The Increasingly Inadequate Police Force

I’ve been frustrated for a while now with how this country is policed. Obviously the police policies are driven by lawmakers – and there’s a lot that they get right. But at the extremes of both ends, there is a lot I think they are getting wrong. At one end of the spectrum, there are some ridiculously dubious so-called crimes (or non-crimes), especially to do with offence, speech and online conduct, that involve the police when it really should not. Yet at the other end of the spectrum, the lawmakers and the police are utterly feeble when it comes to behaviour that really should be dealt with more comprehensively. It’s madness that people can burgle your house, or cause deaths and suffering through the mile-long tailbacks created by blocking the major roads, and not go to prison. Too much of the law has become weak and woke, and its lack of sufficient power and authority has created a culture where too many people doing too much harm to others fail to receive proper punishment, and the victims fail to receive proper justice.

It’s well known that from the early 1990s crime rates have been falling all around the Western world (for a multitude of reasons), while at the same time, more and more laws have been created, and many more possible crimes have been introduced by making more things illegal.

What you have to remember is that it is always in politicians and the civil servants’ interests to keep growing their departments, keep the public convinced their services are more and more important to the running of society, and keep lobbying for more money to achieve this. Just as it’s in a plumber’s interest that people need leaks fixed, pipes mended and products installed, so too it’s in politicians and the civil services’ interests that they remain needed and relevant, and that there are problems in society for which we turn to them to fix. In economic terms, they are incentivised to keep demand high so they can keep the supply coming, and justify the funding for it. The way politicians and the civil services keep demand for policing high is by making more things illegal, and involving themselves in more and more of our daily business.

In the free market, we pay businesses to provide the things we want, and when a lot of people want those goods or services, businesses become mega-successful. Political industries do not have the same model or the same kind of demand curves, so in a sense they have to act against those same natural interests in order to survive. In other words, politics purports to be about making things better and bringing an end to problems, but yet the existence of politics depends on those problems (plus newly created ones) continuing to exist in some form. 

Because of this mechanism, the police are becoming less and less of a good institution - reflecting a society as a whole that's gone down the same path, whereby actions that never should be crimes are being criminalised left, right and centre; and actions that should be more heavily penalised are being treated too lightly for fear of being too unsympathetic to the perpetrator's feelings, hardships or causes for grievance.  

 

A Short Post On Homelessness In Cities

 

We regularly hear that homelessness is on the rise in cities across the world. The general argument from the person on the street (no pun intended) seems to be along the lines of: We’re such a rich city, how on earth can we still have so many homeless people in it? But economist reasoning soon shows the enquiry to be under-developed. It is actually to be expected that the wealthier the city, the more homeless people will be in it.

It’s not that the wealth of the city or the high cost of property is causing the homelessness – well, not in most cases – it’s more the case that, if you’re homeless, the relative cost of being homeless in London or Norwich is lower than the relative cost of being homeless in Bedford or Swaffham. The reason cities are so popular is they contain more things that more people want. If cities are a more desirable place to live for city folk than rural towns and villages, then it’s likely to be the same for homeless people, because those same qualities provide more benefits for them too. In other words, if you’re homeless, it’s easier to get money, food and small opportunities in a city than it is a town or a village.

Don’t get me wrong, I am sure it’s awful being homeless, and it’s very hard to get enough food and money to have much of a stable life – and I have every sympathy with those suffering from homelessness. I’m simply explaining away the fact that, while homeless people have a horrid time being on the streets, it is even more costly being homeless if you're not in a city.

Further reading: an economic analysis On Giving to Beggars

Moral Truths Seem To Be More Primary Than Physical Truths

 

Not everyone realises this, but most ethical debates are debates about facts and knowledge. When you listen to people having ethical debates, if you pay close attention, you’ll notice that they are mostly arguing about propositions related to facts (when a foetus becomes a human, whether homosexual inclination is genetically driven, the impact of drugs on society, that sort of thing). Emotions and feelings dominate our ethical propositions. When you say “x is immoral”, you are expressing a feeling or emotion based on an interpretation of facts. But here’s where things take a strange turn.

In a previous essay, and also in my book on morality, I talked about the level of confidence we have in certain beliefs, and how, when it comes to propositions about good and evil, we seem more certain of those than we do physical facts (even comprehensive ones) about reality. Any scientific statement regarding "Physical property x is governed by physical rule y" that turned out to be wrong, or even a little misjudged with the arrival of new evidence, wouldn't confound us as much as the proposition that we were wrong about some kind of consensually agreed moral proposition like "It is wrong to torture a pensioner as an act of indulgent sadism".

This is one of the profound things about our moral intuition; we develop moral theories similarly to how we develop theories of physical reality, but our intuition about morality, based on our evolved conscience, is so much stronger and more certain than anything we distil from our discoveries of the physical world.

Moral facts and physical facts both come from our knowledge acquired by observing reality through our sense data. Our five physical senses (five for simplicity) enable us to formulate propositions about the physical world, and our moral sense (a bit like a sixth sense) enables us to formulate a sense of right and wrong under various conditions. We develop scientific theories (x reacts to y on the basis of z) based on what our sense data tells us, and we develop moral theories (It is wrong to do x to y) based on what our sixth sense tells us.

But we don't merely derive a list of normative propositions (that which we ought to do) from our list of positive propositions (that which we know about the physical world) - they seem to belong in different categories of intuition. We seem to have a much stronger sense of our moral convictions than we do our physical convictions - not least because:

1) We are more likely to be shown to be wrong about our physical convictions than we are our moral convictions (as per the above examples)

2) We feel ultimately surer about or moral convictions than our physical convictions.

3) We depend on our sense of value to formulate any observations about physical reality.

We trust the five senses because of consistency of experience over a long percentage game. My sight tells me I have a cup of tea on my desk; my touch tells me it is hot and wet; and my nose tells me what it smells like. If I drink it, I'll sense what it tastes like, and if I drop the cup, I'll hear what hear what it sounds like as it hits the floor. Sometimes our senses deceive us, yet we can come to learn why that has happened.

We trust our sixth sense of moral intuition because of a similar consistency with other sense data, but at the fundamental level it never ultimately deceives us (in terms of truth propositions, I mean, not temporary misjudgements), and it has a stronger fundamental bootstrapping than anything to do with our other five senses. We may have committed an evil when we should have committed an act of good, and maybe we should have developed our thinking on moral propositions - but we've never changed or been caused to question the fundamental value structure that tells us good is superior and preferable to evil. We intuit it with such an overarching conviction that it seems to operate on a level above our other experiential interactions.

My overall conclusion on this is that moral truths exist in a more primary way to how physical reality exists, which means that those who believe we simply acquired our morality from adapted physical experiential legacies are making a similar mistake to those who claim that we acquired mathematics purely from our observations about physical reality. Just as mathematics has an ontology over and above physical reality, so too, I think, does morality. It is too axiomatic and too fundamentally inhered in cognition to have been a just by-product of physical evolution - although it is that too, of course, as is mathematical symbolism. 

The best explanation, I think, for the explanatory and conceptual power of both mathematics and morality is that both exist because they have their provenance in the mind of God. The best reason I have for believing this is that both mathematics and morality have such fixed fundamental truths (the laws of numbers and the laws of good and evil) that we do not know of any way that they could be believed differently, and our minds have no capacity to undermine that fixity with a superior level of cogency or rationality.

How Do We Want To Be Understood?

It’s good to reflect on how we’ve changed over the years. When I was a younger, sometimes ladies found me charming on the basis that I appeared to understand them. To add to the allure, I was convinced that our greatest desire was to be understood, and that to be with someone who really understands you is just about the highest inter-personal reward of all. But 25-30 years later, I think differently about that, of which, more in a moment.

Back then, I also had higher expectations of people in terms of their character, and lower standards – whereas now, it’s the opposite; as I believe that having high standards for yourself means you get to fulfil your obligations, and having low expectations of others means you’re not too disappointed and more forgiving – as per my formula: Contentment = high standards for yourself + low expectations  of others.

Returning to being understood, having changed my perspective by expecting less of others, and having higher standards for myself, I’ve come to realise that people’s desire to be understood is often more a desire to be seen as they wish they were through their higher ideal self. In other words, people don’t always want to be understood wholly accurately because that would expose many of the parts of the self they’d rather keep hidden; they want to be seen through the lens of their higher aspirations.

But that’s where you need to be cautious. It’s far more important to have close people in your life who can understand you through the dusky lens of reality, because then you’re telling the truth, and it’s only the truth that can lead to proper enlightenment about the self, and actually, the legitimate fulfilling of potential. If you’re never going to be a good enough singer, or actor, or carpenter or philosopher to make the grade, it’s better that you know about it. Equally, if you’re good enough to be a great salesman, racing driver, life coach or artist, but you don’t recognise it enough in yourself, it’s better that you know that too, and can be encouraged further by others who also see it and share in your truths.

We often mistakenly act as though the people who see us through the lens of their higher aspirations are the only ones that truly understand us, but that’s not necessarily the case. Some who know us best are the most painfully aware of how far short of our ideal selves we fall. Knowing the true extent of our imperfections is one of the deepest understandings we can encounter. When we crave ideal understanding, we want others to accept our ideal self as our real self; when we crave authentic understanding, we want to accept our real self and trust in our pursuit of the ideal self. To be seen as we are and as we hope to be is to ground the understanding in truth and in faith, being forgiving of our faults and invested in our potential. That is the way we should want to be understood. 

 

A Now Defunct Political Salad Analogy

 

For much of my life, my salad analogy view of political parties has been that Tory politicians are a bit like tomatoes. They are mostly ok, you get some occasional bad ones, and sometimes a sweet juicy one that's really good. Whereas Labour politicians are more like celery. Most of them aren't very good when compared to tomatoes, but occasionally there's a half decent one that you still wouldn't choose over a decent tomato, but you might if the tomatoes were out of stock or had gone bad. 

But I don’t think my salad analogy can be proffered these days, because when elections come around, we are really being asked to choose between several varieties of celery.

This is the least friendly to the market, least conservative Conservative Party this country has ever had. They deserve to lose the election, not because Labour would be any better (they’ll be even worse), but because of how shamelessly the Conservatives have betrayed the principles for which they once stood. You may recall, in Dante's conceived foray through the circles of hell, he saw treachery as the lowest place of all. A party that has been so consistently treacherous towards its own values is the most dishonourable of all.

Addressing The Best Argument Against Free Will To Show How We Do Have Free Will

 

In the article on my side bar (link here), I laid out my thesis on free will and determinism - and I expanded on it even more comprehensively in a chapter in my book The Genius of the Invisible God (which isn’t yet available). In that book, I explain why part of the genius of God’s creation is that we do have free will but in a deterministic universe – although that’s too involved for this post, so you might have to buy the book when it comes out to see why. 😊

Below is some leftover material that I thought I’d turn into an article, as there’s lots of interesting stuff still there.

In most cases, three quarters of a problem is solved when concepts are defined clearly, so let me start by defining free will as the ability to make choices in a way in which you could have made different choices. Under that definition, perhaps the best argument against free will, would be as follows. There are only two types of decision you can make in life - a decision based on your desire to do something, or a decision based on being forced to do something. Every single decision you make falls into one of those categories; you either desired to do it or you were forced to do it against your natural desire. Your desire to do something means you wanted to do it because you still preferred to do it when considered against all other alternatives.

To avoid a possible misunderstanding here, your desire to do something doesn't just mean doing the things you enjoy doing or are glad you are doing. You might say, for example, I had my Covid vaccine, but I didn't really desire to do it - I hate needles, and felt compelled to do it to protect myself and others from Covid. But that doesn't mean you didn't desire to do it. You still weighed up the other options and decided that having the vaccine was the decision that provided the preferred utility amongst competing preferences. You may not have enjoyed your Covid vaccine, and you may wish you lived in a world where you didn't need it, but in having it when no one forced you to have it, you desired to have it. When you do something you wouldn't ordinarily choose to do with enthusiasm, it's still because your desire to do it is stronger than competing desires, because the benefits to you outweigh the costs.

Having hopefully convinced you that every decision is either something you desire or something you are forced to do, an argument is then put forward to suggest that this means we don't have free will. The reasoning goes that if you are forced to do something that you didn't desire, then that isn't free will, but if you did desire it, that isn't free will either because we don't control or choose what we desire. Suppose one evening I fancy watching either Frasier or Seinfeld, and I can't choose which I prefer. I desire either Frasier or Seinfeld, but I didn't control my desire to narrow it down to those two options. Suppose I think about it for another couple of minutes, and then opt for Frasier - I did so because my desire for Frasier was slightly greater than my desire for Seinfeld. But I can't choose to desire Frasier more than Seinfeld - it occurred within my internal cognitive machinery. We can't control any of our desires, it seems - they happen to us within our subconscious, based on all our experiences over a lifetime. Think of something you don't desire right now. You probably don't desire that you will fall over and break your pelvis this evening. And if you tried your hardest to desire it, you still wouldn't be able to.

You may be thinking, hang on, suppose I had a slight preference for Frasier, but I chose to override that desire and watch Seinfeld instead - doesn't that demonstrate that I have free will? Alas, no, that doesn't solve the problem, because all it shows is that your desire to demonstrate your belief in free will and watch Seinfeld was stronger than your desire to watch Frasier - you still didn't choose or have any control over the desire. We can't change something we desire into something we don't desire, or vice versa, without desiring to change the desire. At any point, the desire comes upon us, we don't come upon it.

This is perhaps the most persuasive argument against free will; we either do things we are forced to do, in which case it's not free will; or we to something we desire to do, but we can't control our desires, in which case it's not free will either. And to take it further, if we don't have free will, then how can Christianity make sense, given that it's predicated on our being sinners who must freely chose to repent and accept the price Jesus paid for our forgiveness on the cross? How can God punish us for not repenting if we have no desire to repent, and no control over our desire to repent, or our desire to desire to repent? Taken at face value, it seems to put us in an unenviable position that potentially undermines the framework of Christianity.

Yet even that argument, as well made as it appears to be, doesn't convince me - because it doesn't seem to be speaking about the reality we know and experience. Even if we don't fully understand all the conditions and antecedent causes for our decisions, our desires and our will, we still live as though we have the ability to make choices in a way in which we could have made different choices – and that is what I will now unpack.

When you make an ethical statement - "Jack should put back on the shelf that laptop he has just picked up to steal" you are making a statement as though Jack has a choice. Even if you think it's an illusion, you still think as though Jack is as agent of choices with other alternatives. If Jack goes through with the theft, you might feel angry with him - which suggests there is a sense in which you feel like he made the wrong choice. Under hard determinism, for those who say our sense of free will is illusory, are they really just angry at the universe’s deterministic algorithms? Perhaps they think you are, but it doesn't really feel like they are - it feels more like they are angry with Jack, in this instance.

Whichever way we cut the cloth, we act as though people are responsible for their actions. Suppose your son comes home from school, happy that he got top marks in his exam - you would feel a sense of pride in is achievements. But this feeling suggests he got top marks by efforts that could have produced alternative outcomes. Feeling a sense of pride feels like an emotional response to a set of choices that someone you love has made. Would you feel pride if you really felt like your son's achievements were all just part of the universe's pre-programmed determinism, over which he had no control? I have my doubts. Other things we do, like offer advice and guidance, or think hard about what course of action we should take against several alternatives, are done with our minds presupposing that agency and will are fundamental elements in the equation.

As I said at the start, I actually do think the universe is ultimately deterministic in the hard sense, it’s just that our free will is of a different and more complex nature to what most people think. But even if we take the standard free will vs. determinism debate on the free-will-denier’s terms - when we try to decide which we accept out of free will or determinism, we actually rationalise as though there is some free will, but yet in accepting determinism over free will, our reasoning process is behaving as though determinism is false.

Furthermore, we act as though there is a point to doing things, and a purpose too. Think of your wife and children, you home life, your job; you act as though these things are important - to you, to your family, to the wider society - but you don't act as though you presuppose you had to do action x, or that it was impossible to not do x. There's not a good reason to do something if you are inevitably going to do it, and can't not do it - yet you act as though there is a good reason to do it. In a purely deterministic, free-will-denying world, everything is either inevitable or impossible - and even hard determinists don't think, speak and act as though that's true. If you don't think, speak and act in accordance with what you claim to believe, that the belief is somewhat undermined by a stronger interpretation of reality that you, the determinist, lives by - this potentially defeats the foundation of the belief.

A deeper dive
Now we need to go deeper. Existence is a complex subject, and things exist in a diverse range of ways. Ditto the nature of being 'free' and having 'will'. Consequently, the notion of free will existing is a spectrum, not merely a binary proposition, bound up in the complex dynamic between first and third person phenomenology. Reality comes in the first person and third person perspectives - that is, one's view of oneself, and the third person perspective of that self. It's a hasty presumption to discount the concepts of 'free' and 'will' merely through the lens of the highly deterministic particulate third person account of human beings. Just because we believe we have got to grips with mental activity from a third person perspective, I don't think it means we can use that as a viable basis for ruling out degrees of free will from the first person perspective.

The first person perspective is a different category of consideration from the outside third person perspective - there are aspects of first person cognition that transcend the elemental measurements of third-person empirical analysis, even though third person manipulations of the brain can throw up some quite bizarre altered states of consciousness. Despite those bizarre anomalies, the fact remains that freedom from the first person perspective has a category of intrapersonal depth and fecundity that is beyond the lower resolution third person exploration (remember the famous 'king of infinite space' observation in Hamlet). This kind of freedom may well belong more in the arts than the sciences (although it can quite easily belong in both).

Under the first person perspective, there is a complex multidimensional spectrum of freedom, conditioned by a whole range of tenets of personality and character qualities: truthseeking, intelligence, authenticity, temperament, psychology, discipline, aspiration, conscientiousness, goodness, ethics, and so on. If you take the positive elements of the above, juxtaposed with the negative (good better than bad, truth better than falsehood, intelligence better than stupidity, etc) then you'll find that the individual self can enjoy a greater kind of freedom by wedding themselves to the positive values, and a more constricting life by wedding themselves to the negative values. Love the truth, and the world expands beyond your wildest dreams; love goodness and your reality opens up into a joy not previously anticipated, that sort of thing.

Given the primary facet of reality is phenomenological, I think it is the case that these tenets of what we might call 'freedom' and 'will' do exist. The first person reality in which they are experienced differs from the third person deterministic reality measured from the outside, but we enter very shaky grounds if we use that pretext to say it doesn't exist. I think there is also Biblical truth in this notion, which St. Augustine taps into when he says that serving God is greater freedom for us. We read from Christ that ‘Everyone who sins is a slave to sin’ (John 8:34), but in the next breath that "‘If the Son sets you free you will be free indeed’ (John 8:36). That seems to me to hint at a connection between greater freedom and a greater life if we embrace Divine things and die to those old habits.

People ensnared by naïve scientism often just can’t get to grips with the fact that there is a complex set of phenomenological first person experiential testimonies that not only transcend the third person perspective of mind, they actually transcend the third person’s suite of knowledge on how physical reality actually operates. Moreover, we need an up and running first person mental structure that integrates our experiential qualia into coherent patterns before we can even begin to discuss the third person ordinances of physics, so to suggest that the latter has a more primary existence in terms of free will over the former is quite a dodgy place to go. As soon as we become a responsible agent, and think and act as though progress can be made, and that some things have a higher value than other things, we live as though free choices are an integral part of that state of being.

If we can review the past, contemplate the present, and make forecasts about the future in relation to our decisions and values, then we operate as though free will is part of the intellectual and emotional substrate of our life. If as a result we get to partake in the world and relate to each other, then phenomenologically there are no real grounds for denying that choice and agency are fundamental to first person selfhood.

Bogus Communities

 

A method people often use in socio-politics when they want to deceive you is to distort language in the hope that it will act as an emotional sleight of hand trick to get you on side. An example of this is when they insert the word ‘community’ after an adjective, acronym or slogan to fraudulently impute shared views and beliefs among a group of people who are only tenuously connected by having the thing in common under observation.

You can’t even put the cat out these days without hearing about the LGBTQ community, the black community, the trans community, the incel community, the even more absurdly entitled BAME community, and so on. To suggest that these groups of people resemble a community, with common attitudes, a shared viewpoint and a collective vision is preposterous.

Communities do exist, and they are important, and provide lots of value. But cases like the aforementioned do not have the typical properties of a community, and almost certainly never will. Most of the things they have in common have very little to do with their skin colour, sexuality, etc – these so called ‘communities’ are so diverse in views, beliefs, character, age, ethnicity, backroad, experiences, intelligence and education that it’s absurd and demeaning to lump them all together with a faux-communitarian identity just to score cheap social or political points, or to further the agendas of misjudged and extremist ideologies.

Sunday Faith Series: Counterintuitive Christianity - When It's Like The Monty Hall Problem

 

You may have heard of the famous Monty Hall problem:

Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

 

The answer is counterintuitive, but you actually have a better chance of winning by switching. The stick or switch scenario produces surprise and objection, with complaint from those who cannot see that switching increases one’s chances of winning (you can play here and see why switching is the best strategy). The main thing to understand about the Monty Hall problem is that it shows intuitive notions cannot always accept conditional probabilities very easily.

 

There are a lot of counterintuitive things about this world. We know from quantum mechanics and relativity that the very small and the very fast give us counterintuitive conditions that confound our expectations. We know that in the past a functional eye or a planetary system seemed too improbable to have evolved by nature's mathematical and physical laws. Furthermore, when one considers things like monotonic voting systems, 0.999 denoting a real number that can be shown to be 1, water being heavier in liquid form than in solid form due to the latter's reduction in density, or water vapour being lighter than air, our expectations seem confounded – particularly at a young age. The world is full of facts that confound our expectations.

 

We see the same thing in economics, when people frequently don’t understand at first glance why having safer cars causes more accidents, and why contraception actually increases unwanted pregnancies, and why stronger filtered cigarettes could lead to a higher incidence of lung cancer, and why lower percentage alcohol could result in more drunkenness, and why banning the transportation of animals for testing may well increase animal suffering, not reduce it.

 

I believe Christianity to be the world's most powerful and important truth, but it is quite a counterintuitive truth, which is a part of what St Paul is getting at when he says that no one can say "Jesus is Lord," except by the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:3).

 

When I was exploring the faith in my late teens and early twenties, I was struck by the apparent chicken and egg problem of belief: that one cannot know the truth of Christianity without a direct relationship with God through the Holy Spirit, but one doesn't have a direct relationship with God through the Holy Spirit except by knowing the truth of Christianity.

 

I would say that Christianity is the most counterintuitive truth with which we interface, not just because theology is the most complex subject in the world, but because the central essence of its grace is so outrageous and underserved that it can easily confound expectations, particularly for those who are primed to think of life in terms of a personal moral compass of meritocracy. Anyone who thinks morality is the be all and end all of human progress is going to find a faith based on a free gift of undeserved grace rather alien to the intuition.

 

By way of an analogy, Christianity is fairly similar to a riddle: that is, a riddle in prospect is often tricky, but in retrospect, once one understands how it is solved - it is obvious and transparent. Once one solves the riddle of Christianity and looks back in retrospect at their own journey of exploration (which can take weeks, months or years), one sees that part of the complexity was because consideration of the central essence of grace was absent from the riddle while it was still in prospect. Don't get me wrong, I am not comparing the Divine message to some sort of cryptic message He has set for us to solve – I use the term ‘riddle’ only with respect to how complex subjects seem at first obscure and counterintuitive, and clearer and more obvious once the logic trail induces clarity.

 

I contend that in Christianity we are being asked to consider something more counterintuitively profound than anything else the world has ever known - that of outrageous Divine grace. It appears to be contrary to every metric we value: we study hard, we get our rewards with good exam results; we work hard, we get paid and possibly promotion; we strive for moral probity, and we become a good person; we commit a crime, we go to prison - the list goes on. The commonality with these metrics is that the rewards outputted are roughly commensurate with the efforts inputted. Christianity radically departs from this worldly perspective, offering an outrageous offer of grace that makes perfect sense from the inside but beggars belief from the outside (I have personal experience of both perspectives).

 

To be a Christian you have to suspend all thoughts of getting better on your own merits, and accept a free gift of grace as a framework for becoming that better person. To fully live we have to die to self; to gain in abundance we must sacrifice; when we suffer we are to consider it 'pure joy'; and to lead a church congregation involves serving humbly bottom up not top down. No wonder it seems strange from the outside.

Forgiving our enemies is another aspect of grace where the world is often off kilter with Christianity. Humanity has a voracious appetite for justice and righting wrongs - yet when something amazing happens, like a mother forgives her son's killer, and victims of war torture become reconciled with their torturers through a grace-abundant reconciliation, we get a little sense of what it's like when God's goodness is working inside people, and why millions of highly intelligent and educated and worldly people have accepted Christ as Lord based on the fact that He did the same thing as Creator Himself on the cross.

 

And there is perhaps no greater image of the continuativeness of Christianity than the Lord Jesus, Creator of the universe, washing the feet of His disciples. It's only when one accepts Him as Lord and Saviour that that action makes more sense. And that is probably because in discovering that our God came to serve, we uncover that other very counterintuitive thing about forgiving our enemies and those who have done us most harm.

 

The Algorithmic Nature of Christianity

 

Christianity has many cases whereby if you don't experience the primary truth, you cannot know all the other truths that emerge from it. I call this the Algorithmic Nature of Christianity. An algorithm is a set of instructions or rules to solve a specific problem or perform a particular task. For example, the Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers where each number is the sum of the two preceding ones (starting from 0 and 1). The algorithm involves defining the first two numbers and then generating subsequent Fibonacci numbers based on the sum of the last two. So, the sequence begins: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55 and so on. Cooking is another example of something that's algorithmic, in that the recipe provides step-by-step instructions on how to make a meal. If you don't know the recipe for a dish, you can't know how to cook it.

Even more profoundly, the Algorithmic Nature of Christianity provides us with some incisive wisdom, especially regarding what atheists can't possibly see if they don't have or know certain things, and how Christians might bring this to their attention. This is important because Christians can spend inordinate amounts of time debating numerous topics surrounding God's existence, convincing and unconvincing evidence for the Christian faith, reliability of scripture, whether the world looks like God created it, philosophical, moral and ethical propositions around God's existence, and so forth. But while those discussions are interesting and worthwhile for augmenting our understanding, they are not what's fundamentally at play here when Christians and non-Christians discuss the truth of the faith. Because the Bible shows in several places that if non-Christians lack the algorithmic base for discovery and revelation, they cannot possibly arrive at the truths at which they claim they want to arrive.

Here are some examples. The issue with which the majority of atheists are preoccupied is why God seems invisible to them, and why, according to them, He's never given them the kind of personal appearance they crave. But Jesus declares in John 14:8-9 that anyone who has seen Him has seen the Father. He then reproaches Philip with the question "How can you say, 'Show us the Father'?". Atheists who utter the demand 'show me God' are making the same error. Additionally, in 1 John 2:23 we hear Jesus' truth restated "No one who denies the Son has the Father; whoever acknowledges the Son has the Father also". The algorithm here is basically "If you want to know God, you have to recognise that Jesus is Lord". That is, it's impossible to know God exists without having revelation that Jesus is God and the Saviour of the world (see also, John 14:6, where Jesus says, "No one comes to the father except through me"). All the time that unbelievers are arguing about the many things they argue about, they are merely formulating artificial distractions that are averting their attention from the crux of the matter.

The same is true with loving God; "Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love" 1 John 4:8. The algorithm here is basically "To know God is to love Him, and to love Him is to recognise Jesus as Lord." If an individual does not know who Jesus is, they can't love God; and if they can't love God, it's impossible to know Him. This is confirmed further in 1 John 4:15 "If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God."

Another example connected to 1 John 4:15 is that in order to know God, an individual has to have the Holy Spirit living inside them. St. Paul affirms in 1 Corinthians 12:3 that no one can say "Jesus is Lord" except by the Holy Spirit. The algorithm here is basically "If you don't have the Holy Spirit, you can't know God". That is, without recognising Jesus as Lord and without the Holy Spirit living inside of you, it's not possible to be aware of God's existence in any intimate way, because the personal encounter only comes from the Holy Spirit.

Now a third example, about the concept of sin; there is an algorithmic truth expressed in 1 John 1, which says, "If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us." And right after, "If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us". The algorithm here is basically "To have the truth in us, and to apprehend the Bible as the word of truth, we must recognise the nature of our sin". If you don't acknowledge the truth of sin in the world, then you cannot recognise your own sin, and therefore, you cannot recognise the grace that saves us from sin. And not being able to recognise sin and grace means we cannot accept Jesus as Lord, and we cannot receive the Holy Spirit.

Just the above components of the Algorithmic Nature of Christianity already speak an awful lot about the barrier unbelievers have in recognising who God is. They will not find it possible to believe in God if they do not know who He is. Another algorithmic consideration is brought to bear in the quality of humility. Without humility, I do not believe we can have the door opened to knowing God (Road to Damascus encounters like St. Paul’s may provide the odd exception, but the rule generally holds). Proverbs 22:4 says, "The reward for humility and fear of the Lord is riches and honour and life", and in James 4:10 each of us is told "Humble yourselves before the Lord, and He will exalt you". The algorithm here is basically "If you want revelation and exaltation from God, you must seek with humility".

We can see already how all the above is connected algorithmically, where humility is what leads us to understand sin; and understanding sin is what leads us to understand the need for the grace of our Saviour; and recognising Jesus as our Saviour leads us to understand the price He paid for us on the cross; and from that we know God's truth through revelation imparted by our being in receipt of the Holy Spirit.

For the atheist, then, who persistently argues against the Christian faith with claims of not enough evidence or feeling devoid of any person revelation, the algorithmic considerations above are of paramount importance, because it is not possible for them to have their demands for God's existence and revelation satisfied if, algorithmically, they do not yet have the recipe required.

Letters To Troubled Youth - Excerpt 2: Climate Extremism: A Waste of Energy

 

One of my little ‘work in progress’ side projects is an epistolary called Letters To Troubled Youth. It’s a mix of good cop, bad cop letter writing, aimed at the younger generation, warning them about all the highly damaging nonsense they are letting in to their souls, and encouraging them of the greater rewards found in more rigorous truthseeking. I might share the occasional excerpt as a blog post on its own stranding.

Excerpt 2 – taken from Letter 17: Climate Extremism: A Waste of Energy

“Let's go back to basics in economics. For any quantity of a good or service, there is a demand price and a supply price. The demand price is the price at which consumers want to consume, and the supply price is the price at which suppliers want to sell. There is only one quantity for which the demand price and the supply price are in equilibrium. If external forces are acting so that consumers are paying less than the demand price, competition among consumers will bid up the price; or if suppliers are receiving more than the supply price, competition among suppliers will push down the price. For that one quantity of good or service whereby the demand price and the supply price are in equilibrium, competitive forces must be acting optimally with no external interference in the price system. When the quantity is lower than equal, the demand price will be higher than the supply price; when the quantity is higher than equal, the demand price will be lower than the supply price.

Lots of external factors contribute to or act upon the price system to offset the logic outlined above - taxes, price controls, subsidies, queues, shortages, over-consumption, social costs, product waste, and so forth -  and it is only a relatively free trade and competitive forces that ensure that suppliers receive the desired supply price and demanders pay the desired demand price (remember, this optimal measurement is measured at the margin). The important corollary here is that when the above conditions are met, the quantity is the only unique quantity at which the demand and supply prices are optimally set at the equilibrium.

If you understand the logic behind why optimal prices are contingent upon supply and demand, you also understand that prices act as vital information signals, and that they are all inextricably connected to each other. The price of chocolate biscuits for supplier A is driven by what suppliers B, C and D sell them for, but also by the price of jam doughnuts, cream cakes, fruit and cereal. The price of your cinema ticket, your railway ticket, your blue suit, your Asus laptop, and so forth, is driven by the millions of substitutes (of the same kind and different alternatives) available in the marketplace. And if you understand all those things, you can apply the same logic to other areas of human incentives and behaviour.

If all the above is making sense, we can turn this on to the subject of climate change. For the past 150 years, humans have seen a progression-explosion in terms of material wealth and increased living standards, and that has been primarily driven by capitalism and science. The engine that has fuelled this great enrichment has been the harnessing of cheap, affordable energy. Globally, the predominant cheap, affordable energy has been fossil fuels, and it still will be for the foreseeable future. Pretty much everything that drives the economy and helps prices stay close to equilibrium involves fossil fuels (either directly or indirectly). It will be good when we have found alternatives to fossil fuels (or offsetting techniques) that meet all the criteria for optimality I laid out earlier, and we are doing that, and will do it at an even more expansive rate in the future - but right now, we are not advanced enough to dispense with all fossil fuels or reach the point of so-called 'net zero'.

Given that climate change agendas never involve the kind of language, logic or arguments I've outlined above, it should be evident for any who still need convincing that the climate 'net zero' project is miles short of the requisite level of sound reasoning or understanding of the full complexity of the reality - it is a socio-political project driven by narrow self-interest, fear and tribalism. If we can't yet do without fossil fuels, and if a significant proportion of the world's population still requires them to a) continue to build up their industry and advance further on their journey of progression to higher living standards, b) purchase them most optimally in accordance with the price system's information signals, and c) not have the price of their most demanded natural resources bid up artificially by self-serving, narrow-minded politicians, then what the climate extremists are imposing is absurd, unrealistic, selfish, harmful and immoral. Anyone can oversimplify the world and make ridiculous demands on politicians that sadly seem all-too keen to accede to the madness - but it has very little basis in reality, and pays almost no proper regard for how the world actually works and the complex considerations attached to these propositions.”

The Relationship Between Science & Christianity

 

First published today on Network Norfolk:

In this age, the most science-friendly, progressive and technologically enriched age, many people believe that the world has little room for Christianity anymore. There are two false premises here: first, that science can ever act as some kind of substitute for Christianity; and second, that science is like our mother, and Christianity is like an annoying cousin that will soon pass away and only live on in the ashes of our memory.

Both premises get this wrong: Christianity is more like our parent, and science is more like its daughter. Christianity helped give birth to science - it laid down the truth-seeking, fact-finding qualities that would eventually help usher in empirical science, which began its infancy in about the 12th century, and has taken the shape of an upwards curve ever since.

Now, given what I've just said, this next part may seem counterintuitive - but that does not mean that we needed Christianity, or any religion, for science to come along. Science would have demonstrated its utility on our progress whether we were religious nor not. The fundamental reason for this is because science is only a tiny subset of how we interface with the world - it is like a daughter because it comes along after to explain things we've already partially discovered. It is like putting on a pair of glasses to give focus to an otherwise blurry vision.

Given that Christianity is explaining something outside of the purlieus of science, yet also heavily reliant on science as its canvas or substrate, it can only be enriched by science in the same way that other things in life are enriched by science - through explanatory methods. And we mustn't therefore put the cart of science before the horse of initial probing, because we usually find the causality is the other way around. Biblical accounts of salt preserving food from decay happened long before we understood how the preservation works. The same is true of canned food - we were putting food in cans long before we knew about how germs operated to food's detriment. We knew that penicillin kills bacteria long before we learned how it destroys the cell walls of bacteria during gestation.

But just as scientists were more the beneficiaries of new technology than the benefactors (and not the other way around as so many think), so too was science a beneficiary of Christianity, not a rival to it. There's no doubt that extremist religiosity has retarded the progress of science over years too, and that is a shame, because the rewards of Christianity and the rewards of science, while different in scope, are part of the same goal - improvement and transformation.

Whether science helps you cure a disease, travel to Africa as a missionary, print Bibles, speak the gospel through a microphone in an auditorium, feed the hungry or shelter the homeless, it is not a rival or a substitute for other human progressions. Similarly, the methods of science, such as empirical enquiry, logic, analysing data, and interpreting facts and test-based evidence are very much part of the domain of interpreting the truth of Christianity too. Even Plato said that philosophy begins in wonder.

Religious language sits on the border between the revealed truths and the truths still shrouded in mystery. It exists at the gateway between what is revealed and what remains mysterious. Theological language, such as that found in the stories, metaphors and allegories in scripture, opens the gate so that that which was too profound and complex to be fully expressed, could be partially expressed in hints of what is to come. This process is also central to the Incarnation, where God became a man in Christ in order that we could know Him and know the true depth of His love for us.