Turtles Nearly All The Way Down

Suppose we have an infinite regress of turtles, each supported by an earlier turtle, with no first turtle, and suppose that if there is any last item, it’s not a turtle. In this case, the multiplicity of the turtles explains why any given turtle is supported. But no multiplicity of turtles fundamentally explains the supported turtles. Consequently, then, something that is other than a multiplicity of turtles fundamentally explains the supported turtles.

Those who know about the cosmological argument can probably see where I’m heading next.

Sceptics of Divine creation cleave to multiplicity of turtles with an earliest turtle hypothesis, where turtles here mean physical reality (of, being generous, however many universes). But Christians insist on the multiplicity of turtles with no earliest turtle as the cause of all turtles, because if turtles have an explanation, then their fundamental explanation cannot also be turtles, or even a first turtle.

A Type I multiplicity does not explain the turtles, because it does not explain any turtles earlier than the earliest turtle in the multiplicity. And a Type II multiplicity explains any turtle in the sequence as having an antecedent turtle cause, but not the cause of all turtles.

Applying this to real physics, because all physical causation is transitive, then all physical systems that exist must have a non-physical cause. Or in turtle language, anything non‑physical that explains the multiplicity of turtles explains all turtles (that is, all of physical reality) - because for any physical item, it is either a supported turtle or there is a supported turtle prior to it, and no regress can be explanatory as a whole.

That’s a simple way of stating why it has to be the case that a non‑physical entity explains all of physical reality.

 

On Monothinking

 

The reason it’s hard to take seriously people like Richard Dawkins on religion, Owen Jones on economics, Jermy Corbyn on politics, Naomi Klein on climate change, Afua Hirsch on discrimination, Paul Mason on geopolitics, to name a few examples, is because on that subject they are monothinkers; that is, someone who can only process ideas through a single worldview or framework. Their demand for explanation exceeds their supply, producing the intellectual equivalent of a mispriced asset.

As a consequence, they draw inadequate conclusions because they don’t know what they don’t know. On these subjects, they operate in a permanent state of cognitive overdraft, where they can offer only a single explanation for the thing they oppose: Religious belief = ignorance; wealth = exploitation; inequality = injustice; climate change = doom, discrimination = oppression, and so forth.

This works alongside the slightly more subtle phenomenon of what’s called ‘belief-clustering’, whereby the probability of an individual believing x increases the probability that one could predict their belief on y and z. Like, if I know where you stand on inequality, I can probably predict where you stand on Israel; if I know where you stand on they/them pronouns, I can probably predict where you stand on climate change (interestingly, though, probably not so much if you reverse that); if I know where you stand on feminism, I can probably predict where you stand on welfare and state intervention; if I know where you stand on abortion, I can probably predict where you stand on chastity and homosexuality; that sort of thing.

Don’t be a monothinker, because it gives strong indication that your beliefs have been imprudently implanted, not carefully thought through.

On Sola Scriptura

 

I met with a minister recently who espouses the idea of Sola scriptura. Sola scriptura is the belief that scripture alone is the supreme authority for Christian faith and practice. If as Christians we mean that authority shouldn’t drift into human invention that undermines scripture, that no leader, tradition, or institution should override scripture, and that scripture is therefore the final court of appeal on matters of faith, then there is a sense in which Sola scriptura is onto something.

But Sola scriptura cannot be literally absolute, because scripture is not self-interpreting, and Christians rely on extra‑biblical resources to get a handle on scriptural authority. Consequently, scripture is the highest authority, but it cannot be the only authority, otherwise we have a self-refencing problem. So, sola scriptura works only within a theological framework that assumes interpretive components, because nothing contains meaning except by extrinsic relationship to the texts. We need logic, philosophy, and critical thinking to interpret scripture responsibly, to evaluate interpretations, avoid contradictions, apply scripture to socio-cultural situations, and engage with politics, science, ethics, and culture. Therefore, Sola scriptura is relatively true, not absolutely true.

I think most balanced Christians would go along with that. Fundamentalists often resist this idea, because they often weaponise scripture to construct a hermetically sealed, self‑contained in-group of willing adherents (often cults), denying even that meaning depends partly on the reader’s context, to keep the mindset within the circle solely conforming to their aims. That’s why they often warn against “worldly” knowledge like science, philosophy, or human reasoning - treating it as being opposed to scripture in cases when it clearly isn’t. Obviously, there is a lot of “worldly” stuff that is opposed to scripture, but that’s where our old friend critical interpretation and discernment is needed to determine which is which.

The upshot is, being interpretive agents replete with a multitude of extra-biblical resources, and mental and emotional artillery, we clearly read the Bible through our own lens, so we can’t justifiably claim that the Bible is the lens through which we see the world. Instead, it’s more nuanced - scripture is the supreme authority in a relative sense, rather like a compass bearing: it gives the direction we should follow, but we still need maps, terrain knowledge, and judgement to complete the journey. The bearing guides us, but it doesn’t replace the tools.

An even better way to frame this is to say that scripture is a fixed authority, but it is not a fixed direction - because truthful direction emerges only when a reader interprets it correctly, and each individual interpretation comes alive in accordance with their own personal journey of circumstances, background, talents and application. So, it’s perhaps more like a fleet of ships, all trying to travel north (closer to God), but each on their own distinct, unique adventure as they travel. Think of scripture, then, like the ship’s anchor, holding the vessel in the right waters, keeping it from drifting into danger, and providing stability - but with sailors who still need a rudder, charts, experience, and discernment to navigate.

What Nathan Cofnas Got Wrong About Human Intelligence

 

Jason Arday may have been exposed as a deceiver, but Nathan Cofnas, the man who helped expose Arday, gets his interpretation of human intelligence wrong. Cofnas has built his reputation on saying that genetic differences contribute to average differences in cognitive ability between human populations, and that the evidence suggests that environmental factors do not fully explain group differences in cognitive test performance.

He is referring to, among other things, Harvard’s Students for Fair Admissions case, which showed that black students were about 12–14% of the class at the time, but under pure SAT + GPA admissions, black representation would fall to around 0.7%. That part is correct. But Cofnas used the 0.7% figure to argue that if admissions were based only on merit, black representation would collapse, therefore the gap is partly genetic.

It’s true that black representation would severely diminish as things stand, but there is no evidence that the gap of these selected groups is anything other than environmental. The error Cofnas is making is like saying that children who grow up near airports have worse sleep, so they must have genetically inferior circadian rhythms. Or it’s like saying that people who can’t afford pianos are worse at piano playing, therefore they’re genetically less musical.

When environments are equalised, the gaps shrink dramatically, and in many cases all-but disappear. For example, black African immigrant students in the UK outperform almost every demographic group academically, which undermines the genetic‑deficit hypothesis. There are plenty of studies that show an environmental performance gap between what are wrongly labelled ‘races’, and that when the environment changes, the gap shrinks or vanishes. Moreover, the Flynn effect shows that IQ scores rose in the UK by approximately 30 points across the 20th century, mainly because the environments changed, especially around lifestyle and nutrition, like what happened to the Dutch and height.

And it would be very easy for Cofnas to find this out, so I’m not sure why he misinterprets performance gaps under unequal conditions as genetic differences under equal conditions. Modern genetics, neuroscience, and developmental psychology are against him here. If a group can outperform under different environmental conditions, then the indication is that it is not genetics at play.

Lastly, and what I’d say is the most compelling reason to reject the genetic factor, is that lower IQ in people with different skin colour or ethnicity is not what we’d expect genetically from an evolutionary standpoint either, as there is no reason to expect lower cognitive ability in any human population, save for environmentally. Genetic differences in cognitive ability between human populations would require long isolation and strong selection, and human groups have simply not been isolated long enough, nor subjected to the kinds of selection pressures, that would produce such meaningful genetic differences in general intelligence.

On DEI Part II

 

Here I show the limitations of AI while simultaneously elaborating on the issues with DEI I laid out in the previous blog. The best way to use AI is to ask a very specific question about a matter of fact where it would be a prohibitively long-winded task to find all this out oneself. So, I asked Copilot very specifically “What do firms, businesses and institutions cite as the most positive claims about DEI, and please list them in a top 5, strongest to weakest". Here is what it said:

Top 5 commonly cited positive claims about DEI (strongest → weakest)

1. Improved talent discovery
The strongest empirical claim: DEI initiatives can widen the recruitment funnel so organisations don’t overlook high‑ability candidates from less traditional pipelines (e.g., non‑elite universities, non‑networked applicants).
This is the argument that structural bias hides talent, and DEI can help surface it.

2. Reduction of discriminatory barriers
DEI is credited with reducing procedural discrimination (e.g., biased interview questions, biased evaluation rubrics).
This is not about quotas — it’s about standardising processes to reduce arbitrary bias.

3. Better organisational decision‑making
Some studies argue that cognitively diverse teams (different backgrounds, training, heuristics) produce fewer blind‑spots and more robust decisions.
This is the “diversity reduces groupthink” claim.

4. Higher innovation rates
A number of business‑school studies claim that heterogeneous teams generate more novel ideas because they combine different mental models.
This is often cited in tech, R&D, and creative industries.

5. Improved customer alignment
In sectors with diverse customer bases, DEI is said to help organisations better understand and serve those customers.
E.g., banks serving multilingual communities, hospitals serving multicultural populations.

If you’re like me (and I’d highly recommend it 😃), you’re probably thinking how weak they look. And you’re not imagining it; they are weak, because they don’t actually describe the benefits of DEI, they describe the benefits of choosing to hire on merit, which mindfully and proactively includes candidates from diverse backgrounds (something we should all support). That is, competence‑based broadening of opportunity is a sine qua non for firms looking to hire the best candidates, and the benefits AI cited in the above list are not benefits of DEI, they are benefits of a merit-based broadened search space. In fact, the DEI-inspired identity-based prioritisation and arbitrary quotas actually work in opposition to broadened meritocracy.

To be fair to Copilot, I did ask it to list on behalf of what firms, businesses and institutions perceived as the principal benefits of DEI, which shows fundamentally that firms, businesses and institutions tend to remain confused about DEI. The irony, of course, is that Copilot’s list doesn’t reveal the strengths of DEI at all - it reveals the strengths of meritocratic hiring done properly. Every “benefit” it cites is simply what happens when organisations widen their search space without lowering standards, without prioritising identity, and without introducing representational distortions. The upshot is, DEI is in direct competition with meritocracy, and the only thing that works is the thing DEI doesn’t actually do.

The Road To DEI Is Paved With Good Intentions, But......

 

I'm sure it'll be obvious what has compelled me to elaborate on what I’ve said in older articles (see my Discrimination tab in the sidebar): that the DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) ideology is one of those things where almost everybody knows it is bad and unwelcome, but they tolerate it, because in the broadest sense there is little they can do about it. Let me highlight why DEI is such a net cost to society, starting with the most obvious, but going down to the least obvious. 

1)    It has a negative effect on everyone who would ordinarily be hired on merit but is not hired due to a DEI hire. 

2)    Because of number 1, it means lots of skilled, qualified people take longer or find it harder to get jobs suited to their skills, experience and competence. 

3)    It has a negative effect on everyone who is let go in order to increase DEI hires. 

4)    It has a negative effect on competent individuals whose traits are often associated with DEI hires (sex, ethnicity, skin colour, etc) but who actually earned their role on merit. They are wrongly suspected of being DEI hires, and it can be hard to shake off that stigma. 

5)    It harms customers, consumers, students, etc, who receive poorer service because the DEI hire is less qualified, skilled or competent than the person who would have been hired on merit. 

6)    It creates a feeling of wider resentment in industries and institutions, and likely increases unfair negative discrimination in terms of immutable characteristics (sexism, racism, etc). 

7)    It creates even further social tension, because the bad actors who try to defend unfair hiring (hiring not on merit to boost minority representation) look to attack those who are justly resistant to it, stoking more hostility and socio-political division. 

Now, the reason I said DEI ideology is because it's clear that in a merit-based recruitment process diversity and inclusivity are positive things when we simply mean widening the merit-based recruitment process to ensure high-ability candidates are not overlooked. But here’s what I think the real picture shows. Meritocracy achieves the highest efficiency in the market because jobs are matched to the applicants most qualified to perform them. The trouble is that as a society we have never made the most of the benefits of meritocracy, because in practice we have always allowed other types of bias to dictate some of our hiring choices – especially affinity bias, network bias, and structural bias. And because merit-only hiring systems would still involve biases towards people with, say, better upbringings, people with better networks of influence, people with better social capital, etc, DEI can really only introduce a new distortion to adjust parts of an old distortion, but where I believe the new distortion is worse overall. Any employment strategy that is quota-driven, unfairly selective or ideological instead of meritocratic makes an already imperfect system worse. 

We should all want to live in a society in which unjust barriers are removed, access is equal, fair and wide, standards are identical, and the best candidates are hired – but DEI cannot adequately correct prior biases by merely introducing new ones. It’s rather like how, if a lake has too many algae (original bias), conservationists try to fix it by introducing a new species of fish that eats algae. But the fish also eats native species, disrupts the food chain, and causes ecological imbalance in a different direction. Like the lake scenario, the attempt to fix the first bias in employment creates a second, more complicated one.

Except I think it’s even more problematic than that, because the first biases weren’t necessarily too dominant, just mildly distortionary. But adding the so-called corrective variable of DEI has introduced new distortions that are likely to make the prior biases even stronger than they were beforehand. So, DEI becomes a negative skew in two distinct ways - both intrinsically (as per my above list of 7) and extrinsically as per the knock-on effect. So, instead of the consequences of my lake analogy, think of it instead in terms of a particle system governed by several interacting fields. One field - let’s say the electromagnetic interaction - is slightly dominant (the original hiring bias). Then we introduce a new compensating field designed to counteract the dominance, but the new field doesn’t simply oppose the original force, it interacts with the entire system in non‑linear ways - like, say, coupling unexpectedly with the weak force, altering vacuum energy, shifting mass terms, that sort of thing.

Consequently, the new field amplifies the original imbalance through feedback loops. Instead of neutralising the dominant force, the compensating field actually destabilises the system, forces additional corrections, and creates even stronger asymmetries. And just as in this illustration the new field magnifies the very imbalance it was meant to fix, DEI similarly introduces new variables that don’t just distort the system - they interact with existing biases in ways that make those biases even stronger.

To that end, in net terms, DEI makes problems it purports to address even more problematic – and just about everyone is made worse off by that. The only people made better off are bad actors in society who look to exploit or personally benefit from the situation at the expense of everyone else, where those costs are spread thinly (a bit like with government tariffs and subsidies).

The Psychology of Comfort Recalibration

I’ve noticed a psychological trap that people employ on themselves for consolation when they need the solace of not being all they have the potential to be. Let’s give it a name…..er….let’s call it comfort recalibration. I’d say comfort recalibration is basically like this. If an individual cannot attain some element of the subset of all they have the potential to be – like, say, creatively, morally, vocationally, in discipline, in effort, in treatment of others, in goodness, in intellectual progress, in taking responsibility, etc – they prime themselves not to desire or value it. Like a striving cat that wants the mouse in the shed but forgoes the effort to find it by teaching itself that it’s not really hungry. Cats don’t really do that, by the way, it’s just an illustration.

And in human behaviour, it’s not just priming yourself to believe you don’t really desire what you do, or what you should, at the same time it’s priming yourself to be satisfied with what you can easily obtain. Like if the cat can’t catch the mouse he’s desperate to eat, he pretends that insects and grass are what he really desires (a bad medium to long term strategy, as he’ll soon be malnourished).

Observe people in life and you’ll see how frequently they behave like this, often beneath their own conscious inspection. They can’t get the girl they want, so they tell themselves ‘she’s not all that’ anyway. They can’t get any girl, so they tell themselves that relationships are more hassle than they’re worth. They lack the motivation for health and fitness training, so they tell themselves everyone in the gym is just a performative egoist. They can’t obtain the status they crave, so they denounce it all as a tyranny of unjust inequality. They don’t have the combination of will and skill to think through a complex matter proficiently, so they tell themselves their over-simplified opinion is sufficient to state their case.

The problem is, with enough people like this in society opting out and resorting to their own extension of Wittgensteinian games, not only do the truth narratives get bent all out of shape, but the shared values and standards that can make humanity thrive begin to dissolve. I think this is one of the most prominent assaults on our society and our language, where so many people are rewriting the rules to protect their comfort and their ego. We’ve sleepwalked into becoming a culture that normalises comfort recalibration, and I think that’s why truthseeking and truthtelling are becoming like endangered species. 

The Paradox of Similarity in Decision‑Making

 

Regular readers may have heard of Fredkin’s Paradox – which says that the more similar two choices are, the less the decision should matter - yet the harder it is to choose between them. I mentioned this at a recent social event, and received an interesting response back:

“But surely that isn't true, and it doesn't bear out in my experience. If I have to choose between a Chinese restaurant and an Indian restaurant, it's a harder choice than a Chinese and a Thai, or Indian and Bangladeshi?”

On the off chance that readers might find it interesting, I’ll share my response here – which is to say that the above retort actually strengthens Fredkin’s Paradox more than it undermines it. This is because Fredkin wasn’t talking about similarity of category - Chinese vs Indian, Thai vs Bangladeshi, etc - he was talking about similarity of value. That is, two choices are “similar” in the paradox only when they satisfy your goal equally (or nearly equally) well.

Think about your own experience of walking around a capital city trying to help your wife decide where she wants to eat. If the goal is simply “eat something tasty,” and both Chinese and Indian hit that spot near-equally on that day, the decision becomes hard. Not because the cuisines are similar, but because your desire for them is equally strong.

This is why the restaurant example doesn’t contradict the paradox. It actually illustrates it. If in Chinese vs. Indian they are both equally appealing, then the decision is hard. If in Chinese vs. Thai they are not close to being equally appealing, because, say, you had Chinese last weekend and you really fancy a Pad Thai today, then the decision is easy. Similarly, Indian vs Bangladeshi might be similar cuisines but not equally appealing for a number of reasons, making the decision easy, and not a close call.

Of course, a key thing to add about Fredkin’s Paradox is that most human decisions aren’t of this nature. Humans rarely experience true indifference, especially with socio-cultural factors and identity driving so many decisions. Fredkin’s Paradox applies only when you do care, but the options seem equally good in terms of value.

At this point in writing this blog post, I then just started to ponder Fredkin’s Paradox in terms of the dating pool and people’s search for their optimum beloved. If Fredkin is right about the difficulty applying in situations with agonising similarity of value, and I think broadly he is, then if you’re agonising between two prospective beloveds, it’s likely that neither is your optimum beloved. Because as anyone who has fallen in love knows, despite the impression one might form from being a single person immersed in the dating pool search space, the optimum beloved is not the result of a difficult optimisation problem - the optimum beloved is the person who ends the optimisation problem.

Another reason for this is found in Pascal’s great wisdom that “The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.” While the beloved is chosen through many rational and empirical-based decision processes, the heart is not really captured by weighing marginal gains or running a mental cost–benefit analysis; it is captured by a kind of intuitive clarity that smothers mechanical deliberation. Yes, reason tries to optimise, compare, and evaluate, but it’s the heart that does the falling.

That’s why, when the heart knows, the decision process comes to a natural cessation, as the optimum beloved becomes the one who makes the very act of further choosing feel unnecessary.

Wildfires Are Devastating: But Not A Cause For Urgent Climate Action

It’s easy to observe things like the awful Dunwich Heath fire, and the recent droughts and high temperatures, and declare that this is exactly the kind of thing that should galvanise us towards more urgent climate action. But here I’ll show why that’s wrong. It’s true we can expect hotter, drier summers, and that this shapes the conditions in which fires and droughts happen. But the big miscalculation of the ‘urgent climate action’ brigade is that this isn’t a problem to fix like one cleans up some spilled milk or disentangles a knotted fishing net - it’s a natural part of the evolution of our industrial, technological, and climate story that involves prudence and careful discernment of complex trade-offs.

You see, in terms of the whole, multifaceted, interconnected picture, we couldn’t have done very much better in harnessing energy, raising living standards, and developing our industries as we have in the timescale we did. In other words, humanity didn’t recklessly choose this path, we have grown into it via the only workable route for billions of people to survive, flourish, and build the modern world. People who look at only the negative effects in a complex, multifaceted set of trade-offs and complain solely on that basis have usually not thought things through beyond their own immediate interest and reputation: they care more about how they look to others than how proficiently they deal with complex matters.

Every society in the past 200 years has faced the same challenge at different speeds – the challenge of how to lift people out of poverty, feed them, heal them, connect them, and power their lives – and the only viable means by which we’ve achieved this is by working together as a species to use coal, oil, and gas to transform our species. We used fossil fuels as primary resources because they were the best tools we had, and in most cases, still have. They were the engines of prosperity, medicine, sanitation, food security, education, and global stability. Sure, they came with costs – but they made life expectancy double; they made infant mortality collapse; and they made mass starvation the exception instead of the rule.

As I said, it wasn’t all perfect, of course – nothing ever can be – but utilising cheap energy to engender the most remarkable progression-explosion is something for which humanity should be immensely thankful and grateful, not so entitled and judgmental. A truly thankful and grateful person can say that these challenges we are now facing are really part of the consequences of that success – it’s like winning the lottery and being told a small chunk of it will have to be apportioned to cleaning up some mess after the party.

To reiterate an essential point above – I need to tell that with the right kind of analysis of just what the human collective is and has been, it really is the case that as a species we couldn’t have done this very much better than we have, if you think of it through the correct I, Pencil-type of lens (see this blog post). In fact, perhaps the biggest thing we should have done better is scaled nuclear power earlier, but ironically that is something to which most environmentalists have been opposed.

No, we’ve done just about as well as we can in this great collective effort over the past 200 years, and it’s only because we have progressed to the stage that we can tackle climate change through a continuous process of technological development that we know how to pass through this next stage of challenges. That is, a more appreciative, humble way to think of it is our transitioning from the energy that built civilisation to the energy that will sustain it. It’s a story of billions of people doing the best they could with the tools and resources they had to collaborate, and usher in the next phase of our agrarian-industrial-technological evolution.

Remember, as I’ve blogged about before, the progress we are making (and going to keep making even more rapidly) will not just dwarf today’s environmental problems, it will make future generations look back with embarrassment at how this generation was so myopic about the ratio of progression to risk, and benefit to cost.  

No, events like the Dunwich Heath fire are awful to watch – I feel it too, as Dunwich has a special place in my heart. But our story of human complexity, ingenuity, and the next chapter of human responsibility should engender gratitude and optimism, not belligerence and alarmism, as we realise that harnessing fossil fuels and the rise of cheap, abundant energy has been one of the most consequential positive material shifts in human history - and almost all of modern life’s accomplishments - longer lives, mass prosperity, global food security, scientific progress, and the liberation of billions from poverty - sits on top of it.

Odds, Ends & Stray Musings: Trinity-Sun Analogy

 

One of the strange things about the Trinity is that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are all equally God, yet there seems an inevitable order in which we pray “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” It doesn’t seem quite right to pray “In the name of the Holy Spirit, Father and Son” or any other variant - yet if they are all equally God, it might be strange that the order matters.

I suspect the revealed order “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” is primarily to do with the fact that the Father is active in the world before the Son, and then the Son is active in the world by becoming Incarnate, and then the Holy Spirit is sent to deepen the intimacy of the relationship. 

No analogy can fully capture the essence of God, but perhaps we can think of it a bit like our interaction with the sun. The sun’s energy gives us the trinity of light, heat, and warmth – but its light reaches us first, not because it travels faster (it doesn't), but because we perceive visible radiation immediately; then heat follows as matter absorbs the radiation, and warmth is the personal experience that results. Similarly, the Father’s creative act is like light, the Son’s incarnate presence is like heat, and the Holy Spirit’s indwelling is like the warmth.