Are we alone? And does it matter?

Introduction

The intriguing title of Wentzel van Huyssteen’s 2004 Gifford Lectures is set in interrogative mode—Are We Alone? ¹ This was repeated in the published version two years later. Its subtitle suggests the direction of his argument—human uniqueness in science and theology are described in an interdisciplinary conversation around the model of a transversal rationality.

A carefully constructed case for human distinctiveness is assembled in close conversation with paleobiology and anthropology. This locates human uniqueness historically in the development of linguistic capacities in Upper Paleolithic life, particularly its art, for example in the cave paintings at Lascaux from almost 20,000 years ago. The biological explanation for this includes reference to developments in the brain of Homo sapiens which make symbolic activity possible, perhaps quite suddenly in evolutionary terms. Though in part conjecture, it is suggested that this may have conferred upon Homo sapiens an evolutionary advantage which ensured its survival. Following Ian Tattersall van Huyssteen writes, “[I]f there is one single thing that distinguishes humans from all other life-forms, living or extinct, it is the capacity for symbolic thought, the ability to generate complex mental symbols and to manipulate them into new combinations.” ² Accompanying this development, there is a further shift in the capacity for self-awareness and consciousness by which humans are capable of reflecting on their experiences in categories of meaning, intention, and purpose.

Allied to these claims drawn from other disciplines is the theological notion that human beings are created in the image of God. This is explored in some depth. Various historical formulations are found wanting owing to their abstractionism and failure to recognize the embodied and social setting of human life. Yet the imago Dei is reaffirmed in an evolutionary setting as the capacity for symbolic expression and the subsequent ability to represent both theoretically and practically the sense of God. This capacity carries ethical responsibilities for fellow humans, other creatures, and the earth itself. Yet there is also a shadow side to our existence; our lives are entangled in violence, sin, misfortune, and suffering. These are all inflected and compounded by our human capacities, but so also are possibilities for grace, forgiveness, and hope. In the conclusion to his study, a narrative of creation and redemption, emerges with the claim that theologies rooted in particular traditions can go beyond the province of science by offering their own resources and insights. These have a particularity which is enabled by evolutionary processes but not reducible to them, as for example in the skepticism of Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained. Religion may be natural, but it is not exhausted by a naturalist explanation. Hence the space is mapped out for a stronger theology than has sometimes been recognized.

What makes this thesis so intriguing is its capacity both to engage in a patient and cautious conversation with paleoanthropologists while also advancing some modified theological conclusions that are rooted in classical Hebrew and Christian traditions. These theological claims retain some strong notions about human distinctiveness as intended by God and as conferring on human beings alone the status of covenant partners (my words, not his). What emerges is a tentative exercise in a kind of natural theology. The emergence of human symbolic activity as the site for religious awareness and expression meshes with theological claims about creation, providence, and creatures who reflect the divine image. “For the theologian this interdisciplinary move implies that God used natural history for religion and for religious belief to emerge as a natural phenomenon.” ³ We should note here the language of divine intentionality and teleology.

Is anthropocentrism a problem?

In its classical expressions, Christian theology has been heavily invested in claims about human distinctiveness. This appears to be a feature of the two creation stories in Genesis and also the brief allusions to the imago Dei that follow. Parallels can also be found in Psalm 8 and in the ways in which human beings are frequently summoned and addressed by God in the law, the prophets, and in wisdom teaching. This attention to human uniqueness appears to be affirmed by the incarnation. The Word of God becomes enfleshed as a human being, Jesus of Nazareth. This is the focal point of God’s dealings not only with Homo sapiens, but with the entire cosmos. To this might be added eschatological claims which are traditionally focused on the judgment and final destiny of human beings. Despite the presence of other creatures in the Apocalypse, artistic depictions of the last judgment, such as that of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, are concentrated upon the fate of human beings alone. We might then say that the traditional scheme of election, creation, providence, sin, redemption, and eschatological consummation requires some strong assumptions about human uniqueness in the divine economy. Without these, the rug is pulled from under the feet of the theologian.

Nevertheless, claims about human uniqueness face concerted attack in recent literature. “Anthropocentrism” has emerged as a critical term to challenge earlier assumptions that privileged human beings. Several related strands can be detected in such criticisms of the tradition.

First, it is argued that the cognitive capacities of human beings have become isolated and over determined. This has set humans apart from all other creatures, with the exception of angels. At different times, this has been detrimental to women, the disabled, and non-human creatures. These fail a benchmark test by which a true and distinctive humanity is measured, usually in terms of rationality. Such privileging of the cognitive reflects a faulty anthropology. As van Huyssteen argues, the person is embodied, active, and relational and not merely a thinking thing.

The exclusive focus on human beings has also been environmentally hazardous in the ways in which it has presented the world and animals in proprietorial terms. The creation is given to us to regulate, use, and dispose of us as we judge fit. This is arguably a consequence of ontologies in which human beings belong to a different order from other creatures by virtue of their rationality or some other distinctive feature. Even when more benign notions of stewardship or humans as priests of creation are introduced, these are still challenged as overly anthropocentric. Each represents the claim that the world and other creatures cannot be fulfilled except through human guardianship and representation before God. This is hubris on our part.

Finally, assertions of human uniqueness are held to represent a bias by which we confer upon our own kind qualities that render us superior to every other species. This speciesism is indefensible, it is argued, and leads to ethical distinctions that result in harmful practices and gross moral distortion. David Clough’s recent systematic theology of animals works from within the tradition but argues that its reform is urgently needed in order to eradicate all forms of anthropocentrism. ⁴ This requires several shifts: a muted and functional account of the imago Dei; a stress on incarnation and redemption as creaturely rather than human; and an eschatology for all creation rather than its human occupants only. One can of course find precedents for all of these in the tradition—it is no coincidence that much attention has been devoted recently to Maximus the Confessor—and these are cited in an attempt to overcome Western anthropocentrism. While not erasing all evidence of anthropocentrism, this approach to theological anthropology is at least alert to the problems. Human vocation and destiny cannot be articulated except in relation to the whole creation—these are forever bound together.

Anthropocentrism and hominin evolution

In recent literature on the science–religion interface, further support for this criticism of anthropocentrism is evident. On some accounts at least, the scientific evidence indicates that many of the elements belonging to the Upper Paleolithic revolution were already widespread around 80,000 years ago. These include blade technology, bone tools, use of pigment, art, decoration, and long-distance trading. ⁵ In itself, this revision seems to make little difference to any philosophical or theological claim. If it points to an earlier and greater gradualism rather than a sudden explosion (relative to an evolutionary time frame), this in itself may be irrelevant to claims for human distinctiveness. What may be more significant though is the claim that many of these characteristics were shared by other hominin groups who co-existed with Homo sapiens over many millennia, including those whose genetic material some of us have perpetuated.

Claims for a greater gradualism make the case for shared characteristics more plausible. In the case of four hominin groups, it is argued that we are dealing with different species though with a common lineage shared also by Homo sapiens. Each of these species had large brains, bipedal gait, and a developed material, social, and symbolic culture. Of greatest interest has been Homo neanderthalenis who lived alongside Homo sapiens for approximately 15 millennia before their disappearance. Anatomically and genetically, the key features that facilitate speech are found in Neanderthals, including the FOXP2 gene, though Tattersall in his recent study suggests that this is overly simplistic. There is no “silver bullet” that provides a sufficient condition for the emergence of language. ⁶ Nevertheless, the archaeological evidence suggests a material, social, and symbolic culture similar to that of early human beings, with evidence for empathy, care, and an awareness of death. Even if some of this evidence is thin in places and can be contested, it seems unwise to rule it out of court simply for the sake of maintaining a thesis about human distinctiveness. At the very least, the boundaries between these hominin groups now appear fuzzier. This is illustrated by the oft-quoted comment of Stringer and McKie. If a Neanderthal “could be reincarnated and placed in a New York subway—provided that he were bathed, shaved, and dressed in modern clothing—it is doubtful whether he would attract any more attention than some of its other denizens.” ⁷

Such claims for hominin forms of life are intended to arrest any simple claim for either anatomical, biological, cognitive, or behavioral uniqueness. Anything that we have done has its adumbration in other species. Homo sapiens may have survived while others did not, and proceeded to evolve culturally in quite dramatic ways. But this functionality may not have been on account of any startling difference or superiority to other hominin groups which made one outcome inevitable. Like the Battle of Waterloo—a “damned close run thing” according to Wellington—it could easily have gone the other way with dramatically different outcomes for subsequent world history.

To add to these concerns, we need to factor in two further sets of considerations. The first is more mundane and is the aforementioned claim of Clough and others that most of what has historically been claimed as unique to humans is mirrored in species other than hominins. This includes learning, communication, cooperation, empathy, aesthetic sensibility, and even sinfulness. Particularly among the higher primates, these qualities can be discerned. Characteristic human forms of life thus have their analogues in the capacities and activities of other species. This is confirmed not only by a shared genetic inheritance but by studies of animal behavior. Appealing to a substantial body of research, Clough writes,

We now have reason to believe that sheep are capable of recognizing hundreds of faces; crows are able to fashion tools in order to solve problems; chimpanzees exhibit empathy, morality and politics, and can outdo human subjects in numerically based memory tests; dolphins are capable of processing grammar; parrots can differentiate between objects in relation to abstract concepts such as colour and shape; and sperm whales have developed culturally specific modes of life and communication. ⁸

The search for a single quality or set of characteristics that isolates human beings and sets them apart in the created order is misplaced, according to this line of argument. The drawing of a line between the human and the non-human will have two deleterious consequences. The first is the obvious one that the non-human will be relegated to a disposable or instrumental status, since it lacks what differentiates the human as of unique worth. The second is less obvious but at least as important. This is the danger of flattening out the difference between other creatures by assigning them to the common status of non-human. There is a vast difference between an ant and a chimpanzee which is important for the ways in which we should treat them. This can be occluded by introducing a binary line in creation whether between human and non-human, rational and non-rational, spiritual and material. We may be alone as the last hominin group standing, but our deep affinities with other species together with our ancestral and genetic links to extinct evolutionary relatives place us firmly within the natural world, its haphazard processes and forms of animal life.

Extraterrestrial possibilities

There is also an extraterrestrial dimension to this debate which has increasingly come to the fore. Human distinctiveness may be relative to the history of evolution on our planet but what about other planets that populate distant galaxies? What would be the outcome of the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence in terms of how we view human capacities and their place in the story of creation? Here we enter a more speculative field of enquiry though one that attracts increasing attention from scholars. Expert opinion appears divided and it is no doubt rash to hitch one’s theological wagon to either side. Simon Conway Morris speaks of humans as inevitable but in a lonely universe. ⁹ Given the constraints of life on earth, he regards the appearance of something like our species as highly probable. But these conditions require such a complex concatenation of events that he is inclined to believe it unlikely that they are repeated elsewhere in the cosmos. Others are more confident that, given sufficient time and space, the probability of intelligent life emerging more than once is quite high.

David Wilkinson notes how place and status were closely associated in earlier theological anthropologies. If human beings were situated at the center of the cosmos in a prime position on planet earth, then their status as uniquely created in the image of God seemed secure. This appeared both to privilege humans while also casting doubt on the possibility of unconnected extraterrestrial life forms. The decentering of our planet in modern science, however, severs any link between status and place. This appeared to be a consequence of early modern science and it coincided with a period of intense reflection on the possibility of extraterrestrial life. If God had created distant stars and planets which conformed to the same laws of physics, then perhaps other life forms with their own particular histories and relatedness to the divine could be conceived. The distinctiveness of human beings, moreover, was increasingly viewed not in terms of being either alone or at the center of the cosmos but as related in particular ways to the action and purposes of God. ¹⁰ This could be affirmed while remaining open to the prospect of other life forms with their own histories which remain forever unknown to us.

At the very least, it seems unwise to rule out this empirical possibility a priori, on account of theological predispositions about human uniqueness. We might face a future scenario in which theology will have to reckon with a creation in which intelligent forms with their parallel but unrelated stories are also governed by God’s providential purpose. Human distinctiveness would then become at most relative to the history of our planet rather than to the entire creation. We would no longer be alone from either a cosmic or theological perspective, though it is worth recalling that Christian theology since the time of Origen has imagined such possibilities.

The imago Dei reconsidered

Most of the theological discussion of these issues revolves around the locus of the imago Dei. If it denotes a set of characteristics or activities or biological features which set human beings apart from other creatures, then it appears to be in trouble. Two rejoinders might be possible here. Either we continue to seek out a vital human ingredient that isolates our species from others or else we extend the imago Dei to include other creatures, perhaps along a graduated spectrum of capacities. But neither of these options is immediately appealing. The quest for a single or aggregate set of distinguishing features seems doomed to face an array of counter-examples from zoology. Any activity will find its correlate and adumbration elsewhere in animal life. Meanwhile, attempts to spread the imago Dei through a more capacious inclusion of higher primates and other species will also suffer from the problem of fuzzy boundaries. Such a move is likely to lead to an evacuation of any useful meaning or function for the concept beyond some notion of participation in a divine order which could in principle be extended to all creatures, as well as straining the meaning of the biblical text.

Part of the problem here is an exegetical one. The Bible gives us no clue as to what elements of our anthropological make-up constitute the imago Dei—though many theologians have tried very hard to fill this lacuna, often through the assistance of philosophy. Yet this may never have been the intention of the biblical writers in introducing the notion in the first place. In a surprisingly small number of passages in the opening chapters of Genesis, the imago Dei is cited more in relation to functional aspects of human life in God’s world than with respect to some vital ontological ingredient. It is a kind of marker or bookend for a narrative of divine–human interaction. This more functional approach may lead to some deflation of earlier strategies to explicate the imago Dei, but it seems to me the right way now to proceed.

All this is recognized in van Huyssteen’s patient exploration of the history of the imago Dei in the third chapter of his Gifford Lectures and in his subsequent response to critics. ¹¹ There he offers several considerations which may point beyond the impasse. First, he notes what might be called the “particularity” of the relationship between God and human beings. This is a theme that characterizes not only the crucial imago text in Genesis 1:26–27 but also the covenant language which is more pervasive in Scripture. The divine–human relationship is one that has to be narrated; this is a feature of the contextual and embodied nature of our existence. The knowledge of God and of ourselves unfolds in storied form, particularly in the narratives of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. This story is not one which insists upon human superiority to other creatures; it includes a call to responsibility, stewardship, and concern for those with whom we share the earth and a common animal existence. And it recognizes that there are warped and tragic features of human life which do not appear to infect other creatures to anything like the same extent. If there is a human distinctiveness, it is less in terms of a qualitative difference or foreordained isolation. Instead, it inheres in forms of life that have their own particularity but which belong alongside other creatures. “The embodied human person has biologically emerged in history as a center of self-awareness, religious awareness, and moral responsibility.” ¹² Yet this implies neither the discarding nor relativizing of other life forms, nor our deep connections with them.

We might describe this as a weak or benign form of anthropocentrism, over against those stronger and more strident versions which have undoubtedly led Christian thought and practice astray at earlier periods. It is matched by Tattersall’s strong claims for the sudden and unprecedented emergence of symbolic behavior in evolutionary history, though he admits that the causal explanation for this remains elusive. That there could be such a qualitative leap in any cognitive state is only believable, according to Tattersall, because it has in fact happened once in history and after our biological form was settled. ¹³ Others favor a longer and more gradualist account, focusing on the evolution in language in Africa from 250,000 years ago. Not surprisingly, this reading is more open to stressing the continuities with other hominin populations, by contrast with a narrative that describes a sudden emergence of new cognitive functions at a late date in Europe. Instead of a single leap during the Upper Paleolithic period in Europe, a more cumulative if uneven process of biological, cultural, and historical change is discerned, in much of which Homo sapiens is accompanied by other hominin groups. ¹⁴ Nevertheless, whatever the outcome of these scientific debates, the functional particularity of our species remains by virtue of the contingent outcome that it survived while closely related groups perished.

It is difficult to see how theology can avoid some commitment to a weak form of anthropocentrism. But, if we think in terms of human particularity, then this might offset the overdetermination of uniqueness as either superiority to or exclusion of other forms of life. Creatures have their own particularity, often with no reference to human stewardship or domestication. The book of Job points us in this direction with its closing meditations on the power of the crocodile and the hippopotamus. These reflect God’s wisdom—though not in ways that we can understand and far less accommodate to our human forms of life.

Yet human particularity does present a complex narrative unlike other creaturely histories. This does not make us better—in some ways, it makes us much worse—nor does it indefinitely guarantee our survival. But it generates the phenomena of religion and theology, relatively recent developments which are novel in the story of evolution, even if we can discern some protological features of religion in other hominin groups. The particularity of our story can be affirmed without implying that we are alone as the object of God’s concern or alone as God’s creatures in the cosmos, or alone as the single intention of God in making the world out of nothing, or alone as the sole purpose of God in evolutionary processes. All these claims of exclusivity can be abandoned without disturbing the appropriate reading of our particular course in evolutionary history. What evolutionary history reinforces, however, is the extent to which our particularity is embodied and embedded in a wider narrative about creaturely existence. And the account we offer of that particularity will reveal strong links to other life forms.

Incarnation, providence, and eschatology

In this closing section, I consider briefly three further theological features of human particularity—these relate to incarnation, providence, and eschatology.

Within the history of religion is the story of the incarnation of the Word of God as a human being. This can be aligned to the aforementioned weak anthropocentrism. The related claim that the incarnation involves the assumption of creaturely flesh can offset the exclusive exaltation of human beings in the scheme of redemption. As already noted, this is a feature of much Orthodox theology and is part of the current interest in thinkers such as Maximus the Confessor. Ian McFarland points to Maximus’ image of creation as a single arch. ¹⁵ Though composed of different stones, these together form an architectural whole, each holding the other in place. It is not as individual units but as the arch in its entirety that the creation is redeemed and finally exalted by Christ. His work of redemption reaches out to all material existence and not merely to humankind. Admittedly, human beings form the keystone in the arch for Maximus and are preeminent in the way in which they represent the creation. This priestly role is arguably too anthropocentric in its implication that other creatures need us to fulfil their telos. For much of the time, they may be better off without us and apart from us. It is hubris to suggest that the crocodile and the hippopotamus need the priestly mediation of human beings to fulfil their appointed place in creation. Yet in its more extensive scope, this account of redemption points to ways in which the incarnation of the Word of God may determine not only human beings but all material forms.

Nevertheless, the question remains whether there was something fitting (as Thomas Aquinas would have put it) in the Word of God becoming incarnate as a human person rather than as another creature. I cannot see how Christian theology can avoid recourse to a weak anthropocentrism. The claim that Christ’s humanity is no more necessary to the work of redemption than his gender is misplaced. It must lead to an impersonal and subconscious account of salvation which no one could know or attest. What would it mean to speak of the second person of the Trinity becoming incarnate as a crocodile or hippopotamus? We can imagine the Word of God as a woman but hardly as another creature. It would be a Word incarnate which neither taught nor prayed nor healed nor forgave sins.

The incarnation is mediated through human speech, intentional action, personal encounter, and in the cultural context of first-century Palestinian Judaism. Its reception in the church through its proclamation, sacred texts, and sacramental actions belongs to the particularity of the human story. This does not entail that its significance is human only or that it constitutes an aggrandizement of the human at the expense of other life forms. On the contrary, as an act of abasement on God’s part, the incarnation is an accommodation to our creaturely condition, especially to that one part of the animal world that is most culpable for the disorder and spoiling of creation. As an adaptation on God’s part, it is an act of grace rather than a recognition of our elevated status. And yet at the same time, its form and content are inextricably bound to embodied culture, language, and religion. These do not confine its scope to a single species. Yet without these, a hypostatic union could have little if any of its perceived significance, at least as far as we can imagine.

A second type of anxiety surrounds the idea of providence. The intuitive appeal of strong forms of anthropocentrism in Christianity has much to do with the sense that God intended and determined a creation in which human beings would emerge as endowed with the imago Dei. A special act of the creation on the sixth day still shapes many of the assumptions that are held by Christian people today, as well as those of the other Abrahamic faiths. The economy of creation and salvation seems to require the appearance of Homo sapiens as the bearer of the divine image. Without this commitment, the subsequent story of incarnation and redemption is somehow relativized if not randomized. The parallelism of Adam and Christ requires as its prequel the setting apart of human beings as the addressees of God with their particular endowments, opportunities, and failures. In this way, a strong reading of the imago doctrine is essential to the fabric of the Christian faith and this sits uneasily alongside a more messy evolutionary account which sees higher primates and other hominin groups as sharing many of the features that characterize the make-up and behavior of Homo sapiens. The scientific story of our emergence seems to fit rather ill with the more deterministic anthropology of the Christian worldview.

It is difficult to articulate this anxiety clearly but it is deeply felt by many students of Christian theology. To respond to it, one might recall Charles Hodge’s complaint about Darwinism in Princeton in 1874. For Hodge, Darwinian evolution was quite compatible with the idea of creation but he felt compelled to reject it on account of its diminution of providence. In the randomness that it perceived in the trajectory of life forms, evolution cannot be held in tandem with the providential faith of Christianity. Hodge argued that in essence it is atheist with respect to the scope it assigns to chance. The best response to this came from those such as Asa Gray at Harvard who argued for a providence that worked in and through the natural processes of the world. An evolving world may not be wholly deterministic but it can be adapted by divine providence in ways that make it a fitting arena for the works of creation and redemption. We can avoid embracing both a deterministic outlook and also a deism that merely allows the world to run its course. Providential action does not require a wholly determined universe, willed in every detail from an eternal perspective. An evolving world in which not all outcomes are fixed is open to the presence, force, and movements of God’s two hands—the Word and the Spirit. The survival of Homo sapiens rather than Homo neanderthalensis may be an outcome not of divine intention but of evolutionary accident. But this claim does not exclude a divine adapting of the human story to a particular set of ends, nor does it prevent us from affirming the symbolic and cultural accommodation of the divine Word to our creaturely condition. To this extent, the distinctive claims of much Christian theology may be less closely bound to the strong forms of anthropocentrism and determinism that have characterized our theological traditions and which remain surprisingly persistent. It may be an accident that we are alone, or we may not be alone in terms of the longer run of cosmic history. But neither, I submit, would be fatal to the particularity of our species as this is understood in terms of the divine–human encounter that is presented in the Christian religion. As Asa Gray argued, theologians should not “waste their strength in the obstinate defense of positions which have become unimportant, as well as untenable.” ¹⁶

The particularity of our history denotes features that are absent from other creaturely forms of life. In this sense, we may be alone as outliers in the story of life at least on this planet. But in other respects, Christian theology can profitably forsake strong forms of anthropocentrism without abandoning its own core commitments.

Finally, what of eschatology? Given that the study of the early history of Homo sapiens is characterized with uncertainty and contested interpretations, it seems that pronouncements about our final destiny should be tempered a fortiori by an awareness of the limits of our knowledge. The future is even more impenetrable than the past; the study of our human evolution seems to evoke this realization. Furthermore, many of the eschatological images which have dominated the traditions of Christian thought, for example the last judgment, have been situated within a worldview that has now been surpassed in relation to the age of the earth, the span of human history, the size of the cosmos, and its likely duration. In the realm of eschatology, Bultmann’s demythologizing imperative remains with us and deserves some revisiting.

Images of resurrection, judgment, and fulfilment may have regulative force in providing a directionality for human speech and action. “In all you do, remember the end of your life, and then you will never sin” (Sir 7:36). But what is the cognitive status of such recollection? Here the theologian may have recourse to two types of consideration. The first involves the symbolic mapping of eschatological notions in relation to themes of transcendence, forgiveness, redemption, and love which have emerged in the evolution of religion. These are directed spatially, as it were, toward a dimension that is not reducible to the material and the sensory, and temporally toward a future in which they can be better realized than here and now. Alongside this are more particular claims of the Christian faith proceeding from its conviction of the presence of the resurrected Christ, as the fullest expression of the image of God. These claims are future directed and extensive in their scope. Perhaps this is best expressed negatively. The Easter faith cannot project a future that is finally devoid of meaning and fulfilment, nor can its significance be restricted to a portion of embodied creatures only.

What this entails in terms of eschatological specifics must remain hidden from us. We can points toward it only with images and symbols rather than delineate it with any measure of clairvoyance. Thomas Reid’s epistemology committed human subjects to “living wisely in the darkness.” ¹⁷ By the providence of God, we are given sufficient intellectual capacity for the business of life here and now, but remain in the dark about a good deal besides. This might be transposed into terms appropriate to the second theological virtue. We can learn “to live hopefully in the darkness.” Eschatology has its place but its limits and function need to be delineated. In important respects, van Huyssteen’s Gifford Lectures represent those virtues. They may seem Christo remoto, but this is in appearance not reality. In its pursuit of interdisciplinary findings, his work is rightly tentative while striking notes that remain faithful, cheerful and hopeful.