We can learn much about how ChatGPT works from a single question. This question was posed to ChatGPT 3.5 on February 13, 2023.
Isaac NewtonQuestion
Why didn’t Newton accept the Trinity?
ChatGPT’s Answer
Isaac Newton was a devout Christian, but he did not accept the doctrine of the Trinity as traditionally defined by the Church. He believed in a more puritanical form of Christianity and rejected many of the orthodox beliefs of his time, including the idea of the Trinity as three persons in one Godhead. Newton saw the Trinity as a pagan corruption of the early Christian Church, and he held that the doctrine was not supported by the Bible.
Newton’s rejection of the Trinity was a relatively minor aspect of his religious beliefs, and it did not prevent him from making major contributions to science. Nevertheless, his views on the Trinity were not widely accepted during his lifetime, and he was often criticized for his unorthodox beliefs. Today, Newton is remembered primarily for his scientific achievements, and his views on religion are of historical interest.
Analysis
While ChatGPT accurately describes Newton’s views on the doctrine of the Trinity, the rest of the text is misleading and in places outright absurd. Erroneous statements and implications include:
That the Puritans also rejected the Trinity
That Newton’s views on the Trinity were a minor matter
That heterodox religious views are negatively associated with scientific achievement
That Newton’s views on the Trinity were known to the public and criticized during his lifetime
That Newton’s religious views had no lasting impact
Extended Discussion
The religious views of Isaac Newton have been the subject of considerable angst for his admirers. To those who regard religion as superstition and revere Newton as a hero of the Enlightenment who helped banish God from the physical universe, his intense interest in religious questions is unseemly. To mainstream Christians who are no less eager to claim Newton as their own, his rejection of what they see as the central tenant of the faith is no less disturbing. Both groups attempt to deal with this cognitive dissonance by downplaying the significance of Newton as a theologian.
Newton’s theological activities began early in he career. At the time Newton joined Trinity College, Cambridge professors were required to study theology and accept ordination as an Anglican priest within seven years. Newton, a man who did nothing by halves, took the studying part very seriously. But when he began to suspect that the Trinity was a spurious doctrine he realized that he could not in good conscience undergo ordination as a priest of the Church of England as this would require him to endorse all its teachings. Though friends he requested and received a special royal dispensation which allowed him to continue as a professor without ordination.
Newton’s writings on the Trinity are serious scholarly work with the founding texts of Christianity including an intensive investigation of the views of the Church Fathers and what texts they cited. Most of his factual claims are accepted by mainstream scholars today. Mainstream Christianity rejects only his final conclusion that the Trinity teaching is not from God.
Newton discussed his heretical views only with trusted acquaintances which included founders of the Unitarian movement and other major Enlightenment figures. They kept Newton’s views in almost perfect confidence. Even his scholarly conclusions on the authenticity of disputed Bible verses which seem to support the Trinity, which he shared with John Locke in 1690, were not published until 1754, 28 years after his death. Acquaintances in whom he had confided his views were very guarded in their statements as were the few scholars allowed to see his papers. So nearly total was the embargo that Newton biographer Sir David Brewster defended his orthodoxy as late as 1833, only revising his views in a new Newton biography published in 1855 after more of Newton’s writings were released.
Newton’s papers give no basis to claim that his theological work was a minor matter or that he kept his faith and science compartmentalized in “non-overlapping magisteria” as some try to claim today. His theological writings go far beyond the Trinity question and exceeds his scientific output in volume. His scientific work is inextricably linked to his religious views about how God acts in the world. His success in explicating laws of motion lent tremendous support to the long-standing theological theory that God is a king and the universe is a law-governed realm in which most things are controlled not by his direct action but by natural laws which he has established. His faith influenced his science and his scientific conclusions influenced the religious thought of millions.
His denial of the Trinity creates a major problem for mainstream Christians who admire him. If someone of less stature denied the Trinity, the mainstream view would be that he is no Christian. Newton absolutely denied it, not in ignorance and not in senility, but after extensive scholarly investigation. And yet the accepted form which ChatGPT regurgitates is to call him a “devout Christian”.
ChatGPT clumsily combines these two discourses of denial into an incoherent hash. Nowhere is this more evident than in the statement that Newton was still able to do science despite denying the Trinity. It is as if a Christian starts the sentence minimizing Newton’s heterodoxy and an atheist finishes it while having heterodoxy of quite another sort in mind.
The text contains other curiosities. For example it connects denial of the Trinity with the Puritan movement. This is simply false and is not the sort of error one would expect a human being to make. ChatGPT may have connected them because both are critics of the mainstream Church and use similar rhetoric. They call what they object to in the Church pagan and describing their proposed reforms as a return to an earlier form of Christianity. (It is also possible that ChatGPT has made the spurious connection through the Puritan John Newton, author of the hymn Amazing Grace.)
The statement that Newton’s views on the Trinity were not widely accepted during his lifetime and were in fact widely criticized is nonsensical considering that they were carefully concealed from the public. It would be interesting to know whether this howler is a mistake by a human author included in the training data or if ChatGPT has just picked up something commonly said of heterodox views.
The final sentence states that Newton’s views on religion, unlike his views on physics, are of only “historical interest” as if they produced no lasting effect. Even if we restrict ourselves to the Trinity question, this is dubious. Today he is almost certainly the best-known theologian representing the anti-trinitarian position. On the questions of the doctrine’s history and the Bible text his side has taken most of the scholarly ground and the passages which they identified as spurious are excluded from modern Bibles. But this is nothing compared to his influence on religious thought in general. As a figure of the Enlightenment who believed that God’s primary mode of action was through natural law rather than continuous intervention, he helped to revolutionize religious thought the world over. ChatGPT is again simply merging the expressions of those who dislike his views on the Trinity with those who would like to forget his interest in theology in general.
The only thing ChatGPT describes correctly is Newton’s views on the Trinity teaching. This is not surprising since there is now little confusion about what his views were and numerous good descriptions are no doubt to be found in the training data.
This answer gives us insight into how ChatGPT works and why it imagines plausible-sounding but false things. Lacking any understanding at all of the ideas expressed in the texts it is parodying, it connects ideas at the points where they come closest verbally rather than at the points of conceptual contact. So it erroneously traces Newton’s views on the Trinity to Puritanism because he and the Puritans use similar language to describe the Catholic Church and its doctrines. And it equates and merges the cognitive dissonance of Christians and secular thinkers with respect to Newton’s religious writing because they use similar phrases to make excuses for him.
It is obvious from the answers like this that ChatGPT is unable to recognize different perspectives and discuss them in a coherent manner. That it can produce coherent answers to other questions suggests that it was trained on coherent answers written by human authors. It is unable to produce anything new and can strive only for mediocrity.
