Good Science, In Good Faith

It's always struck me as absurd that so many people think there is incompatibly between good science and good Christianity. By 'good science', I mean science that does not believe it has anything to say about the truth of Christianity, and by 'good Christianity' I mean a Christian faith that does not seek to distort or deny scientific facts. This wisdom follows a logical path, which says that if x has no bearing on the truth of y, then one (from either side of the argument) cannot use x as an attempt to deny the truth of y. We do not need to refer to arthritis when studying geoengineering, but being an expert in geoengineering doesn't undermine people's experiences of arthritis. We do not need to refer to psychotherapy when studying calculus, but being a mathematician doesn't undermine the qualities of psychotherapy. Similarly, we do not need to refer to the Christian faith when doing science, but nothing we do in science undermines the probability that Christianity is true. How can it? Christianity is true, and science is the most useful experimental tool we have - both are perfectly compatible when engaged with properly.

Unfortunately, many of the most prominent spokespeople for atheism and for Christianity are under the assumption that they have to defend their science against religious faith, or that they have to defend their religious faith against scientism (the mistaken belief that science is only way to render truth about reality). Of course, if you are riddled with the mistaken assumption that science is the only way to render truth about reality, then you are likely to infer the absence of evidence for Christianity; just as if Jack is riddled with the mistaken assumption about the connection between arthritis and geoengineering, he is likely to infer from his studies of geoengineering that claims about arthritis are dubious.

A proper analysis of the situation would reveal that both science and Christianity are underpinned by four primary qualities; truth, mental cognition, mathematics and logic - all of which are instantiated in the person of God. Even if you don't yet believe in God, you should at least attest to the fact that science and Christianity are both underwritten by truth, mental cognition, mathematics and logic, and that science is inadequate for the matter of attempting to supersede or replace religious faith. Scientism's arguments against the existence of God (from Dawkins, Hitchens, Krauss, etc) are like those of a crazed chef, who tries to cook a luxury banquet with only bread and water as ingredients, and then when he hears from the guests that their meal wasn't very tasty, concludes that banquets are not really very luxurious after all.

 

Cloaked and Framed: The Twin Tactics of Deception

 

Let me ask you a question, first associated with the brilliant mathematician John von Neumann. This question is easy, and you should get it right in seconds. But it sounds harder than it is, and therefore many of you probably won’t get it right in seconds. Here it is:

Two trains are 20 miles apart, moving steadily toward one another on the same track. At the very front of one engine, a fly takes off and begins darting toward the other train. As soon as it reaches it, the fly instantly turns around and heads back to the first train - repeating this back-and-forth dash again and again. The little fly keeps this up without rest until the trains finally collide, crushing it in between. The fly maintains a speed of 15 miles per hour, while each train chugs forward at 10 miles per hour. How much ground does the fly cover before meeting its unfortunate end?

The answer is 15 miles. If it wasn’t immediately obvious to you, once I elaborate, you’ll see why it might have been. Each train is moving toward the other at 10 miles per hour, so their combined closing speed is 20 miles per hour. Since they start 20 miles apart, they will collide in 1 hour. That’s an easy calculation. An even easier one is that if the fly is constantly flying at 15 miles per hour, and the trains take 1 hour to collide, then the fly will have travelled a total distance of 15 miles before it gets squashed.

The answer being 15 miles is not tricky. But what interests me here is how an easy question can appear hard due to the way it is worded, where those considering the question become overwhelmed by the extraneous information, by how the question is phrased, and by how the style of the question appears to be asking the reader to sum the converging series of fly movements back and forth rather than just asking a simple mathematics question (see my blog post on the Wason selection task for a similar example).

I believe this observation - and its converse - has practical application in many areas of public discourse. It’s what I observe as cloaking in overcomplexity, and its converse, framing in oversimplicity.

Cloaked in overcomplexity
When people want to deceive you, they often cloak a narrative with unnecessary (but enticing) detail, encouraging the public to reach for a complex approach (e.g., summing an infinite series of fly trips) rather than recognising the simplicity of the situation. The ever-increasing bureaucracies (taxation, regulation, risk, health and safety, etc) are classic political examples of this. The media and its employment of propaganda is another; overwhelming people with irrelevant data, half-truths, or emotionally provocative content, are tools used to obscure what’s often actually a more straightforward set of truths. Likewise, in some branches of philosophy - especially moral philosophy and epistemology - people sometimes get bogged down in edge cases at the expense of a clearer conception of the fundamentals.

And, I think, by far the most harmful cases of this are when it comes to the Christian gospel - where the most straightforward message of God’s love and grace is frequently overcomplicated by intellectual gatekeeping and analytical abstraction. Don’t get me wrong, these deep dives into theological complexity can be fun and informative, but they are best understood when one has got a grip on the basics first, and accepted Christ as Lord, not as an in prospect game of mental gymnastics that seeks to undermine or obfuscate the faith.

At its core, the gospel is breathtakingly straightforward: God loves you. Jesus died and rose again to reconcile you to God. Trust in Him, and you are forgiven, free, and fully loved. We’re not called to dumb down the gospel - just to remove the unnecessary fog and let the light shine clearly. Like Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 2:2, “I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” Ideally, the best gospel communication comes in simple, accessible and gentle form, before it gets so deep, profound and bold.

Framed in oversimplicity
Just as complexity can be fabricated through cloaking, oversimplicity can be misleading too. Over-simplification is perhaps in the top few human follies, where folk oversimplify intricate systems and lead to poorly thought-out policies or public reactions. And this is not only an interesting dynamic in relation to the cloaking in overcomplexity problem, it actually means that the public is getting misled at both ends. On the one hand, bad agents habitually cloak a narrative with unnecessary but enticing detail to ensure you miss the simplicity of what’s faulty about their claim. Yet often in the same speech, debate article or policy, they get you in the opposite way by using oversimplicity to mislead you in other direction. This means some propositions simultaneously sound logical on the surface, but fail under scrutiny, and sound reasonable under a cloaked narrative, but defective when the rhetorical smoke clears and the proposition is examined in the light of clear reasoning.

The upshot is, being aware of how presentation affects perception helps us evaluate arguments based on content, not just style. And it gives us the language - and hopefully the courage - to pull people up when they’re guilty of cloaking in overcomplexity and/or framing in oversimplicity. Once you recognise the pattern - whether it's unnecessary complication or deceptive simplification - you're harder to mislead.

Greatest Gift, Greatest Gratitude

Consider the question of how grateful we should be for things. Consider 4 events for which I’d be grateful: 

A)    A chap walking in front of me holds the door open a little longer so I can get through.

B)    A neighbour lends me his wood splitter so I can cut my biggest logs.

C)    A neighbour gifts me his wood splitter so I can continue to cut my biggest logs.

D)    A friend saves my life by rescuing me from a burning building.

Clearly, if I should be more grateful for D than B, or C than A, then as a rule, how grateful x should be to y for z depends on the relationship between the intentions of both agents, the expected and actual benefits to the recipient, and the expected and actual costs of the giver. This holds that the costlier the gift to the giver, the more gratitude is appropriate from the beneficiary, providing both individuals partake in a mutually willing exchange. A neighbour who gifts me his wood splitter purely to bless me more than him incurs more costs than a neighbour who has bought a better wood splitter, and just wants to get rid of his old one.

Given the foregoing equation, then, the greatest debt of gratitude in the world is one of such abundance that it’s astonishing how many people alive today pay little or no regard to it. I’m talking, of course, about Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. If a neighbour gave you his wood splitter and you showed no gratitude, that would be bad - and most people would feel uncomfortable in withholding their thanks and gratitude. But even such a generous act is almost nothing compared to the cross, which stands as the greatest act of self-giving in all history. It’s the greatest Being doing the absolute most with the greatest gift at the greatest cost for the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

God becoming human and giving His life on the cross is the not just the greatest act, necessitating the greatest gratitude, it is the ultimate benchmark for all human gratitude - not merely because the benefit to us is eternal life, peace with God, and adoption as His children, but because the cost to Christ was beyond human measure. He bore the wrath of sin, the shame of crucifixion, and the abandonment of the Father - all willingly, because of His love for us. Therefore, whether we are aware of it or not, the greatest Being doing the absolute most with the greatest gift at the greatest cost for the greatest good for the greatest number of people underpins all good acts we bestow upon each other, because all good acts are reflections of the greatest of all good acts.

On Whether There Really Is A 'Climate Crisis'

 

The term ‘Climate crisis’ is uttered at will these days, and the danger is that young people brought up in this normalised Overton Window period won’t even question it. Let’s try to explore what we are dealing with here. The concept of a "crisis" is not straightforward, and different people interpret it in different ways depending on their perspective, values, and epistemic standards. Some friends of mine think there is a climate crisis, and they would take it to mean that we are reaching a catastrophic threshold; a tipping point where irreversible and extreme damage is inevitable, such as runaway global warming, mass species extinction, or the collapse of major ecosystems. Some other friends of mine think climate change is already causing widespread harm and demand immediate large-scale action to prevent worsening consequences. Others I know concede that there are urgent climate problems that need solving, but would only call it a moderate crisis. Perhaps you could call these interpretations of a crisis red hot, hot and warm (pun intended). 

Knowing the nature of the British public, I might even go so far as to say that the majority of people in the UK think there is a climate crisis. But for a nation, this is problematic politically and economically because these conditions are complex, multi-faceted, and difficult to conceptualise in a single framework like ‘crisis’. Most of the population as individuals do not fully understand all the interconnected elements of climate science, economics, and geopolitics that would justifiably define what a crisis is, yet there is widespread consensus that there is a crisis.

The trouble is, when you look at the majority of reported crises in socio-political history, we tend to only be able to recognise them as crises retrospectively, once their consequences became clear. As Hegel famously said, “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk”. The difficulty, then, of claiming we are in a climate crisis before it has happened, where our margin of error increases with every year of future projection, means that if the conditions for a crisis can be claimed to be consensual but not individually understood, it’s harder to epistemologically justify the claim that the crisis is real, especially if you understand that there are a lot of bad and corrupt agents in society in whose interests it is to peddle the narrative that there is a climate crisis. It is highly likely that almost all the individual agents pushing the climate crisis agenda hardest could not explain to you with reason, evidence and logic why there is a crisis. And yet they exist in society as influencers who can push it to the point where most people will believe there is one.

What would ordinarily be matters of empirical fact, economic reasoning, scientific evaluation, and right and wrong are now so routinely politicised and monetised - where most have a tribal stance to defend, or a political or financial incentive - that it’s now prohibitively difficult to track reliable appropriate expertise and rigid interpretive frameworks for large and complex matters like this.

If we think of the value of knowledge as the total benefit it provides to human understanding and decision-making, then wrongly declaring a crisis of this magnitude is one of the costliest errors that can be wrought on society – and is already proving to be one of the most financially costly errors we’ve ever made as a species.

In terms of wholesale epistemic prudence and utility – that is, what we know, and what we know we know - the only responsible conclusion to reach at this point is, in my estimation, roughly as follows. Fossil fuels have been the principal driver of our climb out of poverty, into a decent standard of living in the past 150 years. We are undergoing more technological advances than any individual can keep up with, and solving problems at a rate that far exceeds the climate issues about which the fundies are hysterical. The ideological error the eco-hysterics make is similar to the Malthusian one - it is stuck in arithmetical ratios and not geometrical ratios. Energy is not a zero-sum game. Prematurely limiting the use of fossil fuels while demonising the very energy sources that have transformed the human population is not only short-sighted and ungrateful, it's a toxic message to send to our young. 

The eco-vandals are not 'prophets'; they are the entitled, uninformed narcissists of society who have no sense of perspective, very little gratitude for humanity's past struggles and current achievements – and they are too uninformed to understand that progression is mostly combinatorial, as various technologies and ideas build on one another to create exponential benefits.

I have written a book on this subject, where I have spent a long time carefully researching everything from both sides - whereupon I concluded that there is not a climate crisis, and there is every reason to believe that collective human ingenuity and increased personal responsibility are tools that make solving climate problems well within our grasp. If only more people had reached more carefully thought out conclusions, and been much more circumspect in their reactionary decision-making and short-sighted profligate spending, the current climate debacle wouldn’t look quite so grim, and be quite so costly to members of the public.

Alas, I believe the pervasiveness of the ‘climate crisis’ consensus is primarily driven by two things: 

1) People are very gullible

2) There are a lot of bad agents in society willing to exploit widespread gullibility

Virtue Disguised In False Light

 

In case you haven’t noticed what’s been happening in the past few decades, regarding some of the most toxic things in society right now, I’ve developed a handy checklist: 

1) Victimhood ideology disguised as compassion 

2) Tyrannical ideology disguised as social justice 

3) Nanny-state ideology disguised as responsibility 

4) Authoritarian ideology disguised as leadership 

5) Censorship ideology disguised as safeguarding 

6) Conformist ideology disguised as unity 

7) Groupthink ideology disguised as empathy 

8) Intolerance ideology disguised as inclusivity 

9) Disintegration ideology disguised as tolerance 

All connected to and underpinned by the worst and most pervasive one: 

10) Anti-Christ ideologies disguised as virtue.

Remember, the term antichrist literally means something or someone that is "against Christ" or "opposed to Christ" - not to be confused with the specific figure of The Antichrist prophesied in scripture (although they are related, of course)

I hope you thought about each one carefully, and didn’t just whizz past them. These are a great many of the fundamental assaults on UK society right now. 

Now, I’m not one for conspiracy theories - because most things that sound like a conspiracy theory usually are. But what I’m now going to say might sound like a bit like conspiracy to the uninitiated, but it really isn’t. These ideologies are, in part, a deliberate, orchestrated attempt to undermine Christian truths and influences by people who seek to acquire or protect the self-serving power, authority and influence they have attained. And they are, in part, the results of a scrambled bottom-up attempt of individuals to present themselves as solutions to societal problems, but are in reality, distortions and dismantlement of the values that Christianity upholds.

The promotion of division, control, conformity, intolerance and the disintegration of the family unit under the guise of compassion and tolerance, is a combined deliberate and accidental attempt to undermine Christian principles of individual freedom, personal responsibility, and the sanctity of the family unit. Christianity teaches the importance of personal accountability, love, and truth, while these ideologies distort those virtues to elevate the state, the collective or the powerful individuals in society over God.

In many of the bottom-up cases, this erosion is a passive shift, but in the top-down attempts, it is a deliberate Promethean re-engineering of societal norms aimed at replacing the Divine standards. And for those who study God’s word, the Bible gives many prophecies about this, and in addition to antichrist influences (especially in the letters of John), the Bible presents a vivid and alarming picture of the rise of The Antichrist; a deceptive end-times ruler who emerges onto the world stage through political cunningness and spiritual deceit.

For example, in Daniel 7 and 8, he is symbolised as a "little horn" who arises among ten kings, speaking boastfully and waging war against God’s people. Daniel 8 elaborates that this figure will be skilled in manipulation, will cause deceit to prosper, and will consider himself superior to others. These passages point to a political ascent marked by strategic conquest, rising from a coalition of nations - perhaps something that simulates a revived modern day version of the Roman Empire in the shape of a global alliance. The Antichrist is more than just one person, of course, it’s a form of dominance that is deeply political, and one which has the power to subdue others to consolidate its own authority.

In 2 Thessalonians 2:3-12, St. Paul echoes this warning, describing the Antichrist as the “man of lawlessness.” - which I take to mean someone who can exalt himself above all that is called God and will sit in the temple of God proclaiming himself to be divine. In a way that Nietzsche forewarned (although with a different perspective), he will use false signs and deceptive wonders to mislead those who have rejected the truth, blending political control with religious dominance. I know that tyrants who act as a counterfeit Messiah, and elicit spiritual/political/economic deception to unify and control the masses under his rule, are nothing new - but I think what’s more compelling about these prophecies is a matter of scale.

We now live in times in which mass global connectivity and worldwide attention is possible, and I think that is going to be one of the key elements in the fulfilment of these prophecies (this globalised factor is also true of prophecies like in Matthew 24:14, Revelation 11:9-10, Revelation 13:7, Revelation 13:14-18, Revelation 16:14-16, Revelation 18:11-17). For the Antichrist to appear as the beast from the sea, empowered by Satan, and rule over every tribe, language, and nation, we need a globalised world, and this is symbolised as a modern day fall of Babylon – which is a symbol of the world’s corrupt political and economic systems.

I’m not saying we live in the final part of end times (although I know many Christians who believe we do) - but it should be plain to see that at the heart of this contemporary transformation is a rejection of God’s authority, and a push to place ultimate power in human hands, whether through state control, ideological conformity, social engineering or simply masses of individuals acting on their own whims and desires unaware of the bigger picture or influence this is having. And it should also be plain to see that these are the same mechanisms that are foretold in those prophecies. They all work not only to undermine the individual’s relationship with God, but also to replace the Divine order with a gradual collapse of the moral and spiritual values that lead us all the way up to God’s Truth in Christ.

A Reflection

By and large, I don’t get heavily involved in much politics (and certainly not party politics) or mainstream media narratives. For years, I’ve got a strong sense of how things really work, with the narrative cartel’s hands behind the curtain, and that has only enhanced as I’ve got older, and the world has become even more under their thrall (see my blog The Maze and the Watchtower: Seeing Beyond the Illusion for an initial eye-opener). The world, for all its top-down pretences, is steered not by democracy, the perceived good for the electorate, or the supposed will of the people, but by a quiet, calculating network of manipulators who understand that the easiest way to control a population is not through overt tyranny, but through the careful engineering of ideas, beliefs and perception. I think the more we delve into it together, the clearer you’d see how things really are.

I understand how, for some, this can sound like conspiracy theory, but I can assure you it’s not. This narrative cartel really do understand that fear, anxiety and division are the most potent political currencies, and they mint them in national, and sometimes global quantities, with the primary aim of keeping the masses unapprised, disoriented, alienated, and perpetually in need of interventions that just happen to consolidate more power in the hands of the very people who either caused the problems or pretend they have the solutions to them.

And without being too much of a Cassandra figure (I prefer Jeremiah), I’ve long since come to conclude, often reluctantly, that with the continual acquiescence of the people, there is no realistic way to significantly change things or thwart the aims of this cabal of puppet masters. As well as seizing control of the narrative, they’ve convinced most people that they should be begging for more of it. They are doing the devil’s work for him. And like quicksand, I believe the more people struggle to get out of it through some opposing ideology, tribal loyalty, or even some well-meaning solutions, the more they are dragged under, and the faster they’re pulled into the suffocating depths - because division is a key part of the deception.

Consequently, I’ve resolved to live in a way that tries as best as I can to detach myself from it, knowing that the best life I can live is one that centres itself on God, scripture, on my loved ones, friends, family, private learning, and being servant-hearted in church.

Increasingly, detachment from the above has enabled even more devoted Christian living, and has enhanced my well-being even more, because the above merely distracts and draws us into situations that take the attention off the most valuable things. For me, detachment is not mere resignation - it is a conscious act of preserving my soul’s clarity - actively disassociating myself from the endless spectacle of the superficial maze-running narratives. I believe it’s the only way to find real exhilaration, freedom and peace.

Sure, I do partake in commentary on these matters, in the hope that it might help others detect the cheat and the sheer amount of emotional and intellectual resources it drains from the preoccupants, but I endeavour to not let it steal my gaze from the things of eternal value. 

We Can See God At Work Here If We Pay Close Attention

 

Christianity, when interpreted properly, gets everything right. Here’s one of those profound things it gets right that virtually everyone would know if asked and were honest about it, but to which few pay attention. Picture a staircase, with humans near the bottom. Imagine this staircase represents an upward journey, where each step takes you to higher moral truths and more elevated standards. Moral standards ascend in accordance with God’s goodness and ultimate standard, similar to how true facts are objective imperatives that supersede all falsehoods in accordance with God’s Truth found in Christ.

From this we can recognise 3 key things: 1) All humans can keep tapping into higher standards than the ones in which they are currently operating. 2) However high we climb on the staircase of improvement, we can never reach a point at which there is no further improvement we can make. 3) These imperatives point beyond human ability to God’s holy and perfect nature, where God is at the very top of the staircase (Matthew 5:48: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect”).

What this means is that we continuously recognise higher standards, but cannot fully attain them in our own power - and we can always go higher, but we can never reach the top of the staircase, because that is where God alone is. It’s the strongest indication that the highest standards cannot rest in human construction alone. If humans are the highest minds in the known universe, as atheists believe, then it’s extraordinary that every individual recognises the need for superseding imperatives but cannot ever reach them, and that the only consistent grounding we can conceive is idealised, perfect, transcendent standards. The situation makes sense with God’s nature (perfectly good, holy, just, and loving) providing the highest and ultimate imperatives, but it makes far less sense if we are just naturalistic beings. The true picture is this: 

1)    Human attempts (limited). 

2)    Human ideals (recognised but unattainable). 

3)    God’s perfection (the true grounding). 

Where the staircase illustrates our conception of the hypothetical climb.

The naturalistic, evolutionary reason alone only explains it in part, but like a house of cards, it falls down the higher we try to build it. The correct part is that, yes, humans evolved as social animals, and groups that developed shared rules and expectations (fairness, loyalty, prohibitions on murder, etc) survived better than groups without them. Over time, these moral instincts became deeply ingrained because they helped with cooperation, trust, and long-term survival. And because of this adaptive instinct, and the importance of cooperation and fairness, evolution may have “over-engineered” our sense of duty and obligation, making it feel more absolute and universal than it actually is.

But I think it shows itself to be inadequate, similar to the way that those who think we merely invented mathematics are inadequate – there is no way to construct something that high that is both a) based on ultimate, absolute truth, and b) an ever-ascending staircase of standards that is impossible to keep climbing without sensing further steps still to climb.

Let’s take something like justice as an example. In a Christian framework, the concept of justice can be seen as having an ever‑ascending trajectory, consistently moving from human approximations toward God’s perfect standard. We can start by recognising basic human justice, associated with honesty, keeping promises, treating others fairly, punishing theft, honouring contracts, that sort of thing. And then we can tap into higher standards of human justice, like deeper considerations of human needs, addressing systemic injustices, striving to reduce oppression, that sort of thing. And then, even with profound accomplishments in higher forms of human justice, we can still conceive of ideal aspirations that tap into both a quantitative and qualitative advance up the higher reaches of the staircase – a conceived radical transformation of the world in which full cosmic justice occurs (as per Romans 2:5-6, 2 Corinthians 5:10, and Revelation 20:12-13), but is beyond the scope of ordinary human achievement, however long our evolution carried on.

The whole staircase of justice finds its upper limit in God’s perfect justice, where the very best of our idealised human justice is fully integrated with His Divine love, grace, mercy, and holiness, bringing about perfect foresight of consequences, simultaneous mercy and righteousness, and eternal consistency in accordance with God’s love and goodness.

Consequently, what we have here is a profound sense of God at work in nature, both by what we conceive His ideals to be, and by how evident it is that we fall so short of those standards.

Giffen Beliefs

 

In economics, a Giffen good (popularised by economist Alfred Marshall, but named after the economist Robert Giffen) is something that people consume more of as its price rises, because it is a basic necessity and they can't afford alternatives. A classic illustration of a Giffen good is the humble potato, which served as the most affordable calorie source for impoverished Irish farmers in the mid-1800s. When the devastating potato famine struck, the price of potatoes soared. Ironically, instead of reducing consumption, this price hike forced people to abandon more expensive foods like meat and milk, leaving them even more reliant on potatoes. Whereas in economics, rising prices usually reduce demand - Giffen goods become an economic snare; the costlier the staple became, the fewer options remained beyond it.

On my bike ride this morning, I started thinking of Giffen goods analogically in terms of Giffen beliefs, which would constitute bad beliefs that are harmful in society. Imagine false or harmful beliefs as the psychological equivalent of cheap potatoes - accessible, familiar, and “necessary” to make sense of the world in a difficult or unstable situation. Cults play on these types of belief. As the cost of these beliefs rises - in terms of emotional investment, social alienation, cognitive dissonance, sacrifice, and what have you - the individual becomes more dependent on them.

Like the Irish farmers who had to give up meat and milk to buy more potatoes, the cult member may shed better beliefs (critical thinking, outside relationships, and so forth) to afford the escalating demands of the bad belief system. And, of course, the cult leaders play on this too, because the belief system becomes a psychological trap; the more costly it gets, the harder it becomes to leave, because you’ve sacrificed so much else to stay in it.

Giffen beliefs, like their economic analogue, capture the self-reinforcing nature of harmful outcomes, where the loss of alternatives pushes people deeper into a dire situation, and where the more it costs, the harder it is to abandon.

Why Greatness Produces The Highest & Lowest

 

Christians are fascinating in many ways. Here are two examples from my experience that I’ve mentioned before, but haven’t ever fleshed out beyond succinct epigrams. The first is that I think Christians are both some of the best and worst arguments for God’s existence. Some Christians come across so consistently badly – in their conduct, their thinking and their manners – that if they were the only Christians one ever encountered, then Christianity would seem no truer or more virtuous than communism. Other Christians come across so impressively, with such grace and wisdom, that in them one can sense glimpses of Heaven on earth, and get the strongest indication that Christianity is the truth.

This dovetails with the second observation; that the most prodigious minds I’ve ever encountered are Christians, but so are some of the least prodigious. In other words, humans at their most brilliant in terms of depth of mind, profundity, and creative, emotional expansiveness are Christian – individuals like St. Paul, St. John, and St. James, or in other fields, Pascal, Kierkegaard. Yet some woeful Christians frequently sink to depths of mind that are more intellectually hollow and pitiable than many atheists ever seem to reach.

Given that Christianity is true, and Christians have access to the Creator of the universe, and to a depth of relationship and revelation to which atheists are not privy, this might be one of the strangest things in the world. It’s no surprise that in the greatest minds Christianity amplifies the extremes of human conduct and intellect, but one might be justifiably surprised to find that some Christians descend into the lowest rungs of intellectual sophistication, even below some of the shallowest atheists.

If it’s obvious why Christians reach the great heights – and it should at least be obvious to Christians, who know its truth – then it might not be at all obvious why the Christians reaching the lowest depths of the mind do so. I suppose what we are asking is quite a profound question; why is it that the thing that can engender such astounding cognitive expression at its best can also precipitate the most cringeworthy cognitive failings at its worst? It might be partly a sense of relative expectation, like when a village committee would think it worse if their vicar stole a bicycle than an ordinary member of the community. I think that’s a good prima facie case; we just should expect better from Christians, as they know the Lord, and those sunken defects merely seem exacerbated or magnified on that basis. And we must also remember that the Christian faith, in which God invites anyone to know Him on the basis of the free gift of salvation under grace, is going to include both extremes; the saints and, at first, the wretches – which is another key factor.

But I think the full story is even deeper; I think there are near-paradoxes about the very best things in the world that amplify the very worst things too - like how, in Shakespeare’s sonnet, “Lilies that fester smell even worse than weeds”. Because Christianity is both true, and the enabler of the highest potential in humans, it can magnify both glory and failure because of the power of its truths. When lived faithfully, it produces greatness; but when tainted or neglected, it can produce worse distortions than ordinary unbelief. And perhaps that’s what we should expect; for many of the most egregious failures in society are betrayals of qualities which, at their best, produce the greatest good - like how love inspires some of the most wonderful acts, but in betrayal or loss brings about the worst pain; or like how freedom enables the best human flourishing, creativity, and dignity, yet in excess and without discipline it can descend into chaos and harm; or like how great wealth can be a vehicle for some of the greatest acts of good in the world, but when love of money turns it into selfish greed, it brings about avarice, corruption and chronic discontent. 

It's also similar to how those who live their life in the safe, unremarkable middling currents of destiny face none of the great joys or exhilarations, nor any of the worst tragedies or heartbreaks  - they neither rise to grandeur nor sink to catastrophe – just playing it safe every day of their lives, in a way that at some point, with some honest reflection, should leave them sad and regretful that they never seized life with the passionate truthseeking, courage and wonder that brings about a full life.

This is what we are really reflecting back on when we observe that Christianity, in its vast and paradoxical scope, is not tame at its best or worst. It is the forge in which human greatness and human folly alike are tempered; the light that illuminates the loftiest heights of intellect, love, and virtue, yet casts equally deep shadows in the hearts that turn from its truth or taint it through raw human fault. And that is where some Christians can go astray in ways that those who don’t know God won’t in quite the same way. Like how faith-based deference to scriptural authority produces misinterpretations that cause them to reject established empirical facts about the world; or how binary thinking creates spiritual allegiance that oversimplifies the true complexity of God’s plan; or how, despite St. Paul’s warning in Romans, people under Christian grace can exhibit a haughtiness that puts even worldly pride to shame, as if proximity to divine favour heightens the hubris rather than humbles the heart.

Of course, the benefits of being a Christian far outweigh the alternative – in fact, not just outweigh, but illuminate and redeem every shadow of human existence in a way that false rejection cannot. But just as the Christian faith bears witness to the extraordinary potential of the transformed human soul, the taints and distortions become a testament to the magnitude of fallenness, like how fire, when left unchecked or misdirected out of control, soon razes forests and turns human habitats to dusty ash piles. 

Beliefs of Steel

 

Steel-manning is the opposite of straw-manning – it is the principle of presenting the strongest possible version of your opponent’s argument. I have frequently used steel-manning throughout my life, to understand opposing views more clearly, to sharpen my own reasoning, and to attempt to build the strongest arsenal of personal views and beliefs that I can. It’s an essential tool for intellectual honesty.

I have a theory that the harder it is to steelman a belief or proposition, the less likely that belief or proposition is to be true. It’s well within our ability to believe A over B - where if B has some merit or interesting tenets of consideration, but is still believed to be inferior to A – and yet still use the steel-manning technique to make a reasonable case for B. Out of Charlotte and Emily Bronte, I believe Charlotte is, by a small margin, the more accomplished novelist. But I could write a good steel-manning case for Emily being the better writer. I believe we have free will (to a certain degree), but I could write a steel-manning paper that convincingly argues that free will is not, in fact, built into the material substrate of a wholly deterministic universe. On interpretations of quantum theory, I believe that quantum collapse is an objective physical process, and that it occurs independently of human measurement. Still, I could steelman a defence of alternative interpretations - whether Copenhagen, decoherence, or many-worlds - and such an exercise would make for a stimulating discussion.

Now, when confronted with a belief or viewpoint that you find prohibitively difficult to steelman – where, even if you tried your very best, and made the most honest, rigorous attempt to argue for its case, you still found it’s not even possible to get off the ground - you probably have a very good reason to conclude that that idea is not just folly, but beyond even a reasonable defence of non-folly. For example, I find it prohibitively difficult to steelman young earth creationism – it is just so plain wrong that there isn’t a rational defence that can be made; the only defence occurs through lies, blatant falsehoods and misrepresentations of evidence. I know young earth creationism is wrong – not just because there is no evidence to believe it is right – but also because I find it impossible to steelman.

I find the same with Islam. While it isn’t built on the same kind of empirical lies, blatant falsehoods and misrepresentations of evidence as young earth creationism - as a Christian, I could steel man atheism a lot more easily than I could steelman Islam. There is just nothing about Islam that convinces me it’s anything other than a wholly man-made religion that has evolved into a very false dominant belief system through cultural contagion and hegemonic power structures. Where it speaks truths, its truths are already found in Judaism and Christianity, and where it speaks untruths or makes inaccurate deviations from better religions, it exposes itself as derivative and unreliable.

Sure, if you’re a Muslim young earth creationist you are probably not convinced (😊). But that’s only due to being wedded to the very falsities that steel-manning attempts to expose – it doesn’t undermine the efficacy of the proposition itself. Because you only need to pick something that does fall far from your intellectual purlieus – say, flat earth theory, holocaust denial, or astrology – and see why, to most people, they are just as un-steelmannable, because their claims have been tested and found wanting, and no rigorous defence can survive contact with empirical scrutiny.

So that’s my tip for today; the harder it is to steelman a belief or proposition, the less likely it is to be true. And if you are competent at steel-manning, and find something impossible to steelman, then that thing is almost certainly false.

Christ the Meta-Metalanguage: The Divine Ground of All Truth

 

Truth is told in propositional form. It is true that if all humans are mortal, and Socrates is a human, then Socrates is mortal. It is true that water boils at 100°C at standard atmospheric pressure. It is true that the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. True propositions like the above are true because they correspond to logical, scientific and historical reality. In John 14:6, Jesus tells us that He is the Truth – THE Truth in absolute form because He’s God, and in personal form because He is the Divine Person.

Here’s how I believe we should frame it. True propositions are true because they correspond to reality; and in the deepest sense, they correspond to the ultimate reality, which is grounded in the nature and revelation of God - fulfilled and made manifest in Jesus Christ, who is the Truth.

To consider this philosophically, recall that Tarski showed that truth in formal systems must be defined in a higher-level language - a metalanguage - because a system cannot fully define its own truth. For example, in propositional logic or formal arithmetic, Tarski’s concept of truth requires a distinction between the object language (the language being used to describe the world) and the metalanguage (the language used to describe and evaluate the object language). This mirrors the idea that to fully understand the truth of things, we need something greater than the system itself to provide the proper context and evaluation.

Given the foregoing, if Christ is THE Truth because He’s God and the Divine Person (along with the Father and Holy Spirit – three aspects of the same One God), then Christ’s Truth is a Divine meta-metalanguage. You can think of like this. A metalanguage tells the truth about a language; a meta-metalanguage tells the truth about metalanguages.

In the same way Tarski's theory requires a higher-level "metalanguage" to describe the truth of a system, Christ, as the ultimate Truth, is the Divine meta-metalanguage through which all truths are made meaningful and coherent. Just as no formal system can fully define its own truth without reference to a broader framework, no aspect of reality - whether logical, scientific, or historical - can be fully understood or defined apart from Christ, who is the source of all truth. He is the Divine context and the Word (Logos) through which all things are revealed, ordered, and understood, and He is the ultimate frame of reference by which all truths are grounded. This Divine meta-metalanguage is not merely a system of rules or language; it is a living Person in whom truth is both revealed and enacted.

I get why this is hard to swallow if you’re a non-Christian, because we are talking about a hyper-reality on which this higher truth sits. But the corollary is that we cannot know truly apart from Christ, and all human knowing, especially when it taps into deeper truths, is fragmentary and only enhanced by Divine revelation, because Christ is being itself, sustaining reality (as per Colossians 1:17).

That’s also why, when it comes to salvation, Christ is the only way into truth, as His life, death, and resurrection bring us into communion with the Truth, where such fullness of Divine truth cannot be contained within human language alone.

Bring Enough Of Yourself

One piece of gradually accumulated wisdom I’ve discovered over the years is this. If you’re not thriving in some particular realm of life where there are rich rewards to be had, you’re probably not bringing enough of yourself to it. It’s only full engagement in giving the best of yourself to something that unlocks the full bounty. As long as the pursuit is something that yields rich rewards, then full reward necessities full presence. I’d summarise it with a formula - something like this:

Whole Self × Fertile Field = Full Harvest

Whole Self is your engagement and effort, Fertile Field is a pursuit with rich rewards, and Full Harvest is the abundance you can experience as a result.

Take something like the great works of literature as an example. You harvest what you invest yourself in, so if someone claimed to be underwhelmed by the works of, say, Joyce, Proust or Woolf, it will likely reflect a set of individual limitations or hesitation to fully immerse themselves in the rich experience of the texts, which are very hard to argue as ‘underwhelming’ with a Whole Self investment. Of course, at this stage of life, there might well be perfectly understandable reasons why they haven’t brought enough of their own curiosity and attention to the reading, just as there might be perfectly good reasons why a young boy is still drawing matchstick houses instead of more sophisticated models, but that doesn’t undermine the formula.

The same is true of virtually all domains with a potentially Fertile Field – religion, philosophy, science, economics, psychology, politics, art, history – if you withhold your Whole Self from the engagement and understanding, you’re going to be devoid of the Full Harvest, and as a consequence, you are likely to experience only a fraction of the perspective, and miss out on the more profound riches that life has to offer.

On Very Smart People Not Being Christian

 

Matters of God are different to all other matters in a number of ways. One remarkable way is that intelligence is a poor predictor of getting the God questions right, especially the question of accepting Christ as Lord and Saviour.

For example, if a very smart computer scientist disagrees with your theory about the time complexity of your sorting algorithm, you should probably look into it more; if a very smart astronomer disagrees with your theory about the composition of Saturn’s rings, you should probably look into it more; if a very smart economist disagrees with your interpretation of the Laffer curve, you should probably look into it more; and if a very well informed Tudor historian disagrees with your take on the causes of the English Reformation, you should probably look into it more. But very smart people of this calibre, even people who probably wouldn’t get a lot wrong in most empirical subjects, frequently get the big God question monumentally wrong, and come to entirely the wrong conclusions about many of the most important questions in existence. There are clear reasons why, which I’ll explain in a moment – but I think it is a peculiar anomaly in the intellectual landscape of human consideration.

What lies at the heart of this strange and consistent aberration across many very smart minds, even some highly brilliant ones? Why does the highly competent astronomer, so precise in calculating the orbital path of a newly discovered exoplanet or pinpointing the cause of unusual dimming in a distant star, and the computer scientist with a masterful grasp of the validity of a proof about P vs. NP or the scalability limits of a distributed system, go so far off course when faced with the most important question of all – accepting Christ as Lord and Saviour?

It’s obviously a complex and multifaceted set of reasons – and, of course, the most intuitive answers are that, at the heart level, 1) people only believe what they want to believe; 2) the answer to this question is primarily an emotional response; 3) there is a reluctance to submit to a God who requires our humility and repentance to see the truth; and 4) there is unwillingness to give up certain superficial or hedonistic habits or ways of life that faith in Christ would require revising or abandoning.

And I think they are all satisfactory pretexts for why many very smart people remain wrong on the biggest question – the one regarding their own salvation. But I think it does remain peculiar even at the intellectual level, because very smart minds have the cognitive artillery and resources to arrive at a similar conclusion themselves, not just about the truth of Christ as a proposition on the table, but about their own process map and potential areas of improvement for arriving at the right conclusion.

A Flawed Idea About Billionaires

 

Quote from a friend on Facebook that's doing the rounds: 

“Elon Musk’s wealth is projected to more than double over the next five years, placing him on track to become the world’s first trillionaire.
Here’s what that actually looks like:
- $1 trillion = $1,000,000,000,000 — that’s a million million dollars.
- A worker on £30,000/year earns around $38,000/year at current exchange rates.  It would take that worker 26.3 million years to earn what Musk could be worth.
- If Musk dropped $10,000 on the floor, it wouldn’t be worth his time to pick it up — he makes more than that in under 10 seconds.
- If you spent $1 million a day, every single day, it would take 2,740 years to spend $1 trillion.
In a world where millions struggle to eat, there is no moral or economic justification for billionaires to exist — never mind trillionaires.”

My response: If you’re worried about ‘millions struggling to eat’ then the anti-billionaire logic is backwards. Billionaires tend to do disproportionately more for the poor than any other group, because the more money that comes into one person’s treasury, the more they can scale up their beneficence in the wider globe (through investment, job creation and charitable causes). Here I make no comment about Musk as a person, but generally, as wealth accumulates for an individual, every increasing pound or dollar increases the chances of it doing some external good elsewhere. This is because very rich people accumulate wealth with capital that has declining marginal utility.

If you look at the history of the world since the Industrial Revolution, significant individual or corporate wealth is frequently tied to large-scale economic impact for good, like investment in companies, global job creation, infrastructure, technological innovation, philanthropy, aid and lifting millions out of poverty. And as wealthy people’s personal spending needs become more and more trivial compared to their capital, their positive global influence just keeps increasing, where their own personal declining marginal utility engenders rising utility for the world’s poorest people.

Because of declining marginal utility, one single billionaire is likely to do more good across the world than one thousand millionaires, because a single billionaire has more concentrated resources, which can enable very large-scale projects that the single millionaires would not likely facilitate on their own (most single millionaires would have invested a significant chunk of their million in a decent home).

On Positive Discrimination

Refusing to treat someone fairly because of their skin colour used to be the epitome of the racism we've tried so hard to weed out of society. It has always been so obviously wrong that it's shocking to learn anyone ever entertained the idea. If when reading that you pictured the person being discriminated against having black skin, I'm sure you will agree with me.

Remarkably, though, when some people make the same statement but with the signs reversed - that is, by saying that it's ok to refuse to treat white or Asian people fairly because of their skin colour by hiring people on the basis of their black skin, they don't feel as outraged, and simply call it positive discrimination.

It is peculiar to me that they can use the same type of reasoning and the same type of unfair prejudice as the racists of the past, but one gets deplored and the other gets lauded. Racism against black people is deplorable, whereas racism against white people and Asians is laudable if you just call it 'positive discrimination'.

Positive discrimination on the basis of skin colour or ethnicity is not only racist against white people and Asians, it's actually damaging to black people too. Suppose we have a university that practices positive discrimination. Among the black students there will be those who got in on merit and those who did not. Many of the latter group will be out of their depth, and many of the former group will have their achievements called into question, under the suspicion that they were chosen on the basis of skin colour not competence.

 

Gratitude For Good & Bad Things

Back when I wasn’t a Christian, in the late 1990s, I made the following kind of argument to Christians who said that God had healed them of condition x and illness y:

“It’s all very well saying God healed you from x or y - but through, at best, the universe’s laws or, at worst, God’s unwillingness to intervene pre-emptively, He still enabled these things to happen in the first place. If Jill has painful cancer for 2 years, then gets miraculously healed, it’s strange how God gets thanked for the healing, but not dismissed or condemned for the 2 years of painful cancer in the first place. If Jack breaks my leg by kicking me, I should not praise him for handing me a crutch."

Even then, I could accept the proposition that God doesn’t directly cause the suffering, and that there may be good reasons why He allows suffering for character-building, perseverance and growth.

But when I became a Christian, He showed me through Christ that He’s the one who comes into the wreckage, binds the wounds, and then teaches me to walk again. I also learned as a Christian that even when it seems He’s not noticeably coming into the wreckage, binding the wounds, and then teaching me to walk again, He’s still present - sustaining me, shaping me, holding me up when I can’t feel it, quietly, patiently, weaving grace into the cracks, and writing a story deeper than my immediate relief.

Understanding this helps make sense of Paul’s instruction for us to “Give thanks in all circumstances” (1 Thessalonians 5:18) and “Give thanks always and for everything” (Ephesians 5:20), even the really hard times. But it was only when I spent several years watching my dad suffer and slowly die with dementia that I began to understand more intimately what it means to give thanks in all things – even the very hardest things - because God is always good and always present and working in and through them.

This wisdom also applies to when we give thanks to God for everything that others might see as trivial. Before becoming a Christian, I used to find it strange that Christians would give thanks to God for food they’d just cooked, the weather, a car running well, and so forth. But after becoming a Christian, I began to understand why. It’s beneficial for us to be grateful for all things that we know are, in the long run, for our own good – and the kind of God who loves us enough to suffer and die for us as Christ did is bound to be doing immeasurable good in all kinds of ways that we can’t yet see or understand.

Are We In The Last Days Before Final Judgment?

 

Following on from parts one and two about the current nation of Israel, I want to talk now about this subject in relation to end times (or more precisely, the end part of end times). At some point, Christ is coming again, not as a humble servant this time, but as a righteous King and Judge. No one knows exactly when that will be (Matthew 24:36), but it will happen, when the right Biblical prophecies have been fulfilled. And many Biblical scholars, especially on matters concerning Israel, believe that the end times will come in our lifetime (say, the next 50 years). I’ve often thought about how the world is changing so rapidly in recent times, and with exponential technological capacity and transhumanistic endeavours, I wonder whether there might be a reasonable supposition that the end times are imminent (this is a topic I explored more fully in an essay called “Will God intervene before we become gods?”)

Scripture has a lot to say about the process of God’s Final Judgement. First there’ll be some kind of Rapture event (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17) when Jesus comes for His church, taking believers to be with Him. Quite what that means literally we don’t know. Then we’ll have the Second Coming (Revelation 19:11-16) when Jesus comes with His church to establish His 1,000-year reign. Again, we are not sure what that literally means, or whether the 1,000 years are literal either, but we know His return will be dramatic, and it will bring justice to the world, rewarding the faithful, and judging those who have rejected Him. The Bible declares, ‘For the Lord Himself will descend from Heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God’ (1 Thessalonians 4:16). His coming will be unmistakable, and every person will stand before Him to give an account (Revelation 20:12).

If all this sounds strange to you, you have to remember first that this is exactly what we should expect from a God who made Himself known with the Word of Truth, and who has shown Himself to be reliable, loving, just and merciful every step of the way thus far. You also need to be aware that the Bible is a book full of fulfilled prophecies – most have been fulfilled, in fact – and there aren’t currently many still left to be fulfilled. Remember too that the Bible is alive and active (Hebrews 4:12) and continues to play out in the present and the future, as the final prophecies become fulfilled. It’s a dynamic set of books, where God’s plan is at the heart of every stage of the narrative, right up to the present day, and every future period.

According to scripture, several major prophecies must happen before the Second Coming, including: The tribulation period (Daniel 9:27, Matthew 24:21), The rise of the Antichrist (2 Thessalonians 2:3-4, Revelation 13), The battle of Armageddon (Revelation 16:16), and the Gospel preached to all nations (Matthew 24:14). After the prophecies leading up to the Second Coming of Christ, there are still a few major prophecies that remain after Christ returns. We have the judgment of the nations (Matthew 25:31-46). After Jesus returns, He will judge the nations based on how they treated His people during the tribulation. Then, Satan will be bound for 1,000 years (Revelation 20:1-3), where we are told an angel will seize Satan and lock him in the abyss for 1,000 years, where he will no longer be able to deceive nations. Then we have the millennial reign of Christ (Revelation 20:4-6, Isaiah 11:1-10), where He will rule from Jerusalem in a glorified and more direct way on Earth for 1,000 years. During this time, we are told there will be peace, righteousness, and restoration - but mortal humans will still be living and having children. Furthermore, some people born during this time will still choose to reject Christ, which says a lot in itself. We can expect that Satan is released much later on for a short time and there will be final rebellion (Revelation 20:7-10). During that time, Satan will deceive the nations once more, leading a final rebellion against Christ. But God will destroy this rebellion instantly with fire from Heaven, and Satan will be thrown into the Lake of Fire forever. Then we’ll have the final judgment of all unbelievers throughout history (Revelation 20:11-15), and the New Heaven and New Earth (Revelation 21:1-5, 2 Peter 3:10-13), where there will be no more death, pain, or suffering - only eternal joy and reign with God.

I grant you that if you’re not familiar with this kind of language, it sounds absurd. But once you become familiar with the genius of the Bible, and the notion that God created everything and is enabling His plan to unfold, this narrative isn’t just palatable, it is inevitable. Now, as I said, I don’t think we can comprehend to what extent some of these numbers are literal, or to what extent the drama and eventual denouement symbolises or reflects knowable things in the present day global unfolding, but it can be interesting to speculate on these things in relation to a current world that promises to be so radically different from anything we’ve ever experienced, certainly in terms of scale and magnitude. Because once you understand that the Bible is an active set of prophetic revelations, this stuff becomes interesting at a level beyond the narrative with which everyday social commentary preoccupies itself.

There are still several significant prophecies that believers and scholars believe have not yet been fulfilled, though there aren’t many unfulfilled prophecies left relative to the number of prophecies that have been fulfilled. That is why there are a growing number of the ecclesia who believe we are in the very last period of end times, and that Christ will return very soon. Of the key prophecies that have not yet been fulfilled, there is the rise of a global government or institution (Daniel 7, Revelation 13), and a future world leader (often referred to as the Antichrist) who will establish a one-world government and economic system. Famously, Revelation 13:16-17 describes a "mark of the beast" that will be required for buying and selling. There will also be the rebuilding of the third temple (Ezekiel 40-48, Daniel 9:27, 2 Thessalonians 2:4), where a new Jewish temple will be built in Jerusalem before the return of Christ. The battle of Gog and Magog in Ezekiel 38-39 speaks of a coalition of nations (presumably Arab) that will attack Israel, and we know that this has been a reality for Israel especially in the past 60 years. I note too that in the Psalm 83 war, it looks to be describing a future war where Israel’s neighbouring enemies (again, probably modern Arab nations, though likely Iran too) will unite against it (perhaps the nations listed - Edom, Moab, Ammon, Philistia, Tyre, and Assyria correspond to modern-day nations like Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and maybe even fundamentalist Islam in the Palestinian regions). Revelation 13 prophesies the emergence of a charismatic world leader, making a peace deal with Israel, with a false religious leader supporting him, deceiving people with signs and wonders.

Isaiah 17:1 has a famous prophecy that predicts that Damascus (Syria’s capital) will be completely destroyed and left uninhabitable – and I don’t think this has ever happened in history, even though Damascus is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities. We all know what’s happening with Syria’s ongoing conflicts, and the wider Middle Eastern instability continually on a knife edge. The third horseman of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Revelation 6:5-6) describes hyperinflation and economic turmoil during the last days, and with digital currency and the spectre of a one world overarching institution, we could be vulnerable to this sooner than we think. We read of a massive falling away from the faith that will occur before the return of Christ (2 Thessalonians 2:3, Matthew 24:9-12), a significant division of Israel (Joel 3:2, Zechariah 12:2-3) – and this could be fulfilled when there is a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine, where a major peace agreement ironically causes conflict and division in the long run. Revelation 16:12 predicts the Euphrates River will dry up, making way for the armies of the east, and there will be an increase in natural disasters & pestilences (Luke 21:11, Matthew 24:7), where Christ warned of earthquakes, famines, and plagues in the end times – which I’ve always been unsure of, but then years ago I was unsure if we’d ever live through a global pandemic, and now we have, with more to come, surely.

I’m not denying the speculative nature of some of the specifics above – and nobody knows just exactly how all this will play out in terms of specific world events. But in all of this - amid the prophetic signs, global uncertainty, and rapid transformation of our world – we can have confidence that at the heart of the Biblical message is hope, where the culmination of God’s plan will be rooted in mercy and truth. And we don’t understand this properly until we understand that Israel is central to God's unfolding plan - past, present, and future. To understand God’s end time plan, we must understand the significance of Israel, both as a nation and as a people still chosen and cherished by Him.