How a Skeptical Philosopher Became a Christian with Larry Sanger, Co-Founder of Wikipedia

This transcript has been lightly edited from an automated transcription for clarity and readability. While we've worked to preserve each speaker's words faithfully, errors may remain.

1. 00:00

   Larry Sanger

   The occult is to a very great extent a reaction to biblical ideas. I don't think this is necessarily true for the very earliest versions in Greece, for example, but it certainly seems to be the case for everything after Christianity. Modern occultism makes a great deal of use of perverting the symbology and the concepts of the Old Testament and the New Testament. And I said, okay, if I really want to understand them, I think the place to begin would be by understanding the Bible. And that actually is what led me.

2. 00:40

   Michael Horton

   Interesting.

3. 00:40

   Larry Sanger

   It wasn't because I believed in the occult or like I had studied it a lot and I had a bad experience with it. No, it was nothing like that. I was trying to understand that part of the world which I'd never thought of, didn't take seriously at all. I just thought it was weak-minded people.

4. 00:56

   Michael Horton

   We don't want to live in the Village Green at the end of the day. We can all leave and return to our houses of worship, but our goal is to encourage conversational theology in the Village Green, where we can rub shoulders with Christians from different traditions and expressions.

5. 01:21

   Michael Horton

   Larry Sanger is best known as a founder of Wikipedia. The Wiki Encyclopedia was his idea. This—he spearheaded the project, named it, led it in its seminal year and formulated much of its original policy. He has since gone on to lead many educational and encyclopedic efforts, currently is the president of the Knowledge Standards Foundation, and most recently Larry's name and work is circulating again because after decades as a skeptical philosopher, Larry has announced his conversion to Christianity. Larry, welcome to the program.

6. 02:00

   Larry Sanger

   Thanks for having me. So, in general, I think Wikipedia tends to represent the establishment point of view in everything. Used to be required to be the neutral point of view. That's what they call it anyway. I just simply say the neutrality policy, which initially originally meant that it should be impossible to tell what position the authors of the article take on any disputed question that would be raised about the content of the article.

7. 02:40

   Michael Horton

   And that was the policy you set, right?

8. 02:43

   Larry Sanger

   Well, yes, um, I—it was the policy that Jimmy Wales and I were well agreed upon. I don't know what changed on his end and why he allowed it to, to slide the way it has. Nevertheless, putting that question aside, clearly, if there is any point of view that is generally accepted by academics, that appears in the mainstream media, that is in the mainstream as determined by the UN and various other organizations, the mainstream of science, then that is going to be represented in Wikipedia. And that's basically how it works as far as I can tell. And that's just based on looking at the contents of lots of articles and listening to other people's complaints as well.

9. 03:43

   Michael Horton

   Larry, you—our organization is a conversation mainly around Reformation theology with confessional Lutherans, Reformed, Anglicans, and Baptists, and it's a roundtable. Missouri Synod Lutherans have always been near and dear to—nuclear to what we do. You were raised LCMS. At 17, you had questions and doubts that you say were dismissed by your pastors. Can you recount that a little, how you turned to philosophy instead?

10. 04:23

    Larry Sanger

    It actually started with philosophy before I raised these questions. I had always asked a lot of philosophical questions without even knowing that that's what they were called. But as a high school junior, I had a one-semester class in philosophy and I really enjoyed it. And I was really, you know, on fire with the classic questions, you know, what reasons do we have to believe that God exists? Do we have free will or are we determined? And things like that. And what is the ultimate source of our morality? Why be moral? So along with all of my other beliefs, I ended up essentially jettisoning a belief in God because I noticed that a lot of people in my life seemed to have messed up their lives in various ways. And these seemed to me to be unforced, almost voluntary mistakes that were rooted in, in false beliefs that they had, you know, about things like the mind-enhancing features of drugs or that the the function of marriage or how much alcohol it's acceptable to drink and whatever. And these actually struck me as being objective questions that we could settle. But in order to make sure that I myself didn't ruin my life, or at least make it much worse than it could be, I thought maybe the most important thing for me would be to seek the truth with a capital T. And so, as I say, then my belief in God sort of went by the wayside. But I began thinking quite a bit, you know, asking different questions, trying to prove the existence of God and remembering what I had been taught in that class and so forth. And I was not really able to justify adequately to my own satisfaction a belief in God. And there were a lot of, you know, issues that I had with the Bible, um, as many people who don't study it very hard do. I didn't actually go in person. I called up on the phone a pastor. I don't actually think it was my pastor. I think it was some other LCMS or maybe it was even like a Baptist pastor. I can't remember. And, and just, you know, in order to talk with somebody about my hard questions. Now, I might not have been as respectful as I should have, but I was asking, you know, I suppose what I thought at least were legitimate questions, you know. But he sort of brushed me off. He didn't really give much in the way of substantive replies. Our conversation was not long, and I'm pretty sure he was the one who ended it. He didn't give me much in the way of advice about where I could get my questions addressed. And I actually thought that perhaps he was not taking my questions seriously. I thought perhaps he felt a little bit personally threatened by them. But of course, I was an arrogant 17-year-old, so who knows? But the point is that I was put off, and that sort of confirmed me in my disbelief. I think it would be fair to say that he had an opportunity to pull me back, um, if he had known the right things to say. But that would have actually required that he be pretty well acquainted with some fairly hard philosophy in order to actually be able to answer. And I thought that, you know, all, all pastors would be able to handle such questions because, you know, this is like, isn't this basic stuff? It's actually not basic stuff. It doesn't take very long thinking about philosophical questions before you get to a point where your average pastor is kind of out of his depth. That's my impression anyway.

11. 09:12

    Michael Horton

    You became a philosopher and a methodological skeptic.You didn't want to become a nihilist. You didn't like that. And so you—Ayn Rand and objectivism was the next stop. What is methodological skepticism?

12. 09:27

    Larry Sanger

    Ordinary skepticism is a good place to begin, and that is basically the view that we cannot know something about some area of knowledge. Like, if I can't know anything about science, um, then I'm a scientific skeptic. If I can't know anything about whether there are actually minds and other people then I have other minds skepticism. Methodological skepticism doesn't deny that it's possible to have knowledge. It simply says, hey, as a method of proceeding, when we do our truth-seeking, the important thing is always to be sure to have the truth, to make as few errors as possible, and therefore to suspend judgment as long as possible, or take a skeptical stance. Not—this is not a denying stance, you understand. It's a skeptical stance, which means—holding both pro and con as live possibilities as long as possible until all the relevant data is in, I suppose. And the way that I put it is I had to know what I was believing. I had to have very good reasons to believe it. And of course, I had to be aware of what the reasons were. And that's a pretty heavy lift, especially for a teenager.

13. 10:58

    Michael Horton

    Yeah, absolutely. And you say you were agnostic, sort of passive agnostic, but you were never really profoundly attracted to the New Atheists.

14. 11:12

    Larry Sanger

    Not at all. No. I mean, I wasn't terribly put off by religion. I never thought that religion was like a force for evil in the world the way that some new atheists do. Never thought that. I always respected my parents and siblings, other family and friends who were and are Christian. It's just that I was not convinced. And yet, due to my philosophical training, because you know, all three of my degrees are in philosophy—bachelor's, master's, and PhD. I knew what good philosophizing is like, and I wasn't seeing very much of it from the New Atheists. They were raising philosophical doubts, but they were making a bad job of it, essentially.

15. 12:11

    Michael Horton

    You also saw that on the Christian side, right?

16. 12:14

    Larry Sanger

    Right. I think partly this is because people like William Lane Craig were engaged in debates and writing. I remember assigning stuff from Craig in like introductory philosophy classes and philosophy of religion, which I taught as an agnostic. Of course, this is introductory stuff, so he doesn't go into very much depth there. But I thought that his presentation of the arguments was much too confident and glib even. I was not at all convinced. You know, just to take an example, you can argue and, and perhaps even convince me that there is a necessary being, but then it's not clear to me that that's God. The conclusion God exists doesn't immediately follow from the notion that there is a necessary being that explains the contingent facts in the world, um, which is essentially the, the thing that, that the argument from contingency establishes. It does—certainly doesn't establish the existence of the God of Christianity. So not that I had looked that hard, to be perfectly honest, but no one in my experience had made much of an attempt to basically make the case.

17. 13:49

    Michael Horton

    Wow. That's—that is something that I think all of our listeners—it kind of—it's a gut punch because all of our churches need to really wake up to this. It's not just people like you. There are people who are less thoughtful about these issues. We have to, you know, be ready to have an answer for the hope that we have. Before you began to read the Bible, you say that a friend recommended looking into occult spirituality. Why didn't you go down that path?

18. 14:24

    Larry Sanger

    Well, he wasn't recommending it for, for itself. Without getting into too many details, he opened my eyes to the very phenomenon of organized child molestation, which I didn't even know existed. And even worse than that, the fact that there are some very famous people who apparently have been part of organizations like Epstein. And what he was maintaining is, well, don't you know this is what all the old English public schools are based on? This is like the whole upper-class phenomenon. He says, I know all these people, I grew up with all the—with these people, and, and it's that they're, they're all like, they've got split personalities. I didn't believe a lot of the things that he was telling me, but it was interesting.

19. 15:27

    Michael Horton

    And they were all into sort of New Agey kind of spirituality?

20. 15:30

    Larry Sanger

    That's the other part of it, that these people, even if they put on a show of Christianity, they actually do a lot of dabbling in the occult. And sometimes they're quite open about it, especially in Hollywood, where there is this pedo world phenomenon. And the whole idea is there were sexual rituals in ancient occultism and he told me, well, this stuff continues to this day, never stopped. And if you really wanna understand people like Epstein, then he said, then you should like, read these books from, you know, Freemasons, Albert Pike and a few others, Helena Blavatsky.

21. 16:20

    Michael Horton

    Oh, yeah.

22. 16:20

    Larry Sanger

    I was like, I'm not gonna read that stuff. I started reading it and it's like, this is creepy. I didn't, I didn't take it seriously, and I didn't really—and I still don't. I don't know what to believe on that stuff, to be perfectly honest. And I, to be quite honest, I don't think I want to know. I thought that if these people who purportedly control so much of our lives take this stuff seriously, and yet are able to get away with such horrific crimes, they must do it for some reason. And according to my friend, it was because they were engaged in these occult rituals. I thought if there's anything to that, if I actually believed that in a spirit world that was somehow empowering these people, which again, I don't believe that. I don't believe his version of that—maybe at some level I think that's true, but nevertheless, I would want to be on the side of the angels. I would want to be on God's side if I actually believed in a spirit world. And so another thing that he told me was that the occult is, to a very great extent, a reaction to biblical ideas. And I don't think this is necessarily true for the very earliest versions in Greece, for example. You can tell me more about that, I guess. But it certainly seems to be the case for everything after Christianity. Modern occultism makes a great deal of use of perverting the symbology and the concepts of the Old Testament and the New Testament. And I said, okay, if I really want to understand them, I think the place to begin would be by understanding the Bible. And that actually is what led me.

23. 18:30

    Michael Horton

    Interesting.

24. 18:30

    Larry Sanger

    It wasn't because I believed in the occult or like I had studied it a lot and I had a bad experience with it. No, it was nothing like that. I was trying to understand that part of the world which I'd never thought of, didn't take seriously at all. I just thought as weak-minded people.

25. 18:46

    Michael Horton

    Interesting. So you say no one argument led you to believe in the existence of God. You write, “from the structure of galaxies to the orbits of the planets, from the movement of waves to the fates of mountains, from the origin of life to the complexity of man, there might well be an explanation of these things. Indeed, it seems unsatisfying to say God flipped a coin or God picked a number or God just decided it would be that way.” Sounds like, you know, Einstein saying God doesn't play dice.

26. 19:22

    Larry Sanger

    Right.

27. 19:23

    Michael Horton

    “But of course, that is unsatisfying,” you say. “That is hardly the point. Here is the real point. Even if we had a perfect scientific explanation of each of these things, the conjunction of the facts conjunction”—key there—“the conjunction of the facts in our explanations seems to be driven by a purpose.” Can you elaborate on that?

28. 19:46

    Larry Sanger

    So it—I think the best way to sort of introduce the basic idea, which is a take on the argument from design, would be like from the periodic table. Now, any chemistry teacher or sufficiently advanced chemistry student can explain to you why the elements are lined up in such neat rows. But, you know, the first time you see the periodic table, it's a thing of beauty. And like, why is it so organized? I mean, it's almost like somebody wrote this down in a table and the tables, the different rows and columns have distinctive features. Chemistry teachers and advanced students can explain why they have those properties. Well, it has to do with electron orbitals. You know, if the orbital is full, then the element is inert. And if it's got a whole bunch of open slots, then it's extremely reactive. So the things on the left side—anyway, so we don't need to go into that. But the point is, if you list off a number of different facts, laws, maybe some constants and so forth—I'm not being a scientist, I couldn't do that for you—but nevertheless, you can list off a number of facts and they explain the order, right? And you might say, okay, well then, then the work of explanation is done. The reason that the rows and columns are lined up in such a beautiful way, a, you know, mentally satisfying way is that, well, we've got this explanation. But no, that isn't enough. You actually have to explain why all of those laws are as they are, such that they result in the order. Any one of them could have been different. So it doesn't really scratch the itch to give what philosophers call a reductive explanation.

29. 22:01

    Michael Horton

    It's more a description than an explanation, right? It describes laws and the way things work and more than how they all come together.

30. 22:10

    Larry Sanger

    Well, I mean, there are certain features that supervene on more fundamental facts. And that means that, you know, given certain facts, there's certain properties that emerge or are true of things at a higher level. So, for example, there is a group of noble gases that are inert. They don't react. Well, why don't they react? Well, that just falls out as a consequence of certain more lower-level facts about reality. We are indeed observing the fact that they don't react, but we're also explaining why they don't react in terms of more fundamental laws. But the thing is, that doesn't complete the explanation because we want to know, well, why are the laws as they are? And more to the point, why do all of the laws come together as they do, coincide, so that this beautiful structure emerges? And this is just one example then, right? One that's familiar to most of your viewers from their high school chemistry. And the thing is in the study of nature, there are similar laws to be found at every level of the scaffolding of nature. It's really amazing. It all makes up a beautiful intellectual system.

31. 23:36

    Michael Horton

    Like Stephen Meyer's study of the cell.

32. 23:39

    Larry Sanger

    Right. Oh, the cell is the most amazing thing, really, when you start talking about biology. But you don't have to talk about biology in order to see the same results. You can talk about fundamental particles. You know, if certain things weren't the case, then there never would have been atoms. If certain other things weren't the case, then there never would have been the first molecule. And there were times when there were not yet any atoms, and when there were not yet any molecules, and when there were not yet any compounds, and so on up to, you know, higher levels of complexity. At each level of this scaffolding of nature, then there is an expectation of an explanation that explains why these— this initial state of affairs resulted in something beautifully ordered and yet more complex. That's the basic idea. It's almost as if the end result were planned as the outcome of the initial conditions. Well, that couldn't be the case unless there were some entity that held in mind or had some sort of way of anticipating here. But now we're starting to talk about mental metaphors. So the argument goes, the only explanation that we know of is that there is an anticipated end result, and we need to posit a mind that holds the end result in mind and, as it were, plans out the initial conditions.

33. 25:32

    Michael Horton

    A plan requires a planner.

34. 25:34

    Larry Sanger

    Exactly. And then there's a lot of other things, as I sort of briefly outline in my testimony. I've gone into a lot more detail in other later written work.

35. 25:56

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36. 26:53

    Michael Horton

    I would encourage people to go, first of all, to—I mean, you could just Google Larry Singer, conversion to Christianity, 14,000 words.

37. 27:04

    Larry Sanger

    Yeah.

38. 27:04

    Michael Horton

    Explaining your journey in remarkable ways. And then you also have lots of follow-up comments from people who have asked questions. It's really fascinating. Now, you say, “when I really sought to understand it, I found the Bible far more interesting and to my shock and consternation, coherent than I was expecting.”

39. 27:26

    Larry Sanger

    In fact, I had read the Bible not that long before to, uh, not the whole thing but selections to my sons. And at that time, it struck me as being, you know, what it had always struck me as being, basically, at least since I was about 17, was Bronze Age shepherds with their very simplistic models and stories of the universe and how it began and what does it really matter? You can't really make sense of reality in this way. Therefore, it's not worth paying much attention to it. But here I had an independent reason to start paying attention to it. I actually wanted to understand it as Christians actually understand it. And so I was asking my old questions. Why would God actually order the destruction of a whole people? And is that really just, for example? Or, you know, how could it be that a 90-year-old woman inspired lust in Abimelech among the Philistines? And just a lot of things like that, various kinds of questions. Just trying to make sense of it. And so I looked up the answers. I used a variety of different resources like the ESV Study Bible, gotquestions.org online. It's very useful. I used some old, you know, 19th century commentaries, 18th century stuff, got to really really like Matthew Henry's commentaries later. And I found that by consulting these resources that the Bible was not nonsense. It actually made a lot more sense than I had expected. And what was really kind of shocking to me is that the more that I asked hard questions about the text, the more the text yielded up interesting answers that it seems to me were not being superimposed by me or by some commentator onto the text, but that could actually be found in the text. So the whole seemed to make this beautiful kind of system. Whether I would take it very seriously or not is another question. I didn't immediately believe the answers or anything. But the fact that all of these theologians had addressed my questions. That was their job. I thought, well, that's just like weak-minded apologetics. I didn't realize that that actually is at bottom what theology does and has done for like 2,000 years. And I didn't realize that. And so that by itself was kind of a shock also, because that meant that the Bible had to be sufficient to sustain such a long tradition of inquiry. You know, and coming from philosophy, from history of philosophy especially, it was one of my areas of specialization when I was in grad school was early modern philosophy. So I got really deeply into like the philosophy of David Hume, and I knew what it was like to ask really hard questions of texts and so forth. And the point is, the fact that the Bible could sustain 2,000 years of careful study, like even harder sorts of questions that I would ask about Hume were—had been asked 1,000, you know, 2,000 years ago by people of the Bible. And yet people were still studying it. It's just amazing to me. That kind of shifted my perspective a little bit initially. So I was thinking, you know, maybe there's actually something to be learned here. I didn't have any clue that that might be the case.

40. 31:44

    Michael Horton

    I was struck by the—by your method of doing things, stepping into, not outside of, but stepping into. You're not a believer yet, but sort of stepping into the Bible and letting God speak to you. You say that before you became a believer, even, you basically wrote a summary of the Bible relaying creation, fall, and redemption in Christ as the fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant. That's pretty good theology for a skeptic.

41. 32:15

    Larry Sanger

    Thank you. I had already been watching some good videos, like from The Bible Project.

42. 32:25

    Michael Horton

    Yes. Yeah.

43. 32:26

    Larry Sanger

    And, you know, I don't agree with everything that those guys say necessarily, but when they're on, they're right on.

44. 32:38

    Michael Horton

    Yeah. They're doing great work.

45. 32:39

    Larry Sanger

    And they're very useful, very helpful for someone such as I was. Again, if what you say is true, I think that's because when I sit down as a trained reader of difficult texts, when I sat down and actually tried to understand the text as it's understood by people who believe it, not by critical scholars, but by the people who believe it, the usual story is the story that I saw in there. And I've read the Bible five times now. I'm just about to finish at the end of this month. I will have finished the fifth time in the last five years. The story that I wrote down there has not changed much, but that's because it is reflected in the Bible. The Bible is a remarkably consistent system. The fact that systematic philosophy is even possible and that people are able to find the same doctrines using the same symbols developed in similar ways throughout the whole corpus of Old and New Testament writings is extremely remarkable.

46. 34:00

    Michael Horton

    So all of this coherence, all of this, not just coherence, but the correspondence with reality, it was really big for you. But to what extent was the resurrection of Jesus, the historicity of the Gospels and so forth, To what extent was the historical argument compelling to you?

47. 34:21

    Larry Sanger

    Well, I don't know when I started listening to it, because there was a time when I was spending many hours a day doing this because I was in between gigs. So I actually had the time. So I listened to The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel, and it's such a good book.

48. 34:45

    Michael Horton

    Yes.

49. 34:45

    Larry Sanger

    To introduce people to the historical evidence for the resurrection and ancillary things like the reliability of the manuscripts and other such matters. That made a big difference actually. I think if I had not come to grips with that material and followed it up too, like I went to the original texts, you know, Tacitus and and Josephus and tried to come up with my own judgment about what they were trying to say and how credible was, you know, is this a later interpolation in Josephus and so forth? Still not sure about that one, actually. Let's put it this way. It—that by itself would not have convinced me for sure. I know that. But it was important, extremely important, even essential that the case be capable of being made, I guess. And, and what it really came down to ultimately was an argument to the best explanation. So given all of this evidence, it seemed to me, you know, there are two ways to go. Either I continue on in my don't know attitude, or I go where this whole integrated body of evidence is leading, all pushing in the same direction in this really remarkable way. I'm sort of Calvinist enough to not take the credit for that, for my coming to that ultimate conclusion. I sort of was dragged kicking and screaming even. To quote somebody else. I thought I was initially, at least when I started taking these things seriously, I was saying to myself, what am I doing? This doesn't—this is not me. I couldn't really be taking this stuff seriously. And there is actually one other aspect that I haven't talked about yet, which is I had been in the habit since my childhood when I was still believing that God exists, of occasionally having or imagining dialogues with God. It began with what—even when I was a kid, I never thought that God was actually speaking to me. I was thinking I was speaking to God and I was imagining what God would say in response. And I continued doing that when I was an unbeliever, except I didn't think that I was talking to God. I just thought this was like, say, a supremely wise being that had all the answers and was like trying to elicit them from me, that sort of thing. A Socratic figure, a divine Socratic figure, I guess. So I started doing the same thing. But pretty soon, like within a couple of months, that became more of a prayer. Like the things that I actually seemed to feel the presence of God at a certain point. You know, I couldn't really deny that. And being the very skeptical person that I was and still am, I thought, well, you know, it's just my imagination. Of course I could imagine that. Why wouldn't I be imagining that? But it made a big difference. Let's put it that way. No, I wouldn't believe in a—in imaginary—that my imaginary friend were God if that's all it were. This is what atheists do so often. They take one aspect of religious experience, they focus on that, and they say, taking it entirely out of context, and they say, well, that's just ridiculous. And that's what I was doing, except I, you know, I was saying, well, you're not really praying now, are you? Not really. But then I said, well, actually, these philosophical arguments actually have much better versions that I never realized before. And the Bible makes a lot more sense than it did before. And at a certain point, it was just all coming together, started firing on all cylinders, as it were, despite myself.

50. 39:13

    Michael Horton

    You say, “I never had a mind-blowing conversion experience. I approached faith in God slowly and reluctantly, with great interest, yes, but filled with confusion and consternation.” You've already said a lot of that. You were not—in some sense, you came kicking and screaming. You were not expecting the Bible to be so profound in its new world that it opened to you. But it did. What is the outcome of that for Larry Sanger now? I know there's a lot—a lot of people have asked, well, what about your involvement in local church, and where are you gonna land? And you're sort of still thinking about that?

51. 40:01

    Larry Sanger

    I have been. I've been thinking about it ever since I first experimentally went to church, I think in May of 2020. So about five years ago now. And I went another half dozen times over the following year, maybe two at most, but then I just stopped. It's hard to explain. I think it's hard for some people to relate to. On the one hand, any philosopher PhD philosopher who, like, goes to church and actually really tries to understand the Bible and goes through the sort of process that I do is not going to be an easy person to talk to about the things of God for the average believer.

52. 40:59

    Michael Horton

    Well, I think you'd be a fascinating person to talk to. Perhaps.

53. 41:03

    Larry Sanger

    Perhaps. Okay. And I have had a lot of interesting conversations with people, especially with people like you, with theologians. But a lot of times, you know, the sorts of things that I say and questions that I raise are like, I have no compunctions whatsoever about asking questions that like make people grit their teeth and clench their fists, you know, like wondering if they're gonna, if they're faith is going to get through this. I just like barrel on ahead.

54. 41:39

    Michael Horton

    Well, yeah, good for you. Good for you.

55. 41:41

    Larry Sanger

    I actually think of that pastor that I talked to before. You know, there are some questions that are really difficult for people to grapple with. And I am, you know, like a lot of philosophers, we're sort of trained to live in a position of uncertainty and not be too bothered about it. So that has allowed me to be uncertain and stay uncertain about certain theological questions, which are pretty important in order to really understand them better. And when I do finally make up my mind, I feel like I really have good reasons for the position that I have arrived at. I can tell you I have made up my mind about a number of theological issues. So I'm definitely on board with sola scriptura. I wrote a whole reasonably lengthy essay about it. It's not a book or anything. I don't have time to write books about everything.

56. 42:48

    Michael Horton

    And sola fide, you said justification through faith alone?

57. 42:52

    Larry Sanger

    I do believe that. I think that's very clearly demonstrated by scripture. It's not hard to find that in scripture. There's aspects of it, though, that are more difficult, like, okay, what is saving faith? That's an uncomfortable question for a lot of people, I think. If faith is not merely a declarative belief, but fidelity to God, and if, as Jesus says, being faithful to him means keeping his commandments, if loving him means keeping his commandments, which is basically why he says, you know, your highest obligation is to love God and love your fellow man, then does that mean that I am being unfaithful when I commit a sin? Well, not really. But can you explain why it's not? I've got some ideas on that. It's a very interesting question. Can I really go and bother very many pastors with questions, a lot of questions like that? I mean, I would, I would hope so.

58. 44:06

    Michael Horton

    I know some great LCMS pastors who could answer those questions really well.

59. 44:11

    Larry Sanger

    Yes. But it's not just that. It's also that I mean, I seriously, I was not expecting my conversion story to have the effect that it had, but I suppose I thought it might, something like this. I never imagined it would be like it was. But now just imagine I announce I'm joining the LCMS and, and, um, and then I've changed my mind after two months. Oh, well, you know, I actually started thinking really hard about the Lord's Supper, and I actually do think it's symbolic. So sorry. That'd make me look bad and make them look bad. And it would undermine the pastor, especially if I start talking about it, you know, making videos or whatever, explaining, explaining my reasoning. I'm at a point where when I’ve finally caught up with all these interviews and stuff, then I will have some more time to sit down and actually work through some more of these questions. I have, in fact, talked, you know, made three different videos over two hours in length about the Lord's Supper and whether, whether the text supports the idea that it is, in fact, symbolic or is some real form of the body and blood of Christ. Yeah, I want to get through the issues.

60. 45:08

    Michael Horton

    Yeah, and good. It's great that you take these divisions in Christendom very seriously, not just as people got mad at each other once upon a time. And no, these are really important questions. And you, you are to be commended for, for taking them seriously. Can I ask you one more question? So I have been for this project I've been working on studying as a theologian, looking—I've been looking at the philosophy behind artificial intelligence and transhumanism, posthumanism. And I wonder, you know, certainly you've heard about the singularity, you know, briefly explain that. And then would you, would you say the recovery of religion is not only needed for societal morality, but as a kind of ballast in the midst of accelerating technologies. What do you see as the need for, for Christianity in particular amidst discussions around AI?

61. 46:47

    Larry Sanger

    That's a hard one. In fact, I've been recruited by this group that want to start a certificate of, you know, I guess, moral uprightness for LLMs, for chatbots essentially, and other AI tech. The singularity is the notion or an event that people think might happen probably in the near future if it does happen, where essentially Artificial intelligence is so advanced that it can develop itself and thereafter make exponentially fast developments of itself. The idea being that all we need is energy and a few other things, maybe nanotech. And we'll have basically unlimited amounts of processor power. And if processor power means intelligence, then we could have ultimately unlimited amounts of intelligence. And then what does society look like if there are machines that are many orders of magnitude smarter than human beings? The idea then is that once such machines come online, then human nature itself, or at least the human experience, changes greatly. I mean, we can already see how the human experience is changing and will change a lot more as a result of just the AI tech that we have now. But what if it gets so great that you have but to describe some new invention and it's like put in front of you, for example, in a better form than you could imagine. A large part of the speculation, and it is just speculation, there isn't any really good reason to think that there ever will be a singularity, is that ultimately, the digital minds will become so much advanced that they'll be able to start inhabiting human minds, inhabiting human brains. And this seems to be Elon Musk's idea with Neuralink. He's trying to get out front of that train. And then the idea is that we become superhuman beings with prosthetics, essentially mental prosthetics. Now, what the transhumanists say about this—not that I'm an expert in transhumanism or anything, I'm not. But it's interesting that you, an expert about, you know, the history of the New Age and Gnosticism and that sort of thing, It's interesting that you'd be interested in the singularity because a lot of people have noticed that this is just a continuation of the idea we can surpass our mere fleshly human limitations. But here's how we do it. We do it digitally. And so that the pure beauty of the untethered mind actually becomes the beauty of the digital mind or something.

62. 50:44

    Michael Horton

    We shall be as gods.

63. 50:46

    Larry Sanger

    We shall be as gods.

64. 50:47

    Michael Horton

    Noah Harari's title, Homo Deus.

65. 50:52

    Larry Sanger

    Yeah, right, right, right. It's ridiculous, I think. But I have an argument actually. I'm working on a book If we ever have such, you know, mental prosthetics available, they will not enable human beings to be morally better or anything like that. And there's a good reason to think not. And that is that there are no prosthetics that we can put on ourselves that call part of ourselves. We call them prosthetics. And the idea is if you upload some piece of software into your brain, so to speak, however it will be described in the future, I don't know, that is not going to be part of yourself. What might result is something that is a combination, a Frankenstein monster of yourself and something else. But then that represents a threat to your free will because it's no longer yourself, right? So if you could somehow be given, you know, little electric shocks when you're about to do something wrong, mental restraints, which are actually digital restraints, that wouldn't be an improvement in your character.

66. 52:28

    Michael Horton

    Right.

67. 52:28

    Larry Sanger

    You see.

68. 52:29

    Michael Horton

    Yeah. Well, Larry Sanger is best known as founder of Wikipedia and is a philosopher who has been brought to faith in Christ by the Holy Spirit through his Word, and we are really grateful to have the opportunity to talk to you, Larry.

69. 52:51

    Larry Sanger

    Well, thanks for having me on. It's been a real pleasure.

70. 52:58

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