How To Know God

 

There are four primary ways that God has made Himself known to His creation: 

1) Through the Incarnation, where Christ came to earth to reveal God's love in human flesh, to spend time with humankind, to suffer and die for us on the cross, and to defeat death with His resurrection. 

2) Through the Holy Spirit, who reveals Himself by living inside all who accept Christ as Lord and Saviour. 

3) Through the texts, revelations and the miracles recorded in the Bible. 

4) Through the testimonies, miracles and experiences of God at work in the lives of other Christians. 

Atheists do not currently find those four ways convincing enough, otherwise they'd be believers. And that is fair enough - each one of those four ways usually requires lots of thought, investigation and experience, and I commend any unbeliever who is courageous and diligent enough to give Christianity the depth of exploration it merits. 

But if you want to know God, you have to take Him on His terms - and His terms are the four ways above. If you won't have Him on those terms, then you're not engaging with the true nature of God's revelation, or evidence for His existence.

Further Reading: See my God Tab

One Day There'll Probably Be Only One World Language

 

I feel fairly confident that most of the world will be speaking the same language at some point in the future. Looking back through time, language evolution is similar to speciation. Just as in speciation, populations diverge until they can no longer interbreed, new words and phrases are adopted to the point that groups can no longer communicate properly (this was allegorised in the Old Testament's Tower of Babel story).

But while it's easy to understand how genetic populations became so diverse, it isn't so obvious with language - after all, there are thousands of languages - and yet, despite the multifarious benefits of a rich diversity of language, we all know the disadvantages of communication breakdown with language barriers. 

I assume languages evolved to suit the needs of the populations, perhaps with groups adopting new ways of communicating in order to assert their established identity. Yet you also find that there is more commonality of language in highly developed areas than lesser developed. In Europe, a great many people can speak English as their second language. In other Asian countries, many can speak Mandarin - and Spanish, Arabic and Hindi are prominent too in various regions across the world. Such diversity is less common in more remote tribal regions, where hundreds of exclusive languages are found in smaller tribes.

My tentative hunch is this. Given that English is the primary languages being pulled in the most directions, and given increased globalisation, enhanced technology and human connectivity, it seems likely that English will continue to proliferate until most of the world speaks it, either as their primary or secondary language. In a world of global trade and increased online communication, such is the advantage of mutual communicability that it's probable that as more and more people find it advantageous to speak a common language. And as smaller languages will slowly begin to die out, I think there’ll come a time when virtually the whole world only speaks one language, and other languages are only used for historical study or perhaps have survived in very remote places in successful attempts to preserve endangered languages.

It's well known that a lot of the conflict in the world is primarily caused by not understanding your neighbour (although not just linguistically, of course). In many of these conflicts and prejudices, the main barrier to concordance is a lack of empathy and appreciation of that person as an individual - and a language barrier can play a big part in that. 

While this might take hundreds or even thousands of years, I predict that one day almost everyone in the world will be speaking the same language, and that that language will be English. 

Critiquing Criticism

 

Lots of people have taken to social media recently to criticise Gareth Southgate as England Manager – none of whom could have done a better job as England Manager than Gareth Southgate. And as someone who generally thinks it’s good to withhold criticism and err on the side of generosity as often as possible, this got me thinking about the nature of criticism generally, and about whether criticism should mostly be reserved for cases when the critic could do a better job than the person being criticised. 

Naturally, I don’t mean dispensing with all inexpert feedback. A restaurant customer probably couldn’t make an experimental meal as well as the gourmet chef who served it on a plate, but they might be able to advise if it tastes slightly too salty. A film buff can recognise a movie as having a weak script and under-developed plot, even if he lacks the capacity to make a movie himself. And a diverse range of inexpert views and opinions offered as feedback can be constructive and valuable to the experts.

Consequently, I mean something a bit different with my above consideration; I mean something like, it often seems to me that harsh, dismissive and judgmental criticism is particularly remiss when offered by someone who lacks the skills and capacity to perform the task as well or better than the one being criticised. Such criticism not only tends to fall short on multiple levels, it also often reflects poorly on the amateur critic.

So, starting a few years ago, I endeavoured to do the following – all of which I’ve found beneficial to my life journey: 

1)    Try to avoid harsh, dismissive, and judgmental criticism unless it’s absolutely necessary (and what makes it necessary is usually that other people are being harmed, hurt or deceived).

2)    Err on the side of generosity, and as much as it is reasonable to do so, try to see the best in things and in people.

3)    Whenever possible, only criticise if you think you could a better job yourself, and refrain from criticism if you can’t do the job or task as well as the person you are criticising.

Christianity's Homosexuality Debate: A Critical Analysis Of Both Sides

A homosexual is someone whose inclinations are towards those of the same sex. Homosexual practice is the wilful acting out of those desires in various forms of sexual union. We have no singular pronoun which can refer to either a man or woman, but my definition of ‘homosexual’ naturally includes males and females with categorical equivalence. Excepting lust (which is a complex subject outside of the scope here), the long-standing debate in Christianity about whether homosexuality is sinful must, of course, apply only to the acting out of homosexual inclinations through homosexual practice. There may be Christians in the world who believe that mere homosexual orientations are sinful, but frankly, as we’ll see later, if they believe that, they are probably not the sort of person to whom you should go for wise counsel.

When asked as a Christian what I think about the homosexuality issue (that is: is homosexual practice a sin?), I have to say that it’s not a matter in which I ever feel very inclined to get involved. On this topic, I’m more of a ‘Leave it up to God’ kind of guy – because the matter is so complex, and under so many varying contexts, that I think none of us really know for sure what we should make of it. Most Christians take one side or the other on the homosexuality issue, but they don’t really know how to justify their position with the rigour required to do justice to the complexity of the matter. Their belief is primarily a matter of preference, driven by strong-winded socio-cultural influences and self-preservation.

Being heterosexual, and not facing any of the struggles people with homosexual inclinations face, I don’t really think the homosexuality topic is my battle to be having. I have sympathy with the arguments on both sides of the debate, and I have thought about the matter a lot, and concluded that I think God probably wants us to be far less preoccupied with other people’s sexual orientation and related personal struggles, and simply show as much love to each other as possible, and leave safely in His hands the stuff we can’t fully understand.

I’ve noticed that conservatives are usually inclined to tell me I’m being too liberal in speaking like this, but liberals rarely tell me I’m not being liberal enough. I suspect it’s because conservatives act as though they are pretty sure they are on the right side of the argument, whereas liberals are far less sure they are right about this, and are in a more acute state of awareness of the speculation they are undertaking.

I have written quite a few thoughts on the homosexuality matter over the years, and I will try to bring some of them together here to offer a comprehensive analysis, where I will present both sides of the argument as I see them. Those who only seek quick condemnations with religious clichés will be disappointed here – this is a knotty issue, and the subject deserves more time than most Christians have been prepared to give it. Allow me to present as I see it a case for the prosecution (that homosexual practice is a sin) and a case for the defence (that it isn’t), but only with the disclaimer that I think anyone who has chosen a strong position on this has done so more in emotive speculation than anything else, and with purported justification that is probably less conclusive than they realise.

I believe the homosexuality issue must be summarised with the following set of considerations, which form the basis of why it’s such a complex matter to resolve: 

1)     The fact that the Bible repeatedly says homosexual practice is wrong suggests that God does have some kind of issue with it, even if we haven’t yet established what that issue might be. 

2)     The fact that homosexual inclinations are not a matter of choice means that any Divine prohibition of same-sex sexual relationships imposes a huge cost on people with homosexual inclinations who want to be in a loving, sexually intimate relationship. 

3)     The Biblical template for heterosexual people who want to be in a loving, sexually intimate relationship is marriage. Sexual intimacy is exclusively reserved for Christian marriage. 

4)     For almost all of human history, save for the last few years in a few countries, it has not been possible for homosexuals to marry, meaning any sexual intimacy between practicing homosexuals has automatically fallen outside of the Biblical injunctions against pre-marital sexual intimacy for most of human history.

If God does have some kind of issue with homosexual activity, the challenge, then, is to try to ascertain whether there is something fundamental about homosexual practice that God dislikes, or whether the reason the Bible seems to have an issue with it is because its activity falls outside of the possibility of Christian marriage. If the former, then perhaps no kind of homosexual union, even in Christian same-sex marriage, will ever be permissible to God (in which case, we should try to explore why that is, and what that means for homosexuals); and if the latter, then we must explore whether the possibility of Christian marriage in contemporary times changes the issue.

The ’Not merely a choice’ error
Some Christians try to put a premature end to the issue by asserting that homosexuality is simply a choice, and that if homosexuals were simply to choose the heterosexual option instead, that they too could avoid a sinful sexual union, and enjoy marriage in the way that heterosexuals do. But I think that view comes to grief. Homosexual inclination is not simply a life choice; it is widespread amongst many other animals in the animal kingdom (most in fact). For example, it is quite frequent in social birds and mammals, and occurs very frequently in primates. Some animals are asexual and reproduce with what's called 'parthenogenesis', where an unfertilised egg develops into a new individual (sea urchins and aphids qualify here), and there are some animals that are hermaphroditic, displaying many bisexual tendencies. So virtually all animals practice homosexuality in some way, shape, or form - it's part of our evolution - and we are animals too, so it’s part of our evolution.

Of course, one shouldn’t necessarily look to patterns in nature for moral guidance – I mean, killing and theft are frequent in nature, but we wouldn’t endorse them as moral precepts. But the above argument simply shows that homosexuality is not unnatural to the person with homosexual inclinations. The homosexuals’ attraction to one another is as natural to them as one heterosexual’s is to another heterosexual. 

We have found over 1000 species that show evidence of homosexual behaviour within the species. Although we cannot ask about the moral implication with animals, as this is purely a case of biological programming, we can ask about the passing on of those genes – after all, if natural selection is about fitness, survival and reproduction, it is sometimes thought that genes for homosexuality wouldn’t be selected for, as they would reduce the differential reproductive success rate of a species. Although there is some truth in this line of thinking, quite obviously there is not a sufficient quantity of homosexuality in the gene pool to reduce propagation of the species to near extinction, because we know evidentially that there are many homosexuals in homo-sapiens and yet the human race is thriving. 

The upshot is that whichever way we cut the cloth, there is overwhelming evidence that homosexuality is genetic and hormonal as well as environmental and cultural, and this is played out right throughout the animal kingdom. Of course, it must be said that that alone isn’t sufficient evidence that homosexual practice is approved of by God, after all, we can find cannibalism and infanticide in the animal kingdom, but I doubt very much whether God would want them freely practiced in societies across the world. But it certainly does show that if homosexual attraction does turn out to be theologically unnatural, it does not seem to be biologically unnatural. Moreover, a high proportion of homosexual men have older brothers, and the more brothers the greater their chances of being homosexual. Although tests aren’t absolutely conclusive, the most likely explanation is the biological activity within the child’s in utero environment, where each previous male pregnancy had sensitised further the mother to testosterone, provoking an antibody response that 'mops up' testosterone, thereby reducing the amount received by the foetus, which then diminishes the masculisation of the child’s brain.

Is there any Biblical justification for calling homosexual practice sinful?
I find it difficult to deny that St Paul is quite explicit in his condemnation of willingness to engage in homosexual practice:

Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.
Romans 1:24-27

Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. 1 Corinthians 6:9-10

Applying these teachings to the gospel of salvation, it would appear that St Paul explicitly calls for those with homosexual inclinations to be disciplined in being willing to manage and suppress their desires for engagement in homosexual practices. Except our Lord Jesus, who naturally stands alone, St Paul was arguably the greatest mind in Christian history; which to me means only two things – he was being quite explicit in his teachings on homosexuality, and the more liberal folk have underestimated the power of the sins being committed; or his teachings were not a blanket disapproval, but instead a commentary very specific to the day, and to first century church needs.

Let’s look at the latter first. Although I am not sure myself, I will present an impartial philosophical argument in defence of the latter position, and then one for the former. The first point to make is that, naturally, we cannot simply make doctrines of verses in scripture without recourse to further consideration regarding their proper meaning. Take 1 Corinthians 8:7-8 as an example:

But not everyone possesses this knowledge. Some people are still so accustomed to idols that when they eat sacrificial food they think of it as having been sacrificed to a god, and since their conscience is weak, it is defiled. But food does not bring us near to God; we are no worse if we do not eat, and no better if we do.

No doubt the church you attend doesn't have the slightest issue over this - the issue of eating food sacrificed to idols simply isn't relevant to your church life - but to the Corinthian church to whom it was addressed this was a key issue of the day, because such an offence was considered by some to be a sin against the First Commandment. In most cases like the above, one instinctively knows the relevance and time frames of scriptural teaching, so I need not over-indulge in time spent on that particular aspect of hermeneutics. But it isn’t always so clear in all cases, especially given that without recourse to the proprietary interpretative component attached to your proposition.

If we are to successfully make a case in favour of the prosecution – that homosexual practice is a sin and will always remain so – then we need to take the proposition at its best, not its worst. Let’s say, for example, that there are 300 homosexual Christians in Norwich. Feeling misunderstood, they decide to form a new church congregation (entirely self-funded) and appoint a homosexual pastor to lead them. Let’s call this church ‘Unity in Christ’. This pastor just happens to be one of the most gifted Christians of his day – his education is vast and diverse, he is well travelled and influential in planting many churches, his IQ is off the charts, his generosity, kindness, humility, grace and love is abundant, and his ability to connect with God (and others) and help others connect with God is profoundly impressive. Let’s also say that this ‘Unity in Christ’ church acquires a fantastic reputation for being very welcoming and producing great and challenging scriptural teaching. Plus, they become known for wonderful generosity, reaching others, charity, kindness, superlative conduct, and successful growth. These homosexual Christians have also abstained from any sexual practices throughout their life, but now that they live in a society that allows homosexual Christian marriage, some of them have been married and are living happy, fulfilling, Godly Christian lives.

Going forward, then, when you think of the theological debate around homosexual practice, I’d encourage you to frame this discussion in terms of two devout Christians, let’s call them Jack and Frank, married in a same-sex union who had been chaste until their wedding night. Because if homosexual practice is wrong for all time in God’s eyes, then Jack and Frank’s marriage – the best imaginable homosexual union – is also wrong; but if only some types of homosexual practice are wrong in God’s eyes, then our work is ahead of us finding out what the key distinctions are.

Now you may say that this is still sin in God’s eyes, and that no homosexual marriages are endorsed by God – and you might be right about that. But its wrongness doesn’t appear as obvious to me in the way that other Biblical wrongs, which is why the matter is problematical. Although in terms of how we deal with the socio-personal, society is a broad spectrum not easily amenable to Gestalt descriptions**, we can infer enough to know that, say, murder and rape and theft are detrimental to both utilitarian principles and an overall pursuit of personal virtue and goodness, and that when fruitfully considered, the gamut of guilt, remorse and regret is inevitable if one engages in such behaviour. Not only do murder and rape and theft harm others, they are an outrage on the conscience of the perpetrator of those crimes, even to the extent that one can only actually benefit and develop and (potentially) undergo rehabilitation 'because' of such contemplations.

Now look how St Paul posits his reproofs with the following list, and spot the odd one out; idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, practicing homosexuals, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, slanderers, swindlers, lawbreakers, murderers, slave traders, liars and perjurers. Taken as a mere delineation of the sinful vs the virtuous, homosexual practice seems not to fit easily in that company – because, unlike the other sins, it appears to be a victimless sin, at least, when considering Jack and Frank in a loving Christian marriage. Why did St Paul include it with the above (much more serious) sins? Well, if one thinks of a Biblical template for sexual union, Jack and Frank’s marriage appears to fall within the rubric of an honest volitional expression of commitment and dedication to God, and to one's beloved, with God at the heart of the relationship.

Think of the triangle analogy - if two beloveds move closer to God, they move closer to each other too. Those on the side of the defence can think of no obvious reason why such a relationship would have to be implicitly heterosexual, and certainly there appears to be no grounds for its inclusion among St Paul’s other behavioural reproaches – unless, as the more liberal Christians claim, St Paul is not issuing a blanket reproach on homosexual love and commitment, but on the kind of salacious and harmful behaviour that was seen at the time to be culturally improper and impeding the propagation of the gospel of grace. It could perhaps be thought of in the same way that we might condemn the present day binge culture and the drunkenness and cheap sex attached to it - not as a condemnation of drink and sex as intrinsic pleasures, but of their misuse and their excessiveness in over-indulgence. 

This is why liberal Christians have sought to separate sin and homosexual practice. Where murder and rape and theft obviously involve other people being victims as well as the perpetrator, and while it is clear that sex and alcohol misuse, excessiveness and over-indulgence are harmful – they believe that if a homosexual couple have a relationship and compatible sexual union that specifically falls within the rubric of an honest volitional expression of commitment and dedication to God, and to one's beloved, with God at the heart of the relationship, then not only is it the case that it is hardly a sin at all - its denial or suppression actually does more harm than its uninhibited embrace, and probably contributes to more sin than its acceptance.

Not only is homosexuality’s inclusion quite discordant on St Paul’s list – it seems difficult if not impossible to be arraigned for sinfulness when there isn’t much culpability felt at being homosexual, and no actualised awareness of why such a (to them) natural act of love and commitment shouldn’t be enjoyed in the same way that heterosexuals can enjoy it. I am not saying that solves the problem in favour of the liberal position, but it ought to be factored into the considerations.

This is why the conservative position regarding Romans 1:26-27 and homosexual inclination contravening what is natural to something altogether unnatural, and as being contrary to God’s design (as per Romans 1:21,24), depart from what we know from our current backdrop of genetic and psychological knowledge, and from the numerous testimonies of homosexuals, that it isn’t contrary to the created physiology but very much a part of it.

One thing seems sure, then – if homosexual practice is supposed to be seen as a sin (and it’s possibly true that it is) then, I think the above makes it clear that it is not really a sin like any other sin. If we go down this route, we have to factor in the supporting view that St Paul was criticising specific prurient practices that were seen to be hindering the development of first century Christianity, and some of those were homosexual practices, so he felt it appropriate to mention them in relation to the threat they posed to the first century propagation of grace (see the book of Galatians too), not as a blanket disapproval. In the context of what is best for the church in the spreading of the gospel of grace, one must understand that in those times it was of paramount importance that churches had good and reliable leaders, because getting the church on the move was going to be met with heated opposition.

With the Bible, one must understand that the people of the day understood the contexts of being homosexual in those times a lot better than many seem to now. I don’t mean they understood the biology or physiology better, I mean what the cultural implications were around that time, and the practices being undertaken – they would have understood St Paul’s disapprovals better than we do, because they were living in the midst of those disapproved actions. The Christian who takes the more liberal approach to the subject of homosexual practice cannot reasonably deny that there are injunctions against it in scripture, but they are basing their view on the hope that St Paul was speaking out at the time not against homosexuality as a blanket disapproval for all time, but against some pretty bad practices, not to do with sexuality or biology, but male prostitution and other unhelpful activities that impeded the conceptual clarity of grace. 

Remember St Paul had just had an amazing life transformation and saw the spreading of the good news as a job for early Christians, to give us what we have now. His grace theology was to surpass anything that preceded it, and in the context of the day, he knew that minds were easily corrupted, so he preached a message that sought to stop people becoming incorrigibly lost. If the epistles were only criticisms of first century practices, not of homosexuality under the right conditions, then it would seem that there may be no reasonable grounds of objection to the ‘Unity in Christ’ church or the marriage of Jack and Frank that I introduced in my thought experiment. 

But all that said, it is wise to ask why St Paul issued a condemnation of something we now look upon more freely and liberally, and whether those harsh condemnations were only harsh in the context of the times, and what Christianity was up against, or whether they indicate a more wholesale Divine disapproval.  

I think this is one of the main reasons why the debate has raged on for so many years. If what St Paul was most against was practices that could encroach upon one’s spiritual journey in a time when it was tough to persevere with, it would seem that he could have nothing against the ‘Unity in Christ’ church of the 21^st century or a marriage like that of Jack and Frank. If, on the other hand, he has an issue with homosexual practice in any given time (as a blanket condemnation), for many, they don’t sit well what we know about biology and the causes of homosexual inclinations, and the apparent victimless sin of loving same-sex Christian marriages.

For those who believe that homosexual practice is a permanent sin in all contexts, this entails believing that the victim of the sin is the perpetrators themselves. If chastity and marriage between a man and a woman is the Biblical precedent, then their view is that those born with the genetics that will not enable them to be sexually compatible with the opposite sex are to be seen as having a bad rub of the draw in the gene pool, and are to put up with lot, and live a life of abstinence and denial.  They must live as a single person never knowing the beauties of marriage and sexual love, while all the time feeling inevitably isolated and marginalised having to watch a world full of happy couples having something they cannot have. This is what many Christians must adhere to if they believe that St. Paul was condemning homosexual practice for all time. 

I have only tried to offer a fair and balanced look at both sides of the debate. I will leave it to you to decide on which side of the debate you fall, and how much confidence you feel you can place in your position. 

*Moreover, consider animal groups in which an alpha male does most of the breeding - that's a much lower rate than 85% of the species doing the breeding, yet they thrive in propagating their genes. It's not as though alpha male breeding is incongruous in the selection process - it is actually part of the selection process, because alpha male exclusivity comes with some tremendous positive gains in differential reproductive success for the group as a whole, most notably a large number of the male population not being vulnerable to predation when in the act of procreation. In some cases, as much as 95% of the male population is restricted from procreation, so the above argument against homosexuality is ineffectual, because such mechanisms can be offset by a more valuable safety within a species. These evolutionary mechanisms are just like many others that contain side effects. If the advantage of a particular solution is not outweighed by the negative aspects of the side effect, the solution will usually remain in the gene pool, and that's what has happened with homosexuality - the offshoot is a by-product of sexuality in general, and its comparably minor disadvantages to differential reproductive probability are not strong enough to weed it out, so it has remained in the gene pool. Another probable beneficial solution to its survival is that non alpha male pack animal species often exhibit homosexual behaviour as a kind of interpersonal dynamic, whereby the non-mating contingent bond in order to cooperate with each other during the hunt.

** In psychological terms, Gestalt is a summation of parts related to configuration of elements unified as a whole.

Of Coase Things Won't Change Much

 

“The NHS will be safe again in Labour’s hands” they tell us. “With Labour in charge, the NHS will now get proper funding”, they declare. But that’s not the right way to look at things. The NHS is not in so much trouble because of which party is in government – mark my words, when Labour has finished however long they are in office, the NHS is unlikely to be in a better state than it is now, and that’s because politicians are not allowed to be honest about the problems, and about how ill-equipped they are to deal with them. Don’t get me wrong, I really value the ‘free at the point of use’ element, and my experiences of NHS workers show that they do a fantastic job under extremely challenging conditions. But, alas, for several decades now, the NHS situation has been that politicians pretend that only their party has the solutions to make it better, and members of the public pretend to believe whichever party they happen to favour. If politicians brushed up on their economies, and were voluntarily injected with truth serum, what I’m now going to say is roughly what they’d concede is the truth.

For many complex reasons that are too broad for a short blog post, institutions like the NHS, the Civil Service, Central Government, the EU, etc have become so bloated that they fall victim to diseconomies of scale, where it’s prohibitively difficult to manage the system efficiently through the command economy model. The economist Ronald Coase explored the optimal size of institutions in his “The Nature of the Firm", although he wasn’t talking about institutions like the above. For Coase, a firm is a collection of individuals coordinated by a management structure to achieve specific economic goals – largely, organisations that engage in economic activities to produce goods or services with the goal of minimising transaction costs.

But such firms do simulate the above institutions in that they involve a hierarchical structure, where decisions are made to coordinate the allocation of resources. Looking at the trade-offs between market exchange mechanisms and top down central planning, the latter is frequently devoid of the important information signals that markets provide, and the former is sometimes devoid of the centralised initiatives that maintain a perspective on the bigger picture.

In The Nature of the Firm, Coase determined that a firm optimally undertakes transactions by having an efficient internal hierarchy, where firms expand their activities internally up to the point where the costs of internal hierarchy and command are balanced against the costs of conducting those transactions in the market (such as outsourcing to external suppliers). That’s why an efficient firm (and, by extension, institution) will attain the right internal mechanisms alongside the efficiencies of economies of scale when outsourcing production activities when it’s more efficient to do so.

Under the Coasian theory, this is what determines the equilibrium size of firms, and goes a long way to explaining why the organisations suffering from diseconomies of scale are so consistently underperforming. When the internal structure becomes too complex or burdensome, with excessive bureaucracy, rigid hierarchies and inadequate upward/downward/sideward communication structures, inefficiencies will arise, leading to increased costs and reduced effectiveness in service delivery. And politicians mired in structures that are constructed and sustained with exactly the same inefficiencies are unlikely to be sufficiently equipped or competent enough to significantly improve something like the NHS.

The Emotional Elephant & The Rational Rider

 

One of the most important things an individual will ever learn is that our emotions frequently take the lead and steer our rationality, not the other way around. Hume correctly observed that “reason is the slave of the passions”, and decades of psychological and neuroscientific research in the past half a century have confirmed how right Hume was on this. Jonathan Haidt's metaphor of "the elephant and the rider" is perhaps my favourite illustration of this. The elephant represents the intuitive and automatic processes of the mind. The elephant symbolises the part of the mind that is influenced by emotions, habits, and unconscious beliefs. The rider represents the rational, conscious, and controlled processes of the mind, and is responsible for reasoning, logical thinking and decision-making. Haidt chose an elephant instead of a horse to illustrate the size and power of the driver of these feelings and instincts, compared with the comparably small rider trying to direct the elephant’s movements.

In order to think hard and reason well, we have to learn that humans aren’t the rational reasoning-machines we’d like to think we are. A consistent human tendency is that the elephant (emotional mind) often drives our actions, while the rider (rational mind) tries to justify these actions after the fact – and we serve ourselves (and others) well if we can raise awareness (in ourselves and others) when this is happening, especially in complex, tribal and divisive areas like religion and politics.

Understanding that reasoning is often used to support and rationalise initial emotional responses rather than to make purely logical decisions is one of the most enlightening things we can come to understand when engaging in these subjects. When you’re discussing politics or religion with people, your interlocutor is likely to be obliviously following the direction of their emotional elephant while believing they are using rational arguments to justify their beliefs.

There are key bits of wisdom that can be distilled from our awareness of "the elephant and the rider" phenomenon. The first is that if you’re engaging with someone about a particular issue to which they seem wedded, you are contending with not just what they claim to think and believe, but with all of the intuitive, psychological, emotional and tribal elements that are directing their viewpoints, and their familial, social, cultural and emotional investments in their perspectives. The second is that it makes it easier to see why people so often appear to talk past each other in debate, and why they regularly come away even more divided than when they began, and even surer they are right and their opponent is wrong. And the third is that if you want to help someone change their mind on an issue about which you believe they are wrong, you need to appeal to their emotions and feelings first, and perhaps even bond with them in a way in which they can see you as having their best interests at heart, and not as an opponent, because rational arguments are likely to be insufficient if they do not resonate with the intuitive aspects of the person.

Sunday Faith Series: The Fundamental Error Of 'Creation Science'

When you combine bad theology and bad science, in an attempt to distil scientific truths from the Bible, you get the misguided entity that has come to be known as Creation Science. Creation Science gets both fundamental propositions wrong - and in doing so, it diminishes both the Bible and science.

The Bible is a Divinely inspired book that tells us who God is, who we are, how we should act, how much we are loved by Him, and how we can have salvation. There is no scientific commentary in the Bible (at all), because the Bible was written several millennia before the scientific methods first became formally established.

The scientific methods enable us to converge upon information and ideas on how to assess variable and diverse protocols, and bring them into exquisite theoretical descriptions. Science gives us facts about the physical substrate of our natural world. There is nothing in the domain of science that can tell us who we are in relation to God and His plan for us.

All that is to say, Christianity and science offer two different lenses through which to understand reality as best we can - and things get muddy when their domains are confused. To illustrate, suppose Jack and Jill visit the zoo. Jack is looking at the tigers, and Jill is looking at the elephants, and both are oblivious to each other's focus.

Jack: What a beautiful shade of orange those creatures have.

Jill: It isn't orange, that's the way the sun is shining on them - they are grey.

Jack: Nevertheless, I wouldn't want to be chased and eaten by one.

Jill: What do you mean? They are herbivorous, not carnivorous - they wouldn't eat you.

Jack: Of course they would; haven't you seen those sharp teeth?

Jill: I think you mean tusks.

Jack: Eh?

Now, you see, all the time that Jack and Jill are talking past each other about different animals, their conversation lacks proper utility. The same is true with the Bible and science - the conversations are similar to Jack and Jill's, except the subject matter is more intractable. There is no conflict between good theology and good science; the only conflict is when either (or both) of these tenets are distorted. The continual need for clarifications like this tells us that, alas, there is still plenty of work to be done to weed this nostrum of Creation Science out of Christianity.

Edit to add: Creation science is that familiar phenomenon used by people with a perverse agenda to make their deception sound more credible to pliable individuals – they take a valid word and insert a preceding word to make their deception sound like a credible field. Creation Science is a classic example of trying to make pseudo-science sound like a science. Social justice is a classic example of trying to turn divisive identity politics into a field that sounds progressive. Holistic medicine is a synonym for medicine that has not been verified properly in clinical trials, and so forth.

Some Election Musings

 

Let’s start with some quirky facts about this election that have been doing the rounds: 

1} With a turnout of just under 60%, over 17 million eligible voters did not participate, which is almost twice the number of Labour voters. 

2} Labour secured only about 33% of the popular vote, yet won around 66% of the seats in Parliament, whereas the Conservatives received about 28% of the vote but got annihilated. 

3} Reform UK received 4 million votes (about 10% of the vote) but only secured 4 seats, while the Liberal Democrats secured only 3.4 million votes (around 8.5%) but won 69 seats. 

4} Because of the disproportionality of the electoral voting system, Labour's huge majority allows them to govern our nation despite fewer than 20% of the eligible electorate voting for them. 

5} Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour of 2019 gained a greater share of the vote and lost, with Keir Starmer’s Labour of 2024 gaining a smaller share of the vote and winning. 

It’s clear that Labour didn’t win this election so much as the Tories lost it. A significant proportion of the Labour votes were more concerned with getting the Tories out than they were excited about Labour governing under the leadership of serial bullshi**er Keir Starmer. The combined Tory/Reform vote was roughly similar to the combined Labour vote, where the latter greatly came out on top because we have a voting system that produces big victories when the opposition vote is divided. 

It’s perhaps especially noteworthy here that neither of the main parties fought this election on the values for which they used to stand, and both are currently fairly indistinguishable in mutually standing for big state, high tax, over-regulation, eco-fanatical, freedom-restricting, wokeist principles. For someone with my political values, I feel the Tories deserved to lose, but Labour didn’t deserve to win, which leaves a sense of foreboding for people who haven’t been seduced by the empty promises, taken in by the lies, and been enmeshed in the ever-knottier net of institutional thrall and systemic entrenchment. 

And to those who have built a profile around hating the opposition, I’d say that it’s unwise, because being on either extreme of the left vs. right divide is so inadequate to the task of reflecting the true complexities of something like a human society. A country needs and is built on conservative values to conserve the best values in society, and also requires liberal values to challenge the status quo, employ creative inputs, and help us evolve and improve. 

Conservative values play a crucial role in preserving the best aspects of society, such as Judeo-Christian truths, market qualities, innovation, self-determination, personal responsibility, traditions, cultural heritage, and other established institutions that have withstood the test of time. And liberal values are also essential for driving social, economic, and political progress. They encourage adaptability, enabling society to evolve in response to changing circumstances and emerging challenges. A thriving society like the UK will always function with both those qualities at work, harnessing both conservative and liberal values to maintain stability while promoting progress. 

So, it’s a big problem that the Conservative party no longer resembles the party with conservative values. They no longer have a coherent sense of continuity and identity, and they no longer offer a foundation upon which communities can build and thrive. Equally, Labour used to be the party of the working class – but it’s working-class people who are most crippled by Labour’s descent into over-regulation, Net Zero madness and increasing wokeness. 

Consequently, political commentary that pits one side as promoting evil values, and the other as the solution to counter evil, is just not doing the subject justice, or promoting the kind of thoughtful dialogue required to engage in healthy political discourse – especially given that the values on which they used to be divided have been eroded away within both parties respectively. 

But, alas, I suspect the same story will be told, whoever is in power – people will remain wedded to a tribalistic mentality, where most of the good/bad things done by the party(ies) they support and the party(ies) to which they’re hostile are seen through the lens of individual confirmation bias. It’s a very impoverishing way to do politics; seize on the opponents’ errors and ignore what they do well, and capitalise on the preferred party’s strengths and ignore what they do badly – but humans are primed to be that way. 

The best way to successfully defuse conflict in the world is not to be preoccupied with difference and division, but to encourage intellectual freedom, trade and competition, and celebration of assimilation and the ways in which we are similar with shared goals and common human properties. The political system, in its current incarnation, is not fit for purpose in achieving these aims, and in many cases only pretends to want to do so. 

Party politics aside, the old wisdom still holds, and probably always will; if we want material prosperity, we must promote freer trade; if we want better ideas, we should strive for more intellectual freedom; if we want kinder societies, we should work harder to love; and if we want justice, we should seek the truth.

If We Don't Choose Our Beliefs, How Can We Be Compelled To Believe?

 

A philosopher FB friend of mine wrote this provocative post that seemed to get a lot of positive feedback: 

“If it's true that beliefs are caused rather than chosen, then the idea in Christian theology that the only thing a person can do in order to be saved is believe that Christ died for their sins etc - which presumes people can choose what to believe, then that entire line of thinking is incoherent. You'll need to rethink Christianity and we'll have to rethink these philosophies, but what we can't do is defiantly cling to an idea that is almost certainly false.”

But I don’t think it’s right, so here is my brief take on it, which may be of interest to some:

I don’t think it’s quite right to say “that Christian doctrine is incoherent if we don’t choose our beliefs” – I think it’s more involved than that. I think it’s correct that beliefs are caused rather than chosen, and also correct that the only thing a person can do in order to be saved is believe that Christ is Lord, died for our sins, and so forth. But that doesn’t mean we “need to rethink Christianity”, because beliefs, causes and commitments are more complicated than that.

Because, although we don’t choose our beliefs, we do influence what we go on to believe by our actions and influences, and we increase or decrease the probability of belief based on the decisions we make. For example, an insecure hermit may not currently believe that there is much value for them in experiencing travel. At point 1, they could not choose to believe in the value of travel. But with a series of micro-steps, they might find after a while their confidence has increased to the level that they have started to enjoy their trips, and eventually they may even reach a place where they value being well-travelled beyond their wildest expectations.

Similarly, while we can’t choose to accept Jesus if our current state is one of unbelief, we can make decisions and undertake a series of micro-steps (pray, read the Bible, go to church, aim for higher goodness, practice deeper forgiveness, read Christian theology, etc) that gradually lead us to belief, where at an earlier point on the journey we weren’t able to believe.