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are a myriad of books out there about the right structure to art or the right structure to storytelling. In reading Joseph Campbell and things as a writer, I’ve had lights go on in terms of there being true structures. I am wondering as a priest, as someone involved in the clergy and also in the Bible, whether you see structure to God’s stories and to art in that there is something that you can determine empirically to be true.

      A: I do believe that God discloses the divine nature through the unfolding of history and particularly, in particular people and particular events. There are particular occasions and particular persons through whom the divine nature is more visible than is normally the case. In my view, the authority of the Bible stems from the fact that it is an account of the history of Israel and then of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, which, to me, are the prime events through which God has acted to make God’s nature and purposes known.

      Yes, there is an unfolding there. We have to read the story and accept the story on its own terms, so to speak, it seems to me. The story is not determined by our judgment beforehand. We have to respond to that. Authors tell me that about writing novels and that sort of thing, and I am inclined to understand that may be so. So, there is a sort of authenticity that is involved in story, whether it is a scientific story or not. I am sorry that is a very stuffy answer to a question that leaves me a little bit at sea, as you may perceive.

      Q: I had a conversation today with my mom, and I just have a very basic question. John, verse something [3:16]: “God so loved the world that he gave his only” whatever. If you don’t believe in him, you shall perish. Are we so right in our conviction that we are the ones that will be right? If you don’t believe in him, you shall perish. I think that has far-reaching implications to Muslims, Buddhists, Shintos, and there are more of them than us.

      A: I believe that God is merciful and loving, and I believe that God’s offer of mercy and love is not a limited offer for this life only. After death, a curtain comes down, and if you are caught on the wrong side, God says, “Too bad, you had your chance; you missed it.” That doesn’t seem to be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Equally, I believe that whatever decisions and actions we take in this life, the beliefs to which we commit ourselves are very important. Those who wittingly and willfully turn from God in this life will find it, to say the least, more painful and more difficult to accept God’s mercy. I think more know Christ than know Christ by name.

      I also believe that all will come to the Father through Christ ultimately, because believing, as I do, that Jesus is both human and divine, he is the unique bridge between the life of God and the life of created humanity, and that is the way. Our ultimate destiny is to share in the life and energy of God, I believe. The way into that is, indeed, the way through Christ. Again, I believe there are people who are on that way without knowing the name of the way in which they are coming.

      Eric, Metaxas: We have time for one question, and it can’t be about evolution.

      Q: You mentioned that evolution was absolutely fundamental to an understanding of science. As you know, in the biological world especially, the coded information passed on in DNA is extremely complicated— just the running of a body, the building of a body, and on and on. A. E. Wilder-Smith has made comments that in evolutionary theory, the missing fact is information. Could you comment on if the coded information that is in the biological world comes by chance through evolution, as you have talked about it?

      A: Yes, that is a very interesting question. I think that the concept of information is going to be an extremely important concept in twenty-first-century science, and I venture to think that by the end of the twenty-first century, information in some sense— meaning the structure and the specification of dynamical pattern— will be as important a concept as energy has been in the last 150 years. We are just beginning scientifically to study the detailed behavior of complex systems— nothing as complicated as a single living cell, let alone a human being, but mostly models that are logical models that are run on computers.

      Those already show us that complex systems in their totalities display astonishing properties that you would never guess from thinking about the properties of the constituent bits and pieces. Many of those properties relate to the spontaneous generation of extraordinarily high patterns of order, in other words, the spontaneous generation of something like information-bearing behavior.

      Let me give you an example, chosen from Stuart Kauffman’s book At Home in the Universe. Kauffman is a chap who works on so-called complexity theory and has an interest particularly in its application to biology. Consider a system consisting of electric lightbulbs. This will be a picture of it:

      The bulbs are either on or off. The system develops in steps. Each bulb is correlated with two other bulbs somewhere else in the array. What those two bulbs are doing now— either on or off— determines what this bulb does at the next step in the array, and there are very simple rules that specify this.

      You start the array off in a random configuration of illumination. Some bulbs are on; some bulbs are off. Then you let it just play away on your computer and see what happens.

      I would guess nothing really interesting would happen. It would just twinkle away haphazardly as long as you would let it, but that is not true. The system soon settles down to a self-generated, extraordinarily ordered behavior cycling through a very limited number of patterns of illumination.

      If there are ten thousand lightbulbs in the array, there are two to the ten thousand [2^10,000] or ten to the three thousand [10^3,000]different states of illumination, in principle possible. That is a one followed by three thousand zeros. In actual fact, you will find that the system will soon cycle through one hundred different patterns of illumination. One with three thousand zeros possibility has somehow spontaneously gotten focused down into a hundred possibilities. That is quite an astonishing generation of order. I can see that as the generation of information. In fact, I think, if I remember correctly, he calls that chapter “Information for Free.”

      So, there are still lots of things to discover. I don’t say there aren’t problems. Of course there are, and they certainly are not solved yet. I do think we should be wary of generalizing too quickly.

       Making Sense out of Suffering

      PETER KR EEFT

      January 23, 2003

       Introduction

      Good evening and welcome to Socrates in the City. I am Eric Metaxas. Socrates in the City takes its name from Socrates, who, of course, famously said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Then he drank the hemlock and died.

      Do I have that out of order? Oh, right. He said, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” at some point earlier in his career, and he said it in a very positive way, meaning that we are to examine our lives. Of course, I think he was quite right.

      We are, indeed, to examine our lives. It makes life much more worth living. So, a bunch of folks, most of them friends of mine, and I were thinking that most New Yorkers are so busy that we don’t really take out the time in our lives to examine our lives with any particular rigor. We thought that putting on these events called Socrates in the City and inviting speakers like Dr. Kreeft to address some of the big issues of life would be advisable.

      It actually turns out that we were dead wrong. These have been a disaster, and I think this will be the last one we do. I’m glad you’re laughing.

      These have been really extraordinary. I have to say I am humbled by the turnout tonight. The turnout has been consistently good, the speakers have been wonderful, and these things have been as successful as I have hoped. In any case, we call these events Socrates in the City: Conversations on the Examined Life, and they are meant to be conversations, not only in the question-andanswer that follows the talk but also after these events, when we leave from here. We hope that we have begun a conversation

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