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

 

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

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

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

1)    Human attempts (limited). 

2)    Human ideals (recognised but unattainable). 

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

Where the staircase illustrates our conception of the hypothetical climb.

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

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

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

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

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

On Positive Discrimination

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

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

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

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

 

On The Nature Of Fairness

The world isn’t fair and neither is nature. People are born with varying genetic combinations, talents, intelligence, looks, ranges of opportunities, and so forth, and yet a sense of fairness is usually developed in childhood by the age of about six or seven. Having developed a sense of fairness, it’s not hard to see why we’d keep passing that on to our children, generation to generation, and fairness would be a common value in humanity.

But I wonder where the sense of fairness first came from in human evolution. I can see why, in the inceptive stages of learning, it would be beneficial to adopt a sense of fairness in order to begin to thrive through mutual cooperation. But there is little that is egalitarian about nature, so it’s not obvious where the idea of fairness even came from.

All things considered, I think our concept of fairness has a twofold, proximal and distal cause. The primary cause is that we are created in God’s image, and we are reflecting God’s sense of justice in our very being. And I think the proximal cause is part of an evolved, learned phenomenon emanating from our hunter-gatherer era, where concepts related to fairness were developed in relation to trade and cooperation. Cooperation increases the likelihood of survival and advancement for the group, so it would have positive reinforcements, and the opposite would be true for uncooperative behaviour.

Further, the development of language helped us crystallise this concept of fairness into a more refined consensus, and our conscience helps direct us towards it. And given that we are all evolutionarily related, it is to be expected that crude notions of fairness are to be found in many of the sentient species too (especially other primates), just not at our level of sophistication. 

Ideal Conscience

 

We have a sense of morality through our conscience, and we have a sense of God because we are made in His image. Our sense of morality depends on our individual experiences, and our individual experiences condition how consistent we are and how well equipped we are at making ethical decisions and doing the right thing. A man brought up by drug-dealing criminal parents would probably have different moral successes than a man brought up by two Christian charity workers. A homeless lady has to make different daily decisions to a lady who is the chief executive of a large finance company.

This is important, because every individual is aware of a kind of ideal self they aspire to be, but the conception of the ideal self varies within individuals according to our experience - especially our experience of family, our role-models in our life, our experience of diversity, our education of moral thinkers, our social development, and so forth. Just as tall and short people can reach different heights on the apple tree, and just as fit and unfit people can run different speeds in a race, so too can different levels of moral experience affect how high our moral ideals can be conceived at an individual level. In other words, people have varying conceptions of an ideal, and varying levels of effort to reach those ideals, which means they judge their own conduct differently, let themselves off with different levels of ease, and act or fail to act based on a number of other factors and considerations.

We assess our own thoughts and deeds through our conscience, and we examine ourselves through that conscience. Our conscience is a bit like a sergeant who we try to stay on the right side of, and try to satisfy ethically, but different people have stricter and not-so-strict sergeants, depending on the accumulation of their experience, where, to make matters even more complex, the strictness also varies according to which particular thought or action is being assessed. So our conscience is perhaps more like an entire police force, where a different officer deals with your financial dishonesty compared to the one who deals with your speeding or the one who deals with your bad temper, and so forth.

The point is, we build our considerations of both morality and God from different perspectives with different experiences. Even with our personal sense of an ideal, we are going to judge ourselves a lot less truthfully and a lot less honestly than God will (and probably with a lot more leniency than we deserve). Our conscience is only as competent as we are, just as our beliefs are only as good as our reasoning and evidential scrutiny has permitted, and both are therefore not fit to serve as the commander in chief at the police station of our conscience. Furthermore, our conceptions of God and of the Bible are only as good as our own weight of experience and intellectual considerations, so the likelihood that there is a lack of fitness in this area too is incredibly high. 

Politicians Lie More Than You Think

Here's why politicians lie way more than you think. There are generally two ways to lie. One type of lie is called "suggestio falsi", which is the suggestion of something which is untrue or deliberately telling an untruth - such as about where you were last night, about breaking something and blaming someone else, about not being at an event you claimed you attended, and so forth. The other type of lie is called a 'suppressio veri' type of lie, which is concealment of truth - such as failing to disclose conflicts of interest, ignoring information about negative consequences, not revealing the true costs of policies, and so forth.

Because suppressio veri lies are less blatant and slipperier due to the ambiguity of what they omit, they are harder to directly confront, more widespread, and therefore the most insidious and destructive kind of lies told in society. And they are mostly the kind of lies that underpin the political system - they are habitual tools of manipulation that erode trust and exploit people's assumptions, allowing politicians to shape narratives and control perceptions without outright fabricating facts. In the way that politicians craft the squalid art of omission and indirect duplicity, it could be argued that they, and the media that amplifies and legitimises their distortions, are society's biggest liars.

Untrustworthy Selective Prejudices

 

People post a lot on social media, and readers have to discern who they can trust. It’s a lot easier to see who you can’t trust than who you can, because people who can’t be trusted telegraph it more carelessly over a consistent period of time. The primary one to look out for also happens to be the most common, and it is that over a period of time, those you can’t trust demonstrate their untrustworthiness by selectively focusing on things that accord with their prejudices, while ignoring anything that doesn’t. They will even be oblivious to or dismissive of greater evils or more serious problems just to keep the path clear for their virtue-signalling.

They’ll frequently come down on atrocities they see as far right, but ignore ones that are far left. They won’t be critical of certain kinds of Muslim but they will target certain Jews (especially Israel, while ignoring Hamas/Hezbollah/Iranian atrocities). They’ll say nothing when a Pakistani Muslim rape gang scandal breaks out, but if the same scandal involved white British males committing gang rape against young vulnerable black girls, they’d be all over it. They’ll be silent on terrorist attacks generally when the perpetrator is of a religion or ideology they are not brave enough to criticise, but noisy about the ones that play into their agenda. They’ll disregard the mistakes, scandals and policy flaws of their own party, but come down hard on equivalent incidences when it’s a rival party. They will tell influential figures not to interfere in our politics when they disagree, but praise influential figures who interfere in our politics in ways of which they approve. They’ll defend free speech when it concerns ideas they agree with, but demand censorship or cancelation when opposing viewpoints are expressed. They’ll only preach tolerance, diversity and inclusivity when they view it as the right kind. The list goes on and on.

It’s so obvious that people like that are not to be trusted, and it’s astonishing that people like this are rarely called out for the selective application of their prejudices and biases. Their behaviour is so transparently lacking in credibility, yet within their echo chambers, there is little chance they will be exposed for what they truly serve - not truth or justice, but their own agendas.

But rest assured, you can definitely trust me, of course – I am balanced and consistent in being nearly equally mortified by all political parties and extremists of every persuasion. 😅

The Vice of Virtue-Signalling

2024 was probably the peak year so far for virtue-signalling. It's easy to see through the grim spectacle of this widespread halo-polishing that has infested our society. People virtue-signal as a sign of righteous posturing in an effort to seem morally superior. But, psychologically, why do people want to feel morally superior? It's primarily to fulfil their own needs and establish their own identity, which is, sadly, usually built on validating their individual worth in the mirror of their own insecurities and adequacies.

We should want much better for them, because these are people to be pitied. They are desperate to acquire a sense of belonging and acceptance, and they have deep-seated psychological and social needs that sit in conflict with genuine virtue, courage and truth. Because virtue-signallers have little confidence in their own intellect, their ethics and their over-simplistic grasp on complex situations - they know deep down that they are fraudulent, inauthentic moral peacocks - they use their self-righteous parading as a way to deflect from their own guilt and shame. 

All this is easy to understand when you remember that virtue-signalling is not being virtuous; it's a near opposite, like how prurient indulgence in flattery is a near opposite of sincere praise, or like how a wolf in sheep's clothing is a near opposite of a shepherd. That is the big cheat of virtue-signalling - it's telling lies about virtue to conceal vice. 

What's It Like Being An Eco-Vandal?

 

I recall a quote by computer designer Charles Babbage that has stuck with me over the years, about having an opponent who strikes him as so confused that he is difficult to understand - "I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question", Babbage said.

After eco vandals threw soup on great works of art last week, the weekend got me thinking about what it must be like to be one of those Just Stop Oil members who committed such an act. Like Babbage, I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke an individual to believe they have no future because of climate change - much less, cause misery to innocent people as a result.

Consider the journey you'd have to make to go from ordinary citizen in society, to someone who behaves like that. Just imagine how divorced from reality you'd have to be, to be willing to damage private property and works of art while being filmed, cause misery to holidaymakers, put lives at risk through mass congestion, and rob yourself of your own freedom by being thrown into prison for such acts - all for the distinction of being puppets having your strings pulled by corrupt organisations and self-serving narcissistic cult leaders.

I guess you might point out that they don't know they've been ensnared by a cult, and that most people never do - but if they’re willing to risk prison for their beliefs, then it seems surprising that they haven't up to this point undertaken the relatively simple task of thinking things through with more care and consideration. I actually find it hard to even conceive of the journey downwards one would need to take from sane analysis to the depths of madness we are seeing with climate alarmism and hysteria-driven criminal activity.

What would a sane analysis of climate change reveal? I am almost certain it would reveal that there are problems we are going to have to solve - but that we don't have, and will not have, a climate crisis or a climate catastrophe to deal with. With climate change, we are not talking about a massive change in the short term (which might constitute a crisis), we are talking about gradual changes over a long period of time. Over the course of the next century, we are likely to see climate change necessitating small changes in behaviour, alongside which our technological advancements will be far more substantial. Human ingenuity will enable us to adjust to gradual climate change, where we make tweaks to correct for gradual temperature rises when we need to.

The insistence that we are facing a climate crisis is not one that someone committed to a sane analysis would easily arrive at once they'd factored in the full suite of considerations at play. Consequently, falling for the 'climate crisis' narrative as a bystander is an act of moderate failure. But falling for it to the extent that you are willing to cause harm to others, get yourself locked up in prison, and think that you are a force for good in doing so, is an act of such absurd madness, attention-seeking and selfishness that I really do find it hard to imagine what it's like to arrive at that place, or be such a person.

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.

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.

The Strange Thing About Good & Evil

Good and Evil both exist - in fact, they seem to me to exist in a more concrete way than anything that science measures. The reality of good and evil is so instantiated in truth that a universe in which one of the laws of physics suddenly became radically different would be far less strange to sentient minds than a universe in which good and evil no longer exist. In fact, it seems impossible to have sentience without value judgements - and it seems impossible to have value judgements without the up and running concepts of an extreme upper end (maxima) and an extreme lower end (minima), where one is an ideal we have no chance of attaining, and the other is a nadir from which we should stay as far away as humanly possible. 

But what's really interesting about those concepts, for me, is that the more broader and abstract they become, the more real they appear to be, and the more the propositions about them seem evidently true. When you speak of historical passages of evil, like Nazi Germany or ISIS in the Middle East, the evil attributed to them is an abstraction - it's as though the evil that pervades in those events is a much bigger thing than the narrower particularities of the events. They seem 'possessed' by evil, perhaps rather like how William Burroughs talked about 'genius' as being something we are possessed by, not something inside us implicit in the individual (although in a sense, it's possibly also that, because creativity is heritable).

The more you break those historical catastrophes down to their constituent parts, and the grainier those parts become, the more you diminish the overall intensity of 'evil', to the point that it's very hard to ascribe the notion of evil to any individual person - and even harder still once you drill down into the inner-humanity of that person, and the shared suffering and tragedy that's a central part of the human condition.

 

Even the people thought to be the poster boys of evil - Adolf Hitler, Jozef Stalin, Saddam Hussein, Ian Brady, Charles Manson - were all damaged by their surroundings, plagued by their insecurities, and corrupted by the seduction of having power over others. Peel off the layers, and you don't find anything as substantial as evil - you find really bad choices, failure, regret, circumscribing defects, psychological torment, and a wounded psyche that hates and fears its surroundings, and turns inwardly towards a parochial rejection of truth and goodness.

 

And here's the other thing: each and every one of the people that the sententious subsections of society deem as 'evil' and 'beyond the pale' can be redeemed - they can love by being loved; they can be liberated from their plight by sorrow and regret; and by being forgiven they can be restored, as though a big blanket of goodness has been thrown onto their fire of torment. Restoration is possible because Good and Evil are bigger things than individual properties of personhood.  

Good and Evil seem to me to be too metaphysically overwhelming to be reducible to mere individual traits or personality properties. Their nature in the reality we know constitutes a fundamental reality in the nature we know - it really is as profound as that. Because of that, we humans are so much more amazing than we realise, and so much worse than we realise - and that is the duality of the human condition, played out sublimely where individual identity is perceived as a weighted average of all our thoughts, feelings, decisions and actions.

Debates About Abortion Are More Than Just About Morality

There has been a lot in the news recently about the subject of abortion. Jacob-Rees-Mogg, perhaps the smartest MP in the House of Commons, received widespread criticism for his belief that abortion is always wrong under any circumstances. And last week there was a documentary on BBC 2 called Abortion on Trial in which Anne Robinson hosted a debate between nine people who held different, sometimes highly contentious, views on abortion.

Debates on abortion are seen by most to be disagreements on moral grounds, but that isn't primarily what's behind the divergences. The differences of opinion on abortion are not primarily to do with moral issues; they are to do with interpretation of facts.

They may consist of moral convictions, but moral convictions are based on evidence-based understandings of how certain acts affect human beings, which are about matters of fact and interpretation of data. Take our anti-abortion Catholic Jacob Rees-Mogg, and Mrs. Jones the pro-abortion lobbyist - what they disagree on is not so much about moral issues (not in most cases) it is a difference of opinion about facts.

Jacob Rees-Mogg believes all human life is sacred and should not be killed. Hence, he claims to believe that killing a foetus is morally equivalent (or thereabouts) to committing murder. Although she is pro-abortion, Mrs. Jones still believes that murder is wrong - it's just that she doesn't think abortion is murder. If Mrs. Jones believed that killing a foetus is morally equivalent to murder, then she would be anti-abortion too. That's why their primary difference is not a difference in morality - both of them are anti-murder - it's a difference of opinion about what constitutes murder.

But the matter doesn't stop there. In terms of epistemological consideration of abortion, there are four kinds of women:

1) Those that think abortion is not murder and would terminate a foetus

2) Those that think abortion is murder and have no qualms about terminating a foetus
3) Those that think abortion is not murder and would not terminate a foetus
4) Those that think abortion is murder and would therefore not terminate a foetus

People in group 1 will usually feel able to have an abortion and not feel like they have committed murder. People in group 2 that have an abortion are effectively doing so in spite of thinking it is murder, so they are far lower in numbers than those in group 1. People in group 3 may not think abortion is murder but they may think life is sacred and wish to preserve and protect it. People in group 4 usually would not have an abortion, and may often protest against others having abortions too.

When pro-choice people call for more tolerance, they are underestimating the strength of the opposition's belief. Tolerance is the capacity to recognise and respect the beliefs or practices of others - and of course one can do that even towards those one thinks are absurdly misjudged. I think scientology is a foolish, manipulative belief system, but in being tolerant of it, I'm saying that if you want to believe in something that I think is utter rubbish then that's up to you.

It is prohibitively difficult to call for tolerance in the abortion debate, because what remains ambiguous is the very qualification for tolerance in the first place. There is no use crying out for tolerance unless there is some agreement about what should be tolerated. Given that the two sides disagree on the definition of murder, it is unlikely that appeals for tolerance can be easily used for reconciliation.

Let's now look at the epistemological considerations regarding where people diverge on the abortion matter. If the abortion debate is primarily about whether or not abortion is murder, we have to take the problem a step back, because even if we all agreed that aborting a human life is murder, and that murder is wrong, there would still be the question of at what point does it take effect?

Just as views about whether divorce is right or wrong depend on how seriously one views marriage; views on abortion depend not just on whether it is murder, but also on whether one views a foetus as a human or a pre-human, and on whether murder can occur at the pre-human level.

There is also the little matter of what is life?

People consumed by this debate need to give a bit more consideration to the intricacies of gestation, because what goes on internally is not a simple mythological moment of conception – and that needs to be factored into this idea of denying potential human life. 

If we decide to classify ‘life’ at an exact point, we still have time over which to deliberate. The egg is responsible for 23 of the zygote's chromosomes and the spermatozoon is responsible for the other 23. What this produces is a 'life' of unique DNA structure - a unique life has been conceived, and just like a six month old child, it has metabolism, growth, reaction to stimuli, and reproduction (albeit on a much smaller scale). 

What we have is a process lasting several days whereby the zygote enters the uterus, the cells continue to divide, until a blastocyst is formed (for those unaware, a blastocyst looks a bit like a ball of cells). Implantation is when the blastocyst attaches to the lining of the uterus (this takes a few more days).

The blastocyst has fully attached itself to the endometrium within about ten days after conception, and therefore a woman would know that taking the morning after pill would either prevent an egg from being released from the ovary, or it would facilitate the necessary biochemical changes to the womb so that any fertilised blastocyst is unable to implant and become an embryo.

Therefore, a woman who took the morning after pill a day after unprotected intercourse knows that if a pregnancy was going to occur through natural genetic algorithms then her action would prevent pregnancy. Is that abortion? Is that murder? Surely not. What about a woman who finds out she is pregnant after 10 days and takes Mifepristone on the eleventh day, terminating her pregnancy? It's the sorites paradox all over again.

Doctors have another definition of death - they define death as the point at which electrical activity in the brain ceases. Embryos do not have a brain so in legal terms a woman who takes Mifepristone to kill an embryo hasn’t killed a human life if one defines human life in terms of electrical activity in the brain.

When a loved one is in an accident and loses all cognitive capacity, it might fall upon you to choose whether or not to retract the feeding tube and end your loved one’s life. A lot of people have a hard time agreeing on whether or not assisted suicide is murder. Similarly, consider as an analogue the issue of embryonic development. There is a set of cells at the beginning, and what at some point we would call a ‘human’ collection of cells at the end.

Now imagine five countries, each differing on the their interpretation of the embryonic and foetal developmental stage. Imagine in those five countries each has a law that states it is illegal to abort after an embryo becomes a ‘human’. But when we look at each country's law book we find that each country differs in its definition of ‘human’ – one defines it as when electrical changes occur, one when the blood starts pumping, one when the brain is fully formed, one when the embryo develops a functioning nervous system, and one when fingernails begin to grow. Under those circumstances, none of the five countries can claim to be objectively correct in its constitution. 

Why is killing a sperm or an egg more immoral than killing a zygote, and why is that more immoral than killing a morula, and why is that is more immoral than killing a blastula, and why is that more immoral than killing gastrula, and why is that more immoral than killing a foetus at four months? The morals don't even begin to take a footing until the epistemological category distinctions are agreed upon - and they rarely are in this debate.

On the flawed view that abortion is wrong because all life is sacred

Quite obviously, a claim that all life is sacred and to be preserved is not only absurd, it is biologically impossible. We can't easily afford sperm and eggs the same regard for life as a five month old foetus, just as we can't easily afford microorganisms the same regard for life as sperm and eggs. It may be easy to avoid aborting a foetus if you are against abortion, but it’s impossible to live from day to day without being complicit in killing bugs and insects and microorganisms.

Every time you clean the kitchen worktops or do some gardening, living things are killed. When your house was built, millions of tiny living things had to die for that to happen. Yet I presume even the most ardent anti-abortionist is not opposed to the idea of gardening and house building. Consequently, there is no absolute sanctity of life - we commit genocide on microorganisms on a regular basis.

Moreover, even if two people agree that all pre-natal life is sacred after conception, who is going to regulate this? It takes a long time for the two nuclei to merge and form a diploid after one sperm enters the egg. At what point in this process does life become sacred? 

The earliest we could speak of 'pregnancy' would be the implantation of the embryo - although in almost every case there is a long period of time between implantation and human detection. Most women don't know they're pregnant until a few weeks after conception. Sexual intercourse produces large amounts of spermatozoa, most of which do not fuse with the ovum and produce successful fertilisation - so even the act of sexual union is an act of biological profligacy. Taken to an absurd limit, even sex can compromise the sanctity of life.

The upshot is, there is no clear cut objective point at which one can say an act of abortion is ‘murder’, because if the objection is the denying the potential of so-called sacred life then contraception and the morning after pill would indict the couple too.

Final point: Why I don't think there are many absolute anti-abortionists

I have a thought experiment to show why I think those who say they are against abortion under any circumstances are probably not telling the truth. Picture the scene – it’s 50 years in the future and a sadistic dictator has control of a large island which he uses as a closed incarceration camp for the sexual gratification of his huge army.

All the women there are captive and feel there is no chance of escape. They are ostensibly kept alive to be the sexual playthings of the sadistic army, where each woman’s daily routine is to be raped dozens of times, and this process is repeated every day.

Some of the men are perverted and like sexual perversion with children. Because of this, if a woman becomes pregnant she is still raped for as long as she can be until the baby’s birth, and then along with her daily rapes she is forced to raise a child until he or she is a few years old and can be the sexual plaything for the more perverted army men. Pregnancies are rare because the women are forced onto the pill – after all, pregnancies only impede the men’s enjoyment and it cuts short the woman’s potential for being an optimally shaped sexual slave. 

One day, one of the captives falls pregnant - knowing full well that the baby will be born, and that by the time her child is six or seven he or she will be a sexual slave for the perverted men. And then when the child is older he or she will go into the other rape camp, spending the rest of his or her life being a sexual salve raped dozens of times every day. 

Now, the woman is just 10 days pregnant when she is offered Mifepristone by another of the inmates who takes pity on her – an elderly lady who is herself a sex slave, but who still has one Mifepristone which she was keeping for herself in case she ever fell pregnant. 

To those, like Jacob Rees-Mogg, who think abortion is wrong under any circumstance, I put the following question to you (or any who hold an uncompromising view). Given the woman’s choices (these are the only two choices she feels she has, having been born into this horrible set up, herself a victim all her life) – she can either take the Mifepristone, being pretty sure that she will save her future child from a life of brutal sexual slavery, or she can bring a child into a world in which she knows that from about 5 years old to death that child will have a life consisting only of being a rape victim dozens of times a day, every day.

I fancy that that majority of even the most hardline anti-abortionists would not wish to deny this poor lady the Mifepristone - and for that reason, most anti-abortionists who say they would not advocate abortion under any circumstances are probably either being dishonest with themselves, or probably capable of some pretty unpleasant emotional sadism.