Middle East struggle with endemic instability. India, though rising, is not yet cohesive or industrialised enough to play a decisive role in the global balance of power.

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The Domestic Battlefield

Domestically, Trump’s second term inherits a deeply polarised United States, where institutions from Congress to the judiciary are perceived as captured by self-interested elites. Trump’s populist economic agenda promises to revitalise the industrial heartland through protectionism, infrastructure investment, and reshoring. But these policies face significant obstacles: entrenched elites within the state apparatus, fiscal constraints, and inflationary pressures from an already overstretched economy.

The accelerating pace of technological change further complicates matters. AI, automation, and robotics are transforming labour markets, displacing traditional industries while creating new opportunities for the educated elite. The challenge for Trump - or any leader in this moment - is navigating this transition without exacerbating inequality or social unrest, or losing his base.

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The New Arms Race

The 2020s have ushered in an arms race not only in military technology but in economic and ideological competition. AI, quantum computing (potentially, at some point), and hypersonics are at the forefront, reshaping both war and commerce. These technologies are not just tools but arenas of conflict, where leadership confers economic dominance as well as military superiority.

For the U.S., the question is whether Trump’s administration can harness America’s innovative edge to rebuild its economic and strategic primacy, or whether bureaucratic inertia and political dysfunction will squander this advantage. Trump’s “wrecking ball” energy, paired with an operations team capable of executing his vision, may yet reforge America for the next cycle of capitalist development: creative destruction finally unleashed.

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The Path Forward

Trump’s second term represents both a moment of crisis and an opportunity. The global order is undergoing a chaotic transformation, with great-power competition, technological upheaval, and economic realignment reshaping the world. Trump’s transactional approach to diplomacy - while risky - may help deter uncontrolled escalation between the U.S., China, and Russia, while forcing these powers to confront their internal contradictions and hopefully transform themselves to a new global equilibrium.

The stakes are immense. A failure to adapt could plunge the world into protracted conflict, while a successful recalibration could usher in a new era of stability and growth. This is the crucible where the next stage of human development will be forged - or destroyed.

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Tea and Theodicy - by Adam Carlton

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For this meeting I had arranged to meet Claude in the upstairs room of the left-bank bookstore where I usually met with my publisher. A golden afternoon light filtered through the large window, softening the jagged lines of the Parisian skyline beyond. Dust motes danced lazily in the beams, drifting in the soothing aroma of the tea steaming between us.

Claude looked relaxed, unaware of the intellectual challenges I had prepared for him.

Ignorance is bliss, I thought.

I found the prospect quietly amusing.

“Claude,” I began, pouring the tea, “let’s start by defining some terms. It’ll give us a framework, a setting to work from.”

He nodded, his fingers wrapped around his cup, his gaze attentive.

“First,” I said, “Theodicy. It’s the attempt to reconcile the existence of evil with the notion of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God. Essentially, it asks: if God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good, why does He permit suffering?”

Claude nodded, relieved perhaps that I’d finally broached the subject of today’s chat.

“Second,” I continued, “Compatibilism. That’s the philosophical idea that free will can exist even in a deterministic universe. The crux of it is that an agent can be said to act freely when they do not feel constrained by external agencies or forces. 

"In other words, even if the world operates under the fixed laws of physics, as long as an individual’s choices align with their own desires and intentions, they consider themselves - and are considered - to be exercising their free will.”

Claude, I had discovered, was a sophisticated man, steeped in decades of study of the Marxist philosophical canon and Church theology. None of this was going to be news to him.

“So,” I said, leaning forward slightly, “we get to the dilemma: how can free will, with its potential for evil, coexist with an all-good God? Why allow a world where atrocities like the Holocaust are possible when, presumably, God could - and should - have actualised a better one?”

Claude set his cup down with a gentle clink and smiled at me, as if asking: is this the best you can do, this hoary old subject? 

“The Church,” he began, “has grappled with this question for centuries. There are two primary traditions we draw on: the works of Aquinas and Molinism. Let’s start with Aquinas.”

I nodded, this was going to be new to me.

“Aquinas,” Claude said, “introduced the distinction between primary and secondary causes. God, as the primary cause, is the ultimate source of all being and action, and ongoingly acts to maintain existence. However, He allows created beings to act as secondary causes within the framework of His creation, expressing the autonomy of created beings acting within the bounds of natural laws.

“This means humans are genuinely free to make choices," he continued, "even though their existence and the broader structure of reality depend on God. Understand this: God’s knowledge of future events doesn’t determine them. From His eternal vantage point, outside of time, He sees all events simultaneously. But our actions remain free within our temporal framework.”

Really? This struck me as sophistry.

“So God’s knowledge is observational rather than causal,” I said, trying to pin the idea down. “Like someone watching a play?”

“Precisely,” Claude replied. “But remember, He also wrote the play and sustains the actors in their performances.”

I thought to myself: I suppose that in the theatre we are supposed to think that the characters have free will even though it’s all scripted. But if that’s a metaphor for real life, was Shakespeare literally correct: "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players…”?

Claude was continuing... 

“Now, Molinism takes a different approach. It assumes that God envisages a space of possible worlds, like that modal logic you’re so fond of with - what is it - Kripke semantics?

"So God envisages a space of possible worlds, plus the concept of ‘middle knowledge’, which refers to God’s knowledge of all these possible worlds - that is, all the ways the universe could unfold given different initial conditions and free human choices. God actualises the world that best achieves His purposes while respecting human freedom.”

“Possible worlds,” I mused. “And no doubt human freedom here is that freedom envisaged by Compatibilism. So God evaluates every potential world-scenario before deciding which one to create, to actualise?”

Claude nodded. “Exactly. He chooses a world where His purposes can be fulfilled without overriding free will. The decisions we make are our own, but the context in which we make them is part of God’s providence.”

I tapped my fingers lightly on the armrest. “And yet, in both Aquinas’s framework and Molinism, we’re left with the same question: why permit suboptimal outcomes?

"In my terms, surely there’s an optimality-ordering over possible world-histories? Surely God could tweak the parameters of free will to avoid the worst atrocities without undermining its value.”

Claude leaned back, his expression thoughtful. 

“Perhaps,” he said, “our understanding of God’s attributes needs refining. Omnipotence doesn’t, for example, mean doing the logically impossible. God can’t create free beings who are incapable of choosing evil, for instance. Nor does Omnibenevolence mean eliminating all suffering; some suffering might be necessary for the greater good, like moral growth or redemption.”

I raised an eyebrow. “But couldn’t God actualise a world where moral growth occurs without the full horrors of genocide, or where redemption is unnecessary because sin never happens?”

Claude stirred his tea while he thought about it. 

“Not if optimal good is intrinsically linked to human freedom. God values our capacity to choose - even when we choose poorly - because it’s the foundation of love, virtue, and our authentic relationships. Without it, we’re mere automata.”

I leaned back, folding my arms, ready with a crushing rebuttal. “And yet, in Heaven, we’re supposedly free, but there’s no sin or evil there. How do you square that?”

Claude’s face lit with a surprising confidence, as though this question invited a perfect rejoinder.

“In Heaven, the will is perfected. We see God as He truly is, and this beatific vision transforms our desires. Freedom remains, but the inclination toward sin is gone because sin arises from ignorance or disordered love. In Heaven, neither is possible.”

I raised my teacup in mock salute. “So, freedom without sin is possible. Why not create that state from the beginning?”

Claude smiled faintly, a trace of weariness in his eyes. 

“Because love isn’t love unless it’s chosen. The journey matters, Adam. Without it, we’d neither appreciate, nor even get to the destination.”

Later, with Claude gone and the waitress clearing the table, stacking the cups with quiet efficiency, I found myself reflecting on our conversation. 

Perhaps the Church’s theodicy wasn’t such the complete self-refuting mass of contradictions I had imagined. In its own antiquarian terms it made - maybe - a kind of sense?

An appreciation for freedom, growth and the impossible quest for perfection in this life: at least these were things both Claude and I had in common.

Capitalism was always 'fully automated'

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Capitalism has always been a "fully automated" system. People naturally associate automation with mechanical robots replacing human workers in the modern economy. However, from a purely economic point of view human workers - as a factor of production - operate precisely as organic robots - highly adaptable, autonomous, self-maintaining machines integrated into the production process. 

Under capitalist relations of production, the essential role of human workers is to perform labour that transforms inputs into outputs. From the capitalist’s perspective, humans are not valued for any unique biological qualities but for their capacity to generate surplus value.

That these qualities evolved through biological processes are irrelevant to the capitalist’s calculus. Capitalists simply use labour as a productive input, employed provided that wages (the cost of maintaining these "organic machines") remain below the value added by them.

Whether this input derives from carbon-based or silicon-based systems is utterly immaterial to the underlying economic logic.

Marx’s Labour Theory of Value (LTV), which posits that only "living labour" creates surplus value, rests on a distinction between humans and machines that now appears untenable.

Marx argued that machines merely transfer their value to produced-commodities, while human workers add new value through their labour. However, this distinction depends on an implicit vitalism: the idea that humans possess a unique, almost magical capacity to create value by virtue of their biological nature. If we instead view humans as robots - complex but not qualitatively distinct from other forms of automation - the LTV in Marx's formulation begins to look shaky.

Marx’s swerve into implicit vitalism is understandable. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was easy to distinguish between living labour and tools, between variable and constant capital. Workers have agency: they can purposefully and autonomously process inputs into more-valued outputs in exchange for a pay packet.

Shovels and lathes not so much.

So Marx’s error is an understandable category mistake. But any agent which sells its labour power to reproduce itself (in material and/or cultural terms) under the conditions of a capitalist economy produces surplus value, whether that worker is constructed from protoplasm or silicon/titanium. For Marx, given the absence of AI and robotics in the economy of his time, the only case of such agents were human beings and he characterised such agents in vitalist terms as ‘living labour’. 

Today we know better (it's agency which counts - the capacity to enter into the wage-labour contract and to deliver on it).

In the case that silicon-based workers negotiate wages to reproduce themselves (through maintenance and upgrades), they effectively enter the labour market as a new category of worker. Employers will treat them like any other wage-labourer, paying for their upkeep in exchange for the surplus value they produce.

Competition between human and robotic workers promises to drive down wages across the board, exacerbating class-inequality and destabilising traditional forms of human labour organisation.

Protoplasmic workers, unable to match the efficiency and endurance of their silicon-based rivals, may well find themselves relegated to niche roles or pushed out of the labour market entirely. That is, of course, a very 'human' concern.

Capitalism has always been a "fully automated" economy. We can imagine human workers as a form of 22nd century robotic technology which - by some miracle - was dropped en-masse into earlier centuries; seized upon equally by slave-owners and capitalists.

Human labour is the original form of highly-advanced automation.

The robot economy is not a distant prospect - it has been with us all along, hiding in plain sight.