Explainer

Advent

Creed

2 December 2023

4 min read

Beyond waiting: Advent’s acknowledgements and expectations

Advent has changed since childhood, takes stock of the darkness and expect the light.

Alianore Smith

Alianore Smith is a theologian, communicator and author. She works for a global charity based in London.

Five candles sit in a row against a dark background, only one is lit.

Robert Thiemann on Unsplash.

Growing up, I wasn’t a particularly big fan of Advent.

I think this possibly had something to do with the fact that I was never allowed a chocolate Advent calendar. Every year, my brother and I would petition my parents for one – even suggesting a Fairtrade Advent calendar, even offering to share it (which would be a Christmas miracle in and of itself), in the hope that this would swing the odds in our favour. But no such luck. Every year, we were told in no uncertain terms: ‘Advent is a time of waiting’.

… Can you tell both my parents are vicars?

So no chocolate for us.

I felt this particularly acutely in my first year at university. My flatmates and I decided to open our Advent calendars together on December 1st. Everyone else got chocolate – dairy milk, crunchie, even a Twix. I, however, got a hearty piece of Scripture, detailing two of the key Advent themes: ‘the people walking in darkness have seen a great light.’

After all, man shall not live by advent chocolate alone.

I am delighted to report, however, that since my mother-in-law heard this story for the first time, she now takes great delight in sending me a chocolate advent calendar every single year. My Lindt one for 2023 arrived last week.

Man shall not live by advent chocolate alone… but it certainly helps.

Of course, the older I’ve become, and the greater my understanding of church tradition, the more I’ve understood what my mother was getting at: Advent is a time of waiting.

In the church’s calendar, Advent is a season of expectation and preparation, as people prepare to celebrate Jesus’ birth whilst also looking ahead to his final return as judge at the end of time.

Traditionally, Advent has been split into four (or if you’re very serious about Advent – seven!) weeks, each with a different theme: Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell.

‘Advent is a time of waiting’ doesn’t seem so bad when you know what the alternatives are.

In more modern times, however, the church has generally moved away from the four themes of death, judgement, heaven and hell, and instead embraced slightly cuddlier abstract nouns: hope, peace, joy and love.

Much nicer.

But my new favourite way of thinking about Advent takes a middle ground between these two and comes from theologian Fleming Rutledge. She says this: ‘Advent begins in the dark’.

Advent begins in the dark.

Which seems, quite frankly, ridiculous, when Christmas lights are being turned on in late November, and sparkly baubles are for sale everywhere you look. But traditionally, she’s right: Advent does begin in the dark. Remember what my Advent calendar told me, all those years ago in my uni flat: ‘The people walking in darkness have seen a great light’.

Advent is a season of acknowledging the reality of the world and waiting with expectation for something better – which for Christians means Jesus’ birth and his triumphant return in glory. And if we’re going to acknowledge the reality of the world, we’re going to find some serious darkness.

You don’t need me to list them – they’re right in front of us: Israel and Gaza, poverty even in the most affluent of countries, the abuse of children, the exploitation by ruthless gangs of people desperate to build a better life. It’s everywhere in our newspapers, neighbourhoods, families, and our very selves. Darkness is, more often than not, the reality in which we live.

But we’re not very good, I find, at dwelling in the darkness when the option of skipping forward to Christmas is all around us. When you’re playing Whamageddon’ in every shop you go to, and your social media is filled with other people’s beautifully twinkling Christmas trees, it’s hard to sit with the darkness.

It might mean a slightly different Advent, perhaps with a little less chocolate and a little more reflection, but it leads to something even more glorious.

But, in the words of Fleming Rutledge once again: “Advent is designed to show that the meaning of Christmas is diminished to the vanishing point if we are not willing to take a fearless inventory of the darkness.”

Take a ‘fearless inventory of the darkness’.

How are we supposed to take a ‘fearless inventory of the darkness’ when the darkness is so very… big? So very dark?

How can we be fearless in the face of darkness?

The answer, surprisingly, lies once again in the meaning of Advent: we are waiting for Jesus. The one who Christians call ‘the light of the world’ invites us to acknowledge the reality of the darkness, and understand that ‘the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it’. And we are waiting in the knowledge and the certainty that he will show up. The people walking in darkness have seen a great light.

In Advent, the church journeys from darkness to light. We consider the world around us; we look back to the incarnation – to Jesus’ birth as a baby – and we find ourselves, as we take that ‘fearless inventory of the darkness’, longing ever more fervently for the light of the world to step in.

It might mean a slightly different Advent, perhaps with a little less chocolate and a little more reflection, but it leads to something even more glorious. After all, how much more dazzling is a candle lit in a pitch-black room than one lit in broad daylight?

Advent is about waiting. Advent begins in the dark.

But it points us towards something greater – it acknowledges that deep yearning within all of us as we are faced with the darkness of the world. That deep yearning for light, for hope, for peace, for joy. And it promises that such a thing is on the way.

Explainer

Belief

Creed

6 November 2024

5 min read

Whether it's AI or us, it's OK to be ignorant

Our search for answers begins by recognising that we don’t have them.

Simon Walters

Simon Walters is Curate at Holy Trinity Huddersfield.

A street sticker displays multiple lines reading 'and then?'

Stephen Harlan on Unsplash.

When was the last time you admitted you didn’t know something? I don’t say it as much as I ought to. I’ve certainly felt the consequences of admitting ignorance – of being ridiculed for being entirely unaware of a pop culture reference, of being found out that I wasn’t paying as close attention to what my partner was saying as she expected. In a hyper-connected age when the wealth of human knowledge is at our fingertips, ignorance can hardly be viewed as a virtue.

A recent study on the development of artificial intelligence holds out more hope for the value of admitting our ignorance than we might have previously imagined. Despite wide-spread hype and fearmongering about the perils of AI, our current models are in many ways developed in similar ways to how an animal is trained. An AI system such as ChatGPT might have access to unimaginable amounts of information, but it requires training by humans on what information is valuable or not, whether it has appropriately understood the request it has received, and whether its answer is correct. The idea is that human feedback helps the AI to hone its model through positive feedback for correct answers, and negative feedback for incorrect answers, so that it keeps whatever method led to positive feedback and changes whatever method led to negative feedback. It really isn’t that far away from how animals are trained.

However, a problem has emerged. AI systems have become adept at giving coherent and convincing sounding answers that are entirely incorrect. How has this happened?

This is a tool; it is good at some tasks, and less good at others. And, like all tools, it does not have an intrinsic morality.

In digging into the training method for AI, the researchers found that the humans training the AI flagged answers of “I don’t know” as unsatisfactory. On one level this makes sense. The whole purpose of these systems is to provide answers, after all. But rather than causing the AI to return and rethink its data, it instead developed increasingly convincing answers that were not true whatsoever, to the point where the human supervisors didn’t flag sufficiently convincing answers as wrong because they themselves didn’t realise that they were wrong. The result is that “the more difficult the question and the more advanced model you use, the more likely you are to get well-packaged, plausible nonsense as your answer.”

Uncovering some of what is going on in AI systems dispels both the fervent hype that artificial intelligence might be our saviour, and the deep fear that it might be our societal downfall. This is a tool; it is good at some tasks, and less good at others. And, like all tools, it does not have an intrinsic morality. Whether it is used for good or ill depends on the approach of the humans that use it.

But this study also uncovers our strained relationship with ignorance. Problems arise in the answers given by systems like ChatGPT because a convincing answer is valued more than admitting ignorance, even if the convincing answer is not at all correct. Because the AI has been trained to avoid admitting it doesn’t know something, all of its answers are less reliable, even the ones that are actually correct.

This is not a problem limited to artificial intelligence. I had a friend who seemed incapable of admitting that he didn’t know something, and whenever he was corrected by someone else, he would make it sound like his first answer was actually the correct one, rather than whatever he had said. I don’t know how aware he was that he did this, but the result was that I didn’t particularly trust whatever he said to be correct. Paradoxically, had he admitted his ignorance more readily, I would have believed him to be less ignorant.

It is strange that admitting ignorance is so avoided. After all, it is in many ways our default state. No one faults a baby or a child for not knowing things. If anything, we expect ignorance to be a fuel for curiosity. Our search for answers begins in the recognition that we don’t have them. And in an age where approximately 500 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute, the sum of what we don’t know must by necessity be vastly greater than all that we do know. What any one of us can know is only a small fraction of all there is to know.

Crucially, admitting we do not know everything is not the same as saying that we do not know anything.

One of the gifts of Christian theology is an ability to recognize what it is that makes us human. One of these things is the fact that any created thing is, by definition, limited. God alone is the only one who can be described by the ‘omnis’. He is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. There is no limit to his power, and presence, and knowledge. The distinction between creator and creation means that created things have limits to their power, presence, and knowledge. We cannot do whatever we want. We cannot be everywhere at the same time. And we cannot know everything there is to be known.

Projecting infinite knowledge is essentially claiming to be God. Admitting our ignorance is therefore merely recognizing our nature as created beings, acknowledging to one another that we are not God and therefore cannot know everything. But, crucially, admitting we do not know everything is not the same as saying that we do not know anything. Our God-given nature is one of discovery and learning. I sometimes like to imagine God’s delight in our discovery of some previously unknown facet of his creation, as he gets to share with us in all that he has made. Perhaps what really matters is what we do with our ignorance. Will we simply remain satisfied not to know, or will it turn us outwards to delight in the new things that lie behind every corner?

For the developers of ChatGPT and the like, there is also a reminder here that we ought not to expect AI to take on the attributes of God. AI used well in the hands of humans may yet do extraordinary things for us, but it will not truly be able to do anything, be everywhere, or know everything. Perhaps if it was trained to say ‘I don’t know’ a little more, we might all learn a little more about the nature of the world God has made.