Has religion finished its task? Ahmet Arslan on the future of thought

Asking about the future of thought means asking what humans still do themselves before asking what machines will do next. Opposite Fatih Altaylı, Professor Ahmet Arslan speaks with the gravity of decades in the history of philosophy, from Ankara to Ege, and with the poise that his book Bir Ömür Düşünmek confers. The point is not to choose between nostalgia and futurism but to tell apart what natural intelligence still carries and what no algorithm can assume.

The program flows less like a studio chat than like a new stop in a long river interview. Recorded over ten days at five hours a day in Gaziantep, the conversation sets a pace where questions are never consumed in haste. The philosopher sells no formulas here; he shows a way of living with questions. The resulting book therefore reads like a walk from ancient Greece to the dilemmas of today.

So why has religion become the main station of this walk in recent years? Arslan speaks neither as a wounded believer nor as a militant opponent but as a historian of states of mind. Its work of explaining the world, founding law and consoling mourners has passed, in his account, to science, the rule of law and secular institutions. What remains is a more intimate question: what meaning a longer, more comfortable yet more uncertain human life will give itself.

Official language versus lived belief

In Türkiye that diagnosis wears a concrete face: cold sermons read from above in bureaucratic diction. A young listener seeking warmth and sincerity meets a list of rules and walks away. Arslan sets against this shared tables, hymns sung together and holiday crowds. When ceremony withdraws and regulation remains, faith stops being an inhabitable place.

Yet reducing religion to this present failure would be unjust, for its civilizational contribution is immense. The equal worth of every soul, the demand of justice for the weak, the discipline of fasting and giving travelled far beyond mosque and church. In the modern world this legacy often lives in secular dress: human rights, the ethics of care, solidarity campaigns. The old vessel cracked, but the moral content keeps flowing through other channels. These are the same questions of virtue and habit debated for two millennia in the Ethics texts hosted at constitution.org.

Christianity offers the most eloquent counter-example of this transformation. Beside the inward, sober Protestant word, Catholicism keeps a whole sacred theatre of processions, incense, choirs and calendars. That persistence is not decor; it answers an anthropological need that abstract principles never satisfy. People live not by principles alone but by gestures performed together. Here the 2010-2020 findings summarized from pewresearch.org remind us that Christians lagged behind global population growth, so ceremonial vitality and headcounts tell different stories.

Sufism, nature and ancient wisdom

The same need explains the pull of mysticism, from Sufism to far-eastern teachings. Arslan recalls that pantheism , named in modern Europe by Toland in 1705 with roots reaching the Stoics, thinks of God not as a distant master but as an order diffused through nature. The turning dervish and the sage contemplating the cosmos both seek union more than obedience. What attracts those tired of rigid dogma is exactly this soft embrace. Readers can trace Toland 1705 and the ancient roots step by step in the pantheism entry at plato.stanford.edu.

From this long historical detour comes a quiet optimism about Türkiye itself. Despite polarization, decisive habits have taken root: the rule of law demanded by all, the individual wanting to choose a life, pluralism learned the hard way. Arslan denies neither setbacks nor anger, yet he sees a favorable slope in these silent demands. A society that argues about everything, however heatedly, has already left the age of imposed unanimity.

The literature of the Republic tells this maturation better than speeches. Migration from village to city, metropolitan loneliness, the emancipation of women and imperial memory were all worked through in novels and poems. In that mirror society recognized itself without flattery. When philosophy feels remote, the novel steps in and makes the contradictions of rapid modernization thinkable. The psychology boom described on unco.edu is the same wave of self-understanding spilling from literature into science.

Democracy, climate and the powers of the century

Democracy stands like a delicate plant with roots in old soil. Plato already distrusted it as the regime of flatterers, and the Roman experience showed how a republic could collapse under Caesars and the outer worlds called barbarian. Arslan repeats the lesson without nostalgia: the rule of numbers gains worth only through institutions, checks and a culture of compromise. Without them the vote applauds but no longer governs. His Rome analogy for migration pressure from the south is thus a warning about institutions, not a prophecy.

The climate crisis tests this fragility from another side, demanding long decisions from short-term regimes. The Trump-era withdrawal from agreements is recalled as the emblem of a nationalism preferring instant profit to shared responsibility. Against rising waters and temperatures, treaties look feeble yet indispensable. Nature does not bargain; it sends the bill. Theses on the sacred and the secular about existential security and religiosity illuminate the same fragility from yet another angle.

Then appears the third challenge: mind made by humans. Systems that compute, translate and diagnose work with uncanny efficiency, yet they want nothing and answer for nothing. Arslan draws the line sharply: will requires a being troubled by its own existence that owns its acts. Leaving judgment to machines would mean ceasing to be subjects. The consciousness-indicators study published via cell.com confirms the boundary in technical language: metrics multiply, but responsibility and desire stay human.

Homework, desire and self-mastery

That warning leads to homework and the training of mind. Thinking is not piling information but ordering reasons and setting rules for oneself with nobody watching. Discipline of concepts, slow reading and honest dispute build character as much as intellect. Under a rain of notifications this sense of intellectual homework looks like resistance. Fathers once did the homework; now artificial intelligence does it, so what children will learn is a moral rather than a technical question.

A Hegelian reading throws social light on this struggle: in the famous master-slave dialectic the commanding side grows dependent on the working side. Those wrestling matter and nature gain skill until the old order falls and the laboring bourgeoisie takes the stage. If we now have machines do the work, the same question returns: on which stage will we build recognition. This current reading is told through a prompt-negate-repeat cycle in the Hegelian meditation on AI published via springer.com, where the thesis-antithesis-synthesis rhythm survives into the machine age.

Aristotle had already named the heart of the matter: distinguishing the motions of the soul. Desire pushes toward the near goal, practical reason weighs means and ends, virtue is born of their repeated harmony. Book Six of the Ethics describes the prudence that hits the mark in the singular case, neither cold calculus nor blind drive. Educating a human is first of all tuning this inner orchestra. The young flocking to psychology seek the same tuning through the door of science.

Language, simulation and soul

One dizzying question remains: the name of God in human language. To say God is to take it into subject, predicate, tense and story. Theologians have long known this: every word about the absolute is analogical and fragile. Perhaps that is why the silence of mystics sometimes says more than treatises. Even the three-stage sequence of decline reported via nature.com, first belief, then belonging, then practice, suggests language and institution eroding together.

The contemporary imagination plays the same vertigo with its own myths: the Matrix, atoms, multiverses. The simulation hypothesis amuses engineers and worries philosophers, because proof reverses and telling reality from a perfect copy grows uncertain. Physics describes ever stranger structures, yet the strangeness of an equation never answers the question of meaning. Science fiction here asks real questions in adventure costume, and Arslan enjoys such speculation as literature while refusing it as proof.

The close ties these heights back to a humble, beloved discipline: psychology. Crowded departments promise a toolkit for anxieties that metaphysics no longer soothes. Arslan treats psychology not as philosophy's rival but as its interlocutor: one listens to singular wounds, the other asks about common ends. And the interview closes on that wish: may thinking remain a shared art rather than a solitary performance.