The theme of diversity in a challenging time
The American Scientific Affiliation (ASA) is a long-standing network of scientists, educators, and professionals dedicated to their Christian faith and scientific integrity. Gathering at the end of July in the heat of Washington, D.C., the group was acutely aware of it being an election year as well as the reality that their largely evangelical constituency is negotiating a diversity of viewpoints. This awareness evidently influenced the conference theme: “One body, many gifts: the diversity of divine and human endeavor.”
On the first full day of the conference, Francis Collins, the former Director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health addressed this diversity head-on with his keynote address: “Come Let Us Reason Together: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust.” With pointed remarks about how skepticism over vaccines for COVID-19 led to needless deaths to addressing the crisis of climate change, Collins spoke of the urgent need to reestablish trust in science and public health and address racist messaging and threats to democracy. A featured speaker and supporter of ASA over the years, he clearly enjoyed the support of his listeners and created a sobering message shaped by his Christian faith and desire to harmonize this faith with current science.
Other plenary speakers presented differing dimensions of diversity including Praveeen Sethupathy, Professor of Physiological Genomics and Chair of the Department of Biomedical Sciences at Cornell University. Sethupathy asks and answers the question, “Why Does Diversity Matter?” in terms of mentoring a diversity of individuals within his own labs and the resulting enrichment that it brought to his work and to his faith.
Charmain Royal took another tack with diversity in terms of unity in her plenary talk, “Diversity, Unity, Oneness.” As a Professor of African and African American Studies, Biology, Global Health, and Family Medicine and Community, Royal argues that there are “no biological human races” and that “most genetic variation within the human species is found between individuals and not groups.” Royal urges that as Christians and as a nation, we should be about unity rather than division, as expressed in Ephesians 4:4 (NIV), which says that there is “one body and one Spirit.”
Beth Allison Bar, the James Vardaman Professor of History at Baylor University reflects on gender and the idea of “complementary” roles for women and men in her plenary session: “Are Women Human? A Medieval Catholic Perspective on Modern Evangelical Ideas about Women.” Assessing the Southern Baptist Convention’s recent vote to remove certain congregations from the SBC with women pastors, Bar speaks to the issues of women in society and the church. She argues that a modern gender theology of complementarianism is “rooted in Aristotelian misogyny that was less present in medieval Christianity” and worries about how a restrictive complementarianism theology is impacting the “dignity and personhood of women.”
Brandon Vaidyanathan, Chair of the Department of Sociology and Director of the Institutional Flourishing Lab at the Catholic University of America provided the last plenary session on “The Diversity of Beauty in Science.” Conducting the first global study on the role of aesthetics in science and surveying nearly 3,500 physicists and biologists, Brandon brings three conclusions: 1) Sensory beauty in nature draws many to become scientists. 2) Useful beauty is the reliance on beauty as a guide to truth. 3) The beauty of understanding – the joy of uncovering the hidden order underlying phenomena or inner logic of systems – is science’s most valued aesthetic dimension. Brandon argues that science is “fundamentally a quest for the beauty of understanding,” and is an antidote in these divided times.
AI and Faith experts participate
Alongside the theme of diversity, artificial intelligence emerged as a popular topic of presentations—partly because leaders from AI and Faith collaborated with ASA organizers in juxtaposing the “Generating Wisdom” conference at the Museum of the Bible , July 25-26, with the ASA Annual Meeting, July 26-29. Among the 75 ASA presentations, five of the presentations were given by AI and Faith experts: Cyrus Olsen, Mark Graves, Thomas Arnold, Derek Schuurman, and Daren Erisman.
Olsen, Graves and Arnold presented a shared session themed: Large Language Models and AI in Healthcare. Cyrus Olsen, working out of the University of Scranton and associated with the Harvard Medical School Stroke Lab, Olsen has been working with Mark Graves and Thomas Arnold on “compassionate care and integrating AI and faith into healthcare and medicine.” Olsen discusses the need for rhetorical listening and attending to the other, and wonders if healthcare workers have the time to listen to their patients with the necessary cultural context. He suggests that AI can help bring domain knowledge involving religion and traditional spirituality to healthcare providers. Olsen specifically draws from his experience in Uganda with stroke victims and how to improve their care through knowledge of Christian and traditionalist nature influences. Suggesting the tool of RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) systems integrating knowledge graphs and vector databases, Olsen foresees AI as assisting in healthcare diagnostics and training—sensitive to a person’s religious/cultural context.
Mark Graves discusses compassion and healthcare specifically in terms of a future “compassionate AI” that has an “explicit awareness of suffering” and could serve as a monitor for quickly expanding AI. Working from a moral psychology of virtue, Graves expounds on a moral psychology of compassion that can be used in developing compassionate AI motivated to “alleviate suffering as aligned with its compassionate purpose.” Graves further develops levels of models for an AI moral actor and requirements for “compassionate self-reckoning.” He concludes that “compassion depends upon affordances, motivation, knowledge structures, and whether compassion is relevant to oneself.”
Thomas Arnold responds to anthropomorphism toward AI, particularly within the context of healthcare and long-term care. Drawing from Tuft’s Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) lab, Arnold discusses “disembodied” LLMs and chatbot interfaces concerning robotic interactions that bring out attributions and can manipulate human instincts. He asks, “What does compassion mean when it comes to human-AI interaction, especially for care contexts?” Arnold suggests that it might mean designing for “representative (not replacement) compassion on the part of providers” and giving “support and assistance for compassion (dementia care and giving breaks).” Arnold recognizes that there are “technical pitfalls, but the complementary threat is human beings just lowering expectations to meet whatever the technology at present can do.”
Derek Schuurman and Daren Erisman gave separate talks within the context of AI, the human condition, and the use of AI within Churches. Schuurman explores the use of chatbots as part of the science and faith discussion with a demo of a Blaise Pascal chatbot. Schuurman views the anthropomorphizing of machines as promoting “ontological confusion” and evaluates RAG systems as useful but more costly regarding token counts, and longer queries. Daren Erisman addresses the radical nature of generative AI in terms of an invasive personalization of faith, the role of AI and ministry, AI and chaplaincy, and the need for AI fluency within congregations with a healthy regard for how the monetization of AI and prosperity theology have found a synergy. Erisman closes by reflecting on the need for “presence” in an I-Thou relationship and how AI seeks to find its place amongst human need and want.
Concluding thought
As the American Scientific Affiliation fields its 78th-anniversary Meeting, the AI and Faith network grows into its 6-7 years of existence. Both communities face broad tents of people and viewpoints, yet science, and specifically for AIF, artificial intelligence spans a plurality of traditions providing an emergent language for both diversity and unity.
Here is the link to all the ASA presentations: https://a916407.fmphost.com/fmi/webd/ASAdb49?script=SearchForSourceOccasion&$SearchString=%222024+Annual+Meeting%22
