Cosmic Open-Endedness

 

When we consider mathematical patterns describing our cosmos, it is worth exploring the question; is the cosmos mathematically open-ended - that is, does it resist compression into a finite description? This can be a misleading question because - assuming the cosmos is spatially finite - how can it be both open-ended and finite? But there’s a subtle yet important thing to grasp, because 'open-ended' should not evoke a picture of the physical cosmos stretching into the far horizons of infinity, like a cave that just seems to get bigger and deeper the more we enter it (although analogically that seems to be somewhat true of our observable cosmos too through a scientific lens). No, it is a mathematical term about whether or not the cosmos has patterns that can stretch to infinity (stress; patterns, not physical properties), and can be finitely characterisable. The answer is, we don’t know whether or not the cosmos has patterns that can stretch to infinity, but we do know that if they follow rules expressible by a finite description, then the system would count as “closed” in the algorithmic sense.

If we look at a pattern, we may try to extend it to infinity based on its observed order; if the extension is fully predictable and can be described by a finite algorithm, then in that sense the cosmos could be considered algorithmically “closed” - though this would still leave us far short of complete knowledge, of course. It is a subtle concept to grasp: that a pattern extending indefinitely can sometimes allow for a finite description.

However, there is a practical problem that likely prevents a definitive theory of such closure. When searching for patterns in the cosmos, there is no guarantee how far a pattern reliably extends before it is overtaken by another, more complex pattern. Perhaps the pattern we have inferred only applies for a limited range, then shifts according to some higher-level rule. Even if we identify this higher-level rule, it may itself be limited, replaced in turn by yet another overarching pattern. With this potential succession of pattern changes, the cosmos reveals itself as a tapestry of staggering mathematical depth and intricacy, where patterns layer upon patterns in a hierarchy of ever-expanding complexity.

But it’s even deeper than that because, given previous writings on the nature of mathematics and how the cosmos unfolds as a monument to mathematical majesty (see my side bar), the physical creation is, to all intents and purposes, effectively mathematically “open-ended,” because at best our efforts can yield only local, provisional theories, where each is but a fleeting glimpse into the infinite web of mathematical structure that underlies all of physical reality.

Let me explain it another way, for clarification. Consider that every time our "window" on the cosmic patterns increases we find that we require a new or more complex algorithm to describe the broader patterns; in effect, the pattern never stabilises into something describable by a single final, comprehensive algorithm. By the way, this is another reason why I argue in my paper on free will and determinism that determinism and indeterminism are not binary opposites, but part of a spectrum.

As our window into the cosmos gradually expands, the stock of short algorithms would eventually be exhausted, forcing algorithmic descriptions to grow ever longer and more intricate - thereby surpassing human comprehension and reaching a level of complexity that can only be accounted for by the cosmic intelligence underlying mathematics itself. And here we are talking about God - which begs the question: which kind of cosmos would the God of the Bible be most likely to create? Naturally, we can only speculate, but here’s a possible way to do so.

If God created the cosmos as “closed”, He could have created the mathematical engine with fundamental laws that are simple, consistent, and finite in description - a cosmos where patterns can, in principle, be fully captured by finite algorithms. This would be elegant and potentially intelligible - and may be tailored to God’s creative dispensation of exhibiting a cosmos with order and purpose in a background of mathematical wash.

If God created the cosmos as “open-ended”, He could have designed the cosmos to be infinitely rich, with layers of patterns that continually evolve, so that the full scope of cosmic mathematics is never exhaustively describable. This would reflect a depth of creative freedom, leaving room for unpredictability, novelty, and ongoing discovery - and may be tailored to God’s creative dispensation of exhibiting a cosmos with mystery and adventure.

In my view, neither fully satisfies - which may well be why, from our observations, God’s creation appears to deliberately combines both - exhibiting a finite set of fundamental laws (closed at a base level) that give rise to an emergent, open-ended complexity that stretches into a mystery that can only be fully captured by Omniscience Himself.

How We Made a Nation Too Fragile to Cope

 

You’ve probably noticed it’s hard to state tough and unpleasant truths without sounding unsympathetic; but that is quite strange when you think about it - for it’s quite easy to be sympathetic to genuine cases of x but also speak frankly about false claims or instances of x that cause mass harm (see my blog post here for further commentary on this phenomenon).   

Last week, I mentioned a horrible problem to solve, as we hear that Britain is sliding 'into economic crisis' over our £85bn sickness bill. I’ve touched on what I think are some of the problems and solutions in a previous blog post (see here). And I take absolutely zero pleasure in saying that I’ve been warning about this danger for years - especially how we’ve coddled young minds in a way that’s left many of them ill-equipped to face life head on, much less pursue the adventure that life offers all who pursue her courageously and truthfully. And this plight is especially bad for weak young men, because there is nothing good at all about being a weak man (either for men or women). And let me remind you, being strong here doesn’t mean aggressive, excessively dominant, or hard - it means the strength to endure, to be brave, to take responsibility, to be vulnerable, secure, and grounded.

What underlies the UK’s rise in sickness-related economic inactivity, increased anxiety, and a lack of strength, perspective, resilience and responsibility is a crisis that will be very hard to peel back. Hard, but absolutely necessary, as we simply cannot go on like this. The UK has been beset by a culture of dependency and avoidance - where personal responsibility and resilience have been eroded by a system that over-pathologises normal life struggles, and tells too many people they are sick or hopeless when they are really struggling to function adequately or simply unmotivated (the type 1 and type 2 error problem I discussed in the blog linked above).

Everyone knows the positive effects of our becoming more aware and accommodating of illness and mental health (reducing stigma, encouraging people to seek help, increasing understanding, etc). But I think few can deny now that in the past decade and a half the pendulum has swung too far toward medicalising ordinary life challenges, lowering expectations of resilience and responsibility, creating a culture of dependency and over-reliance on the state, and in some cases even producing systemic incentives against work.

Alas, I actually doubt whether there is an easily manageable solution to this - we’ve let things get too out of hand - and there are certain impediments to reversal. One of which is that the people who superficially find advantage from this dependency culture reap most of the benefits while the rest shoulder most of the costs (although the ‘benefits’ enjoyed by the former group are, of course, a poisoned chalice). Second is that the politicians, media and institutions have deliberately orchestrated this to secure compliance and control, and feather their own nests, so it’s unlikely that they will willingly unwind it or champion virtues that undermine it, for fear of compromising their own careers, and of a backlash from the wokerati.

The task of restoring shared responsibility and purpose, while balancing it with compassion and expectation, is hard to achieve at the best of times. But given that the culture has shifted so deeply, it feels prohibitively difficult. But not impossible, because, as with most things, I think the erosion of personal responsibility, resilience, virtue and a more strongly integrated shared moral framework coincides with the decline of Christianity in this country. And plenty of great writers, many before most of us were born, warned societies that a lack of Christianity means the decline of a narrative of meaning, moral duty, and transcendent purpose. It’s one of the many ways in which the decline of Christianity has left a vacuum that secular institutions haven’t filled well.

Everything At Once

 

During the only slow bit in the Thursford Christmas show (the raffle, for those like us, who didn’t have tickets) I was thinking about how, in astronomy, when we look at something very far away, we’re seeing it as it was in the past, not as it is now - like we would if there was a distant mirror suspended in space. And I was thinking about my mum being born 80 years ago, in 1945, and how, if a giant planet-sized mirror orbiting a star roughly 40 light-years from Earth (because light has to go there and back) existed, I could see her on her day of birth (light too faint, interstellar dust, etc, might be a problem, but let’s pretend we’ve solved that issue).

Now, if you think about it, that kind of conceptualisation can act as an analogy for how we temporal physical beings interface with our eternal, timeless God. So, we know from relativity that the universe can be thought of as a four-dimensional spacetime “block”. In that model, all events - past, present, and future - co-exist within a single geometric structure. From within time, we experience periods of it: “now,” “before,” and “after”. But from outside, for God, every moment simply is.

But here’s another fascinating thing, and I think you might know what I mean here; I fancy that our consciousness is a bit like a mirror that reflects the entire block at once, sensing every moment as equally present, equally real, equally vivid, but yet at every moment locked in the present ‘now’ we call the self. Through the mirror, there is a sense in which tomorrow is not really “later” and yesterday is not really “gone.” All of it - the whole history of the universe - is immediately present in the sense that we are made in God’s image and seeped in the Divine plan, like a vast landscape seen in a single glance, where we are always eyeing our past, our present and our potential, and always deeply connected and integrated in the grand narrative.

Because if we pay close attention, we can sense that in being conscious there are always glimmers of the same timeless light that holds all things together, yet always at the same time reflecting hints and yearnings of how much more we can yet become. Because we are beings of sequence who sense eternity, and fragments who are always tapping into the whole; every past, present and future thought, deed, hope, regret, mistake, act of love, and so forth is a small reflection of that greater life in which all our moments are already complete in God’s cosmic narrative.

Perhaps we can consider a symphony to further illustrate. When we listen to it, the music unfolds in time - note after note, movement after movement. The beauty exists through succession: beginnings, climaxes, resolutions, and what have you. That is a bit like how we experience our own lives - as a melody played out moment by moment. But….now imagine the symphony not as sound but as a standing wave - a single vibration that contains within its structure all the frequencies, harmonics, and resonances that the symphony would otherwise express through time. From within the music, we would hear the passing of notes; from outside it, an external cosmic mathematician could see the entire waveform at once - the total pattern of the piece existing simultaneously. That’s the difference between the human, temporal view and the Divine, eternal one. Life for us is living through the music, where God is the whole symphony, perfectly complete, with no need for sequence.

Why God Likes Science & Capitalism

Suppose you're sent off to another universe in a super cosmos-travel machine and you land on the first planet you find with evolved life. The most intelligent species (which closely resemble humans) has evolved a belief in a god they call Z as their main religion, sustained over thousands of years, with hundreds of other religions that have come and gone over the centuries. You look at their recent history and find that for 199,800 of the previous 200,000 years their progression has been slow and steady with mostly subsistence level living, high infant morality, widespread poverty, where the pattern has been very slow steps up a very gentle slope. Then in their last 200 years they fused science and capitalism with industry, improved travel, population increase and more widespread communication, and suddenly those very slow steps up a very gentle slope became very fast steps up a very steep slope of progression. In fairly quick time they saw the diminution of subsistence level living, high infant morality and widespread poverty being replaced with better health, wealth and prosperity. On seeing this you might be inclined to think that their religious belief has at least in some part been inadequate to the task of lifting people into genuine progression.

With that in mind I'll give you some empirically verified evidence of how the world has gone for human beings on earth in the past 200,000 years. For the past 199,800 of those 200,000 years we had low global populations, and humans lived in meagre conditions, with lots of primitivism, low life expectancy and frequent infant mortality. People's earnings stayed around the subsistence levels (save for a tiny minority of aristocracy and ruling classes), and despite our being religious or worshipfully inclined for most of that time, our beliefs had no real impact on human beings at a scientific or economic level. Yes it is true that great works were produced by some great religious minds - but compared with everyone who ever lived they amount to a tiny minority. And while it is true to say that fabulous cathedrals and temples were built in reverence to God - it is equally true that around those great buildings most people were still barely subsisting - and nothing built or designed or written from worshipful inclinations changed that with any real significance.

The point being, Christian belief is based on supernatural and metaphysical truths, and truthful beliefs are extremely valuable to individuals and communities at a devotional and communal level, but it would be false to say that in the past few hundred thousand years religious belief had any significant impact on people's health, wealth and material standard of living, or on their economic and scientific development, when compared with the effect that science and capitalism had, because it didn't. The argument that some great scientific innovators and pioneers were religious won't help here, because it still fails to account for their relative scarcity, or for the thousands of years that preceded them where not much progress was being made.

So, despite the evolution of religious belief and moral ideas, for the past 199,800 of the aforementioned 200,000 years human progression moved at a snail's pace. Then a couple of hundred years ago something changed. People started to become more scientific, more empirically minded, richer, and populations began to increase more rapidly (it's still going on).  It was primarily science and capitalism that caused this sudden cheetah-like sprint of progression. This science and capitalist-based progression can be explained by a simple rule of thumb - people innovate, improve and provide answers to problems - and the more people, the more innovation, improvements and problems solved.  The more ideas and the more people to share those ideas with, the more humans prosper, and the quicker they do so.

Now let's be clear; science and capitalism haven't created a materialist utopia (far from it), nor a panacea against moral ills, and they are not without their negative spillover effects - but their prominence has seen an exponentiation effect that has brought more progression in the past 200 years than in the previous 198,800 years. In those 200 years, earnings, health, wealth, knowledge, scientific and technological capacity, and overall well-being has improved at an astronomical level not seen in any period of time that predated it.

Failure to recognise this puts one in a potentially knotty situation if one is a theist, because purely on the record of human health, wealth, standard of living, economic development, technological and industrial progress, it cannot be denied that the 200 years when science and capitalism have been most prominent have provided a much better record for humans than the thousands of years prior to that when religious belief was most prominent.

This does not, of course, mean that the progress science and capitalism have provided are the only kind of progression available to us - for it would be impertinent to measure human progression in terms of science and capitalism without mentioning the importance of Christianity in the areas of life into which science and capitalism make no real inroads. It stands to reason that the way Christianity enriches us is both locked into the material tenets of life, but also very much locked into metaphysical tenets too.

If things like science and capitalism show themselves to be good vehicles for human progression, or beneficial tools for lifting us out of poverty, curing diseases, feeding the impoverished, communicating globally, and generally enhancing our knowledge of the world, then they are not at odds with faith, and can work alongside Christianity so long as they enacted with a Christ-centred heart. And that's why if God is a God who values the kind of human progression with which we can lift people out of poverty, cure diseases, feed the impoverished, and generally enhance our knowledge of the world, then it seems to me that God must like science and capitalism at its best, as history has shown them to be the two best vehicles to achieve those things.

Sleight of Hand Environmentalism Problem

 

When it comes to spending money, there are things we spend our own money on directly that we can manage well ourselves (clothes, wine, holidays), things the government spends our money on, on our behalf, that we couldn't so effectively manage locally (defence, rule of law, welfare), and things the government spends our money on, on our behalf, that we (or they) would better off not spending money on. 

Using cars to illustrate, the government model for provision, as everybody knows, is roughly this. They take your money, buy you a Ford Fiesta, and tell you they are doing you a favour because you really need a Ford Fiesta. The people who wanted a Ford Fiesta don't mind as much as the people who wished they could have used their own money to buy a Honda Civic, or a motorbike, or a bicycle and a holiday - but even the recipients of Ford Fiestas could have bought them with their own money if the government hadn't taken it. The real beneficiaries in this equation are the suppliers of Ford Fiestas, and the politicians who take the money to buy each of us a Ford Fiesta and keep some for themselves. Ford makes many sales it would not otherwise have made, and many consumers end up with Fords they wouldn't have otherwise bought.

Cronyist organisations, like those seeking to sell their wares off the back of environmentalist dogma, lobby the government for more and more money, under the pretext that the planet is going to hell in a handcart, and we should therefore be forced to spend money on their products. Most climate policies are like Ford Fiestas in those scenarios - we get them whether we want them or not, and we have no easy way to opt out of them.  

What’s The Future Of The Church Of England?

 

With the way it’s been going recently, with their continued descent into wokeness, moral relativism and leftish identarian politics, I honestly wonder whether the Church of England will survive its current identity crisis; whether there’ll be a big split, or whether it will disintegrate as it continues to dilute or abandon many of its sacred doctrines.

I’m reminded of Alice’s Red Queen, where it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place, and if you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that. Many factions of the Church of England are running twice as fast to remain chameleons that blend into transient values and misguided cultural whims, while gradually losing their voice, and with that, much of the power of the gospel it was founded to proclaim.

Ordinarily, assuming this trend continues, I would have predicted that during the next century the Church of England will fracture: some factions will attempt to remain a force for, while others will accelerate further into misjudged conformity and compromise, leaving it divided and diminished beyond repair. But I have an element of doubt, because the Church of England is enormous, and deeply intertwined with British society, law, and governance - so a split would be complex and messy.

The Church of England is the established church in the UK; the monarch is its Supreme Governor, and bishops sit in the House of Lords. Splitting would involve complex legal and possibly parliamentary processes. Churches, cathedrals, schools, and endowments are legally held by the institution. Dividing assets would be chaotic, costly, and litigious. And we all know that bishops, priests, and dioceses are tied to the formal structures of the church, and millions of people identify as members - so convincing them to follow a new, separate body could be slow and uneven, especially at there would be inevitable disagreements over what the split would even look like.

Maybe these trends won’t last, and the church will wake up and see sense. Or maybe it won’t see sense by itself, but the trends themselves will die, as many hopeless things do, and the church will no longer be able to court popularity and relevance through these diluted vogues. Or maybe it can’t split, but will become more and more divided, leaving it to be a continued but ever more fractious mix of institutional dysfunction, cultural irrelevance, and spiritual compromise, with a regrettable loss of clear identity. As someone who always felt that I could vibrate to a slightly conservative Anglicanism, I’d hate to think that the church would become an even more hollowed-out institution, struggling to speak with authority, losing members, and drifting further from its founding mission.

It’s my faith in Christ as Lord that keeps me believing that the Church of England is worth saving. For all its current confusion, the Church of England still carries immense beauty and weight. Its liturgy remains one of the most profound expressions of Christian worship ever written; its cathedrals and parish churches still anchor countless communities in prayer and continuity; and its historic rootedness gives it a unique moral and cultural authority. If only it could recover the courage to speak timeless truth with grace and conviction, it might yet become again a steady moral compass in a disoriented nation. If it cannot recover its soul, the Church of England may eventually endure only in name, but not in spirit.

A Good Use Of Energy

There’s a lot of confusion in green thinking about how energy use really works - both from greens who don’t adequately grasp the relationship between efficiency and energy saving, and, to be fair, from those at the opposite end who assume that making things more efficient automatically means we’ll use less energy. Thank God there are Blogs like mine to set things straight. 😃

You can think of capitalism's progression-explosion a bit like this, through the lens of the Jevons paradox. We build a steam-powered factory which costs £10 per item made. At £10 an item, we can sell 100 a day, because few customers can afford it. Then we build an electricity plant, and that only costs £1 per item made. At £1 per item, we can now sell 10,000 items per day, because most people can afford it. That's ten times more spend on a hundred times more energy, and a hundred times more consumers of that energy.

But in reality, it’s not as simple as “a hundred times more energy,” because the new technology also makes each item cheaper precisely by using less energy per unit. If production rises a hundredfold while each item uses a tenth as much energy, total energy use still rises about tenfold. In other words, efficiency lowers the energy per item, but growth in production and consumption more than makes up for it. 

But in fact, it’s even more efficient than that, because we said we have ten times more total spending, and roughly ten times more total energy use - because even though each item uses less energy, we’re making vastly more of them - but the “a hundred times more energy” is an understatement, because but in my example, each item became cheaper precisely because it uses less energy per item. In other words, depending on how the technology and demand interact, total energy use might increase tenfold, a hundredfold, or somewhere in between - but it almost never falls. Efficiency doesn’t necessarily reduce total energy use; but it can enable the economy to expand and consume even more, and both consumers and producers are richer, and more is being produced for less effort. When goods and services become cheaper, we generally buy more of them. When production gets more efficient, we produce more. And the energy use increase from the economy getting bigger typically outpaces the energy use reduction from things becoming more efficient.

But there's even more to the story, because per unit of production, energy becomes more efficient (less energy per item). This is why we need to separate efficiency from total energy use. Per person, or per unit of economic output, modern, advanced economies are usually far more efficient than their predecessors (see the Environmental Kuznets Curve, which also factors in positive trade-offs regarding pollution vs. income benefits, and shows how, at higher income levels, pollution declines, as societies can afford cleaner technologies, smarter regulation and more efficient service-based economies.) - we get more GDP per unit of energy than older economies did, especially with the additional structural shifts (to services, outsourcing manufacturing) alongside those efficiency gains.

Energy intensity has been falling for decades in advanced economies, which shows that growth is almost always greener or more energy efficient. Yet at the same time, total global energy use keeps rising, because efficiency makes goods cheaper and accessible to more people, expanding both production and consumption.

This is one of the many matters the environmentalists don't address - though in most cases they don't currently even think in ways that show them this needs addressing. In other words, it's not just that they don't get this; they don't usually know there is anything here that needs getting (ditto the other green blind spots I have blogged about in the past). It's the complex trade-off between the efficiencies above, of the Environmental Kuznets Curve, and the fact that efficiency doesn’t shrink our total energy appetite - it just allows us to fuel a larger, more energy-intensive economy, where growth is not just about using less energy per item; it’s about the huge advancements of more activity overall, where the trade-off is more absolute energy use, but in most cases for the betterment and improved material living standards of the human species.

Beware of Honest, Well-Intentioned Politicians

 

I don’t know if politicians are generally more honest, well-meaning and good-intentioned than in the past. I’d guess, in some ways, yes, in same ways, no. But as per the wisdom from C.S. Lewis that “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive”, I suspect that it’s the so-called honest, well-meaning politicians who want to do good on our behalf who frequently do the most harm (especially indirectly).

It is with this in mind that I refer you to something I discovered called Celine's Third Law (based on a character in The Illuminatus Trilogy), which contends that an honest politician is more dangerous than a corrupt one, because a corrupt politician cares only about lining his own pockets, but an honest, idealistic one seeks to reshape the world - and that’s precisely why he might end up causing the most damage.

Celine contends that the proliferation of laws only breeds more criminals. Every new law chips away at personal liberty, and with the sheer volume of legislation being passed, no ordinary citizen can realistically navigate daily life without inadvertently breaking some rule. It is, paradoxically, the well-intentioned reformers - those earnest politicians seeking to improve society through legislation - who pave the way for true tyranny by overregulating every aspect of existence.

I believe that is true, but I think there is an even more compelling aspect of the same phenomenon - the honest politicians are even more dangerous because they are the ones who see the ever-increasing size of the state as the solution to most problems, and therefore they are the reason the size of government becomes so bloated that it can no longer afford to sustain itself. At this stage, which is what we’ve seen in recent times, performances suffer, politician live in denial, and we end up with crumbling public services.

I suppose all this is to say that the road to political hell is paved by visionaries with some good intentions, but who believe too deeply in their own righteousness and lack the humility to know their limits. Ignoble political con artists are dreadful, but you might like to consider that perhaps it is well-meaning dogma that allows the machinery of control to grow beyond all restraint.

On Not Picking Sides

 

Yesterday’s blog post was about how easy it is to pick the right side (when there are valid sides one ought to pick, that is, based on empiricism, rationality and logic). Straight after publishing it, I decided to compose a follow up, on the matter of not picking sides - that is, when it’s not so easy to justifiably land on one side or the other, or when the mere framing of sides is remiss. This is because there are areas of life, science, philosophy and human experience where “sides” simply don’t exist in any meaningful way - or, if they do, you only see them because you’ve drawn them yourself or been expediently influenced by the whims of others.

Regarding where sides don’t exist in any meaningful way, I think my paper on free will and determinism is a good example (see here). As a result of the ancient and ongoing debate on this subject, I’ve tried to liberate the reader from needing to pick a side. It’s not a ‘picking a side’ kind of matter.

Or take the question of consciousness. Try not to pick a side on the matter of whether it’s spiritual, an emergent property of matter, a fundamental aspect of the universe, or something we’ll never explain - liberate yourself with the comprehension that it’s all four.

Or take the nature of mathematics, and whether it is discovered or invented. Again, no need to pick a side - it is both (see my blog posts on the nature of mathematics here).

Or take the frequently insufferable philosophical debates about consequentialism and deontology. Both are key elements of moral philosophy if your landscape is broad and wide enough. Pitting them against each other is a bit like arguing whether your pet Rover is a dog or a mammal.

Often it takes stepping out of the divisive nature of religious, political, or ideological conflict to see the situation with a broader perspective. Which is why, for example, a historian studying the French Revolution through the lens of retrospection is unlikely to come down firmly on the monarchy’s decadence or the guillotine’s virtue. Or why a competent theoretical physicist wouldn’t even begin to pick a side in considering the apparent tension between quantum mechanics and general relativity, knowing there are many further discoveries to be made. Or why a balanced philosopher studying the Enlightenment is likely to observe the delicate trade-off between the advancement of reason and progress, and the sense that something precious can easily be lost or discarded through overly rigid black and white empiricism.

Those are just a few examples of the other side of the coin from yesterday’s blog post. The upshot is, while as I said yesterday it’s important to seek the truth to land on the correct side of propositions (and avoid the harms of the incorrect sides), it’s also important to understand that the more profound truths often live in a deeper open-endedness (often due to our own limitations as a species), and certainly transcendent of our conveniently invented oppositions. In those cases, there’s a quiet, assured wisdom and discernment in resisting the urge to pick a side.

Picking Sides

People love to pick sides. What's astonishing is how often they choose not just the wrong side - but the one that's completely opposed to what's right. It’s also surprising this happens so often, as picking sides is usually a lot easier than many people make it look. To show how easy it is - and in a way that should be blindingly obvious - let’s identify some of the big topics that flood our news and media, and see how easy it is to pick the right side.

In the battle over free speech, pick the side that authentically champions free speech and cares about individual liberty with responsibility, not the people trying to suppress it for their own perverse agenda. Regarding economics, pick the side that understands why an economy is less efficient when controlled through politically motivated short-sighted central planning, and favour free markets except in cases where a more top-down organisational structure is more effective than bottom-up. At the same time, be sympathetic to a socialistic mindset in terms of community, mutual help and support, and shared social responsibility outside of the market economy. And always pick the side that understands the price system and knows the harmful effects of price fixing.

On climate alarmism, side with reason over hysteria. Acknowledge that climate change needs addressing with intelligence, but reject the doomsday cult that insists we have only ten years left, every decade, forever. Understand that real solutions come from innovation, adaptation, and pragmatic policy - not panic-driven demands to dismantle modern civilisation.

On the issue of biological sex, side with biological reality: men cannot become women. A man identifying as a woman does not make him one, no matter how sincerely he believes it or how loudly others demand agreement. Don’t let men in women’s sports, prisons or toilets - it’s absurd.

Champion equality of opportunity, and reject both overt racism and unfair discrimination, but also reject the modern mutation that sees racism and unfair discrimination in everything. And pick the side that rewards competence and effort, not one that dilutes excellence in the name of equality of outcome. At the same time, be mindful and sympathetic to individuals who genuinely need a helping hand through no fault of their own – and even show grace when it is their fault. Regarding the messy victimhood culture, pick the side that encourages sympathy, compassion, resilience and personal responsibility, not the one that weaponises suffering and compassion, elevates grievance to a virtue and turns fragility into power.

Regarding immigration, be a global citizen - be tolerant, and acknowledge the immense benefits of immigration, but understand that there will be serious problems if it’s uncontrolled or out of control and excessively concentrated in certain socio-economically challenged areas of the UK, especially with groups who have many values we find, at best, challenging and, at worst, abhorrent.

In the debate between evolution and young earth creationism, side with the overwhelming evidence for evolution while retaining your faith in God. Don’t fall in with those who reject science because it threatens their narrow interpretation of scripture. At the same time, see the obvious compatibility between Christianity and science, because it’s easy to understand why we shouldn’t look for scientific truths in the Bible.

And while this last one is more complex (see here, here, here and here), in the Middle Eastern conflict, don’t side with malevolent forces working against God’s chosen people, Israel. If you’re siding with fanatical Islamists who rape and behead women and who proudly want to wipe Israel off the map, consider that you’re going drastically wrong in your analysis somewhere. At the same time, realise that Israel has been under immense existential threat for decades, and because of that (among other factors), it isn’t behaving well in every situation, and have deep sympathy for all the citizens of every nation involved who are the main victims of their government’s military actions.

Here’s what you should know now - it took me just twelve minutes to think of those examples and write that blog post, and I only decided to write it literally ten minutes before that. And while each case is complex, and could be unpacked with more consideration - in my defence, I have done this repeatedly in past articles - the point is, it’s very easy to intuitively know which side is closer to being right then wrong, and it’s remarkably easy to land on the side that aligns with reason, decency, and basic reality - if you care about the right things, and haven't surrendered your intellect to nonsense, and your conscience to tribalism or fear.

On Defining Genius

My wife and I are watching Celebrity Traitors, and we’re frequently amused by how often the other participants refer to Stephen Fry as a ‘genius’. Stephen Fry is not, of course, a genius. He’s very knowledgeable, and quite intelligent, but not a genius. The overuse of the term genius tends to happen when people are too generous about what a genius actually is. It’s a bit like a dwarf claiming a person of slightly above average height is a giant. So, anyway, my sweetheart and I proceeded to pause Celebrity Traitors and discuss what constitutes a genius. “Fear not”, I said, “the Preface in my book The Genius of the Invisible God, and one of my letters in Dear Treasured You, briefly discusses this very thing.” 😊

So, I emailed it to my sweetheart, and thought it might be of interest here too. This is how I view ‘genius’.  

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Excerpt from Dear Treasured You......

I don't think it is the case that a person is a genius. I think genius is a cosmic, metaphysical force - like love, beauty, justice, grace, mercy, joy and fulfilment - it's something greater than us that we tap into. Genius seems to me to be a comment about not just the within, but the without too - it's a term that rightly confers glory on individual accomplishment, but alongside which shines light on qualities that transcend the immediacy of the achievement. You can commend individuals for permanently changing the way that humanity perceives the world, and the high praise and regard is fully deserved. But in doing so, we are also, in a sense, giving them credit for discovering something that appears to be already existent but awaiting discovery. Shakespeare took playwriting to a level never surpassed before or since; Darwin helped revolutionise biology, Einstein did the same with physics; and Mozart did the same with music. But while there's no doubt that these minds, and many like them, have made huge contributions to our world - those contributions seem more like revelations that tap into something more ineffably profound and mysterious than the constituent parts of the contributions themselves.

I believe each of us can pursue our own excellence of self and draw profoundly from the well of potential within us, which involves the gradual bringing out of human qualities that most people believe are reserved for a few hundred special people. That is the scent of genius that we are forever following in the trailing winds of its mysteries. The art of words, numbers, visualisation and music convey deep truths about reality, and form a body of shared experience around which intellects and artists revolve.

Here's an interesting corollary of the above point. Many of the geniuses of yesteryear - in poetry, philosophy, art, literature, music and film - did not acquire the status of 'genius' until years (sometimes centuries) after their work was produced. It's as though humanity had to grow into its own shoes in recognising the wider picture that surrounds the genius of the contributions. We think we have uncovered genius when we come across talents like Shakespeare and Einstein, who can give exhibition to such extraordinary human qualities – either with brilliant use of language, or mathematical formulae in science, or something of that kind. But while it is true that some people are endowed with higher mental acuity and greater vision than others, genius is vast enough and prevalent enough to encourage the greatest exploration of the brilliant potential inside yourself. This might be the strangest paradox about genius; its provenance belongs without, but it can only be personally cultivated from drawing out the greatest potential from within.

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Excerpt from The Genius of the Invisible God.....

One of the ways I define genius is that the average, good and great producers of their craft do what others might be able to do with similar time, effort and creativity - whereas the genius produces craft that nearly all others would never produce with similar time, effort and creativity. In other words, a genius operates not by doing more within a dimension, but by dipping his or her toe into a new one that others didn’t see existed. Given the same tools, time, and imagination, the genius extracts results that the rest of us couldn’t even conceive were possible. When you consider real geniuses – like Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Dirac, von Neumann, da Vinci, Shakespeare, Mozart, etc - you’ll notice that where other intelligent and creative people improve upon what is, the genius taps into a profound landscape that reflects what could be - and makes it real before the world even has conception or language for it.

Engaging with the mind of a genius – if one is encouraged to pursue it to the maximum potential - is rather like sensing the gradual enlightenment as one watches the glistening night sky turn into a beautiful sunlight next morning. For ourselves as we watch the light illuminate the sky, the hours may seem like a long hunting trip; times of fighting the cold wind and steep climbs are interrupted with intoxicating moments of suspense and delight at what one finds when the uniformity of space and time is jolted by a new perspective, as we get more enthralled by the object of our chase.

I believe that the closer we can get to feeding our own genius and developing our potential, the more we will start to see that the world is full of philosophical cheats and deceptions – many of which begin as honest enquiries and steadfast endeavours. I use the term ‘feeding our genius’ because in this book I am going to speak of genius as being more than just a qualitative part of a human’s abilities – for I believe that whatever ‘genius’ we possess internally, either through inspiration or perspiration, is always being fed by a bigger form of genius out there in the conceptual landscape. We are always extrapolating from bigger things than ourselves.

William Burroughs drew a distinction in art between tonal and nagual art. The tonal universe is the more empirically predictable cause-and-effect universe, whereas the nagual is the less foreseeable, intractable elements of reality that burst through unannounced and beyond the radar of prediction. Burroughs saw the nagual as more unpredictable and harder to creatively construct than the more predictable and manageable patterns of the tonal. As he reflected, "For the nagual to gain access, the door of chance must be open".

Whether it be the painter with his formulae of form and colour applied to a canvas, or the writer with the congregation of words to paper, the true ‘genius’ of creativity is not in the person doing it, but it is being continually re-crafted by tapping into something transcendent of the self. This isn't a scientific viewpoint, it is an artistic feeling. Norman Mailer once suggested that William Burroughs was "possessed by genius" as opposed to ‘being’ a genius or even ‘possessing’ genius. The dynamic spontaneity of ‘genius’ is nagual according to Mailer and Burroughs, and to be possessed ‘by’ genius is to tap into something altogether special and grander than ourselves. At first glance, it might seem like something that finds itself located in the collective nature of human minds, in that we share it, and all, in our own way, seek to take possession of it. But even the collective human minds are obtaining the genius from somewhere much grander than themselves - it is too grand to be contained merely within the human species, stupendous as it is, nonetheless.

Normal Distributions Normally Aren't Normal

 

I saw an interesting complaint about distributions in GCSE results, and then a second article, posing the loaded question “Why do some subjects not have bell curves (see here and here)?” The big issue with their line of enquiry is apparent confusion between what they call a ‘normative process’ and a normal distribution. You see, most bell-shaped data you encounter in the real world isn’t actually normal - at least not in the strict mathematical sense. The normal distribution - also known as the Gaussian distribution - follows a precise mathematical form: 

f(x) = 1 / sqrt(2 * pi * sigma^2) * exp(-(x - mu)^2 / (2 * sigma^2))

It’s perfectly symmetric around its mean mu, defined only by its mean and variance sigma^2, and has tidy, well-known proportions, where about 68% of values fall within one standard deviation of the mean, about 95% within two, and about 99.7% within three. That’s the pure Gaussian world - it’s elegant, compact, but rarer than you think, so it’s not really ‘normal’ at all. If it's not perfectly symmetric and unbounded on both sides (that is, with no limits, skews, outliers and mixtures) then it is not technically a normal distribution. 

So, it’s certainly the case that many real-world data sets produce histograms that look like bell curves, yet deviate in subtle but crucial ways. Some such examples would be fat tailed distributions (like in many financial data sets), which have more extreme outliers than a Gaussian predicts; asymmetric processes (like biological weight categories); and combinations of multiple subpopulations (like male and female height) can produce an overall bell shape that’s not truly normal, to name three examples. All that is to say, the bell curve is a shape, but it’s not a guarantee of normality. Anyone who uses the concept of normality when it isn’t really there opens themselves up to errors, like the increased likelihood of underestimating the probability of rare or extreme events, like misapplying statistical tests that rely on Gaussian assumptions, and like drawing misleading inferences from what seems on the surface like ‘tidy’ data.

If I may suggest a better way to think about normal here. The normal distribution is an idealisation - a mathematical lens that sometimes fits reality well, but often only approximately. Real data lives in a messier world. Consequently, while the Schools Week article rightly draws attention to the potential harms of rigidly applying a bell curve to educational outcomes, it implicitly assumes that the bell curve is a natural or unavoidable benchmark for student ability, which is a hasty assumption. Student performance, like many social phenomena, is influenced by a mix of factors - personality profiles, teaching quality, socioeconomic background, learning differences, levels of freedom, etc - which do not necessarily conform neatly to a symmetric Gaussian model.

More broadly, this reflects a deeper issue that has pervaded education for too long: the push toward homogenisation - an obsession with fitting diverse learners into uniform models of “average” performance. This not only misrepresents the true distribution of abilities (especially at the upper end), but also unfairly neglects or distorts those who fall outside the assumed curve.

Instruments of Love

 

I like how Bishop Barron uses the term "instrument of love" to describe a person who has been transformed by God's grace, and how he encourages us to enable all our circumstances to become a force for good and a participation in God’s redemptive work. Let your riches be an instrument of love; let your poverty be an instrument of love; let your celibacy be an instrument of love; let your marriage be an instrument of love; let your desire to find a beloved be an instrument of love; let your good health be an instrument of love; let your ill health be an instrument of love; let your work be an instrument of love; let your rest be an instrument of love; let your failures be an instrument of love; let your successes be an instrument of love, that sort of thing.

To live in grace is to let every circumstance become an instrument of love – and that’s perhaps one of our best prayers; Teach us, Lord, to turn all that we are, and all that we are becoming, into an instrument of love.

Sexual Equality = More Domestic Violence?

I saw on Tyler Cowen's blog that he was a little perplexed by the fact that the Nordic countries are supposed to be the most sex-equal nation in the world (he says "gender-equal nations", but that's the wrong term), but yet alongside this, they also appear to have a disproportionately high rate of domestic violence against women.

Tyler, who from what I've seen doesn't get perplexed about very much, is perplexed because "logically violence against women would be expected to drop as women gained equal status in a society". To me, that expectation is far from obvious - so much so, in fact, that I'd even be inclined to expect the opposite: that as women gain equal status the likelihood of violence against them increases.

Don't get me wrong, I'd really love it not to be the case, and as male attitudes towards women hopefully continue to improve, then that societal betterment may well offset some of the aforementioned increased likelihood of violence. But given that men have equal status with other men and fight all the time, I wouldn't have thought the 'equal status' factor is the thing that reduces incidents of male violence against women.

A study from a few years back explored this contradiction - the so-called Nordic paradox. Why, after all, should it be perplexing? If a boy grows up being told that men are stronger than women, and that a “real man” never hits a woman, he’s learned a kind of protective chivalry rooted in hierarchy. But if that same boy is instead taught that men and women are equal in jut about every way - and that chivalry is patronising or patriarchal - then why wouldn’t we expect some men to treat women as physical equals, including in moments of conflict? That's not a defence of violence, obviously - it’s simply a reminder of the age-old economic wisdom of unintended side effects. Equality changes not just laws and opportunities, but also the cultural scripts that once governed restraint.

There may be other factors at play here, though - like, for example, perhaps people in the Nordic countries are more likely to report abuse. Often a society with lower reported rates have much lower reporting rates, and this may be true in reverse here, especially as Nordic women’s high economic independence might also mean they’re less financially trapped in abusive relationships, so abuse is more likely to be reported or result in prosecution.

There are many unintended consequences in life, and this might be one such case. 

Writer's Update: The Challenge To Be An Important Writer

 

Bound up in one's endeavours to succeed in a particular craft - in my case hoping to be a published Christian author - are several tricky hurdles to overcome to make an author publishable. I think this can be illustrated by referring to Ricardo's well-known distinction in economics between the intensive and extensive margins of cultivation. The extensive margin refers to the process of bringing new, previously uncultivated (and typically less fertile) land into production as demand for agricultural goods increases. The intensive margin, on the other hand, involves increasing output on already cultivated land by applying more labour or capital. At the intensive margin, adding more inputs to the same land leads to diminishing marginal returns. As demand grows, it may become more economical to expand cultivation to new land, even if it is of lower quality. This is Ricardo's rent theory; economic rent arises from differences in land productivity, where more fertile land (closer to markets or naturally more productive) generates a surplus over the least productive land in use - that is, the land at the extensive margin.

In the economics of Christian writing, the extensive margin is like finding entirely new topics or niches where few have written before - akin to cultivating new, less fertile land. For a Christian writer, this means exploring fresh or overlooked subjects where the competition is low, but the audience or interest might be limited. The intensive margin is like writing more articles on well-established, already saturated topics - like adding more effort on already cultivated land - which is a challenge in a crowded market, where fresh and uniquely interesting ideas become harder to find and produce. As with diminishing returns in farming, the marginal cost of originality rises, because anything truly fresh and unique has a higher probability of being either too niche or arcane for public consumption, or not wholly factual, because the field is already crowded with smart people's work over centuries, and surely if it's truly fresh and unique in a good way, someone will have written it already.

Consequently, just as in agriculture, breaking into the Christian writers' market and making a significant difference involves the key balance between exploring new, less trodden ground (extensive margin) and deepening effort in saturated topics with high barriers to originality (intensive margin).

I think some of my books are at the extensive margin, bringing fresh and unique perspectives but risking limited readership. I'd say The Genius of the Invisible God is at the most extensive margin, where there nothing quite like it out there - and as so much of it came from (I believe) direct Divine revelation, I'm not sure anyone else could or would ever write it.

And I think Benevolent Libertarianism and The Ecstasy of Divine Goodness are slightly at the extensive margin too - even though the topics (economics and morality), are well-trodden. I think those works stand out in their field as being comprehensive and compellingly fresh enough to make a splash - they each take a well-trodden subject and flesh it out to its deepest, most expansive treatment, expression and dimensions.

The Divine Truths of Love is similarly on the borderline; it is at the intensive margin, because love is a very well covered topic in writing history, and it's hard to break new ground; but it's also at the extensive margin in its uniquely comprehensive writing style, and the breadth of elements contained within one book.

Dear Treasured You and my as yet untitled Christian apologetics book both occupy the intensive margin - they are the ones most surrounded by existing literature - and probably require the most exceptional creative distinctions in order to stand out.

This is the challenge ahead – but it’s always a pleasure and privilege to be on such a journey.

If you're one who prays, then all prayers for this next stage of my journey are appreciated. 

An Interesting But Flawed Idea About Free Will

 

Many popular formulations of propositions about free will don’t strike me as being very compelling, often because they rest on either category errors or definitional errors (sometimes both). But there’s one that posits that God’s foreknowledge of our actions doesn’t take away our freedom to act otherwise – which is problematic from a Christian perspective, but isn’t uninteresting (if you’ll excuse the double negative). The upshot of the proposition is this; even if God knows that I will do A, that doesn’t mean I’m compelled to do A. I remain capable of choosing differently. If I were instead to do B, then God’s knowledge would simply encompass that choice rather than A. In other words, it’s my decision that grounds what God knows, not God’s knowledge that determines my decision. I am therefore genuinely free in what I do, though whatever I freely choose is perfectly known by God.

There’s a problem with this idea, though - it amounts to the proposition that my action explains God’s knowledge, not the other way around. Even in His timeless realm, God’s knowledge can’t be dependent on the actual choices I make, because He sees them in an eternal present as part of His omniscient atemporal knowledge suite.

Knowledge depends on truth, and my future free action cannot metaphysically ground God’s eternal knowledge, since God’s knowing is not temporally or causally posterior to human action. Just because the action hasn’t yet occurred (from my perspective) it doesn’t negate the omniscience of the action from God’s perspective. There is too much modal tension in any alternative theory, because even if God’s knowledge depends on my choice, the truth that “God knows I will do A” is already necessary for God to be omniscient, meaning it’s not metaphysically possible that I do otherwise and God’s belief remain true. In other words, it’s epistemically impossible for God to be mistaken, yet metaphysically impossible for me to do otherwise without altering that necessary truth, so the argument comes to grief.

On Love of Country

 

Alongside the Christian love, in which we are called to love all people (Matthew 22:37-39, John 13:3-35), we tend to love people in two ways; we love some because they are wonderful people and we enjoy what they bring to our lives, and we try to love the less wonderful people because it is better for them (and us, of course) that they are loved. To that end, love of country is really love of people - like one tries to love friends, work colleagues and acquaintances - because the official nature of a country (governments, politics, institutions, media, culture, business, etc) are more like transactions between systems than connections between individuals.

Consequently, I think love for country really means love for people who we’d ordinarily choose to love, because there are plenty of people in every country who we find it harder to love and are not naturally inclined towards them. But then the opposite to the first kind of love is the failure to love those who are not like us, and that is the less Divine kind, and goes against the Christian virtues of God’s love. And once that has set in, it becomes more likely that people will develop a dislike of ‘otherness’ - those who are not like them, which is when patriotism can easily descend into nationalism, and even racism, bigotry and intolerance.

But it won’t do to just write off everyone concerned about immigration as being of the latter kind, because it is quite possible to love everyone in the first sense and the second sense, but still remember that a country is very much like a sort of business transaction where it is not always prudent to have uncontrolled immigration, or let in people who values are opposed to and dangerous towards our own. Therefore, love of country in the healthy kind can also mean, and sometimes should mean, that the best way to love individuals in one’s own country is to have a sensible immigration policy, not a reckless open-door policy under the dubious and insincere pretext of being merely seen to be virtuous, tolerant and welcoming.

Your Friend’s Folly Is Your Foe

 

You’ve probably heard it said that your enemy’s enemy is your friend (which mostly isn’t true). But what is mostly true is that your friend’s folly is often your biggest foe.

In my economics book Benevolent Libertarianism, I talked about how the biggest competition for the job for which you are applying is not a rich entrepreneur, but someone with similar skills and experiences who’d be more likely to express an interest. I offered an analogy that, when on the pull in a nightclub, average looking Graham’s biggest competition is not gorgeous George, it is average looking Gary and average looking Gordon.

This can be summarised as a reliable rule of thumb, that our fiercest competition usually comes from those most like us, not those far away from us, because they overlap with us in skills, goals, and audiences, and compete for the same space.

I feel this most acutely in a different way about my Christian faith. The biggest impediments to the tenability and credibility of the gospel are frequently not atheists, agnostics or members of other religions – they are the science-distorting fundies, crackpots, hucksters, snake-handlers, weaponisers of scripture, ill-mannered congregation members, charlatan prosperity-gospel peddlers, whooping self-appointed prophet grifters, and cultish sectarians – who are, basically, all fellow Christians who purport to be on the same team.

We’ve seen that in politics too. We saw how the biggest threat to the Blair brand of centre-left Labour became Corbyn’s hard left. We’ve seen how the biggest threat to the Conservative Party have been those who’ve actually taken their place as being conservative while the party has drifted off to the centre left.

It’s definitely something to watch out for - it’s often not the opponent across the trench who undoes you, but the fool recklessly waving your own flag.

Should We Love or Hate the Devil?

 

This is somewhat tongue in cheek and a bit whimsical, but it got me wondering. If the Devil is one of our enemies, and we are called to love our enemies, then are we called to love the Devil, despite hating what he does and who he is? Some humans are awful, but we are encouraged to hate the sins but love the sinner. Should we, then, hate the sins of the Devil but love him? I don’t know. We are told in scripture to resist the Devil, to hate what is evil, but does that mean we should hate the Devil, even though we are told not to hate other humans who are our enemies and persecute us? If we should love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, and the Devil is our enemy and persecutes us, then should we pray for him? And if we pray for him, wouldn’t we pray for him out of love? Or do we not bother praying for the Devil because we think he is beyond saving (and, therefore, note the opportunity costs with regard to the other prayers we could be offering up instead), and because we already know in scripture that the Devil will be judged and cast into eternal punishment (Revelation 20:10)? I suppose if we must ‘resist the Devil’, then we probably shouldn’t give him the time of the day in our thought processes. But we should be mindful of his influence to be alert to his schemes.

Just a few off-the-peg thoughts to consider. 

The Future Of Meat Consumption

 

It seems likely that killing animals for meat consumption is one of those admittedly very long transitional periods in the human story, and some people feel it will probably be an improvement when we can produce our own meat in the lab, artificially synthesising the protein, fat and carbohydrates that make up the meat’s constituents.

But what we mustn't overlook is that the reason tens of millions of animals are used in livestock production each year, and the reason they occupy a lot of the Earth’s land and require a lot of resources themselves, is not because we are all clumsily disregarding the climate, it’s because there are no viable, affordable alternatives that can presently improve upon the resources that meat-eating on a global scale requires.

Activism like vegetarianism and veganism increases demand for different products and changes behaviour, to which the market has responded. For the meat eaters, when lab-produced meat becomes cheaper to provide than farmland meat, many suppliers will switch to it. Given that livestock animals are bred for human consumption, then if it takes off, a switch to lab-based meat will reduce the number of livestock animals, thereby reducing resources required to feed animals and land required for their habitat.

This pattern isn’t unique to meat production, of course - it reflects a broader principle in technological progress, where social pressure can raise awareness but rarely substitutes for scalable efficiency. I explained the underlying mechanism in a paper on power laws and parsimony, and this casts lots of doubt on the success of trying to edge these things along before we are scientifically, technologically and economically ready to do so.

This also follows another rule of thumb in economics - that if it’s beneficial for suppliers to do something that reduces their own costs, resources and labour, they are already incentivised to do so, because suppliers generally respond to cost incentives (though factors like taxation, subsidies, consumer preferences, and regulation can delay technological shifts even when more efficient options exist). 

Britain is struggling a lot right now from lack of growth, and much of this is to do with the present systemic misallocation of resources that artificially raises the price of energy, and drives policies that have serious negative unintended consequence. Alas, the situation will only worsen if we don't elect politicians who have the will and competence to reverse it.