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.

 

Hume's Greatest Contribution To Philosophy

 

Let’s begin with a statement that is both provocative and unsettling: we never truly predict anything entirely new. By ‘entirely new,’ I mean empirical facts that cannot be anticipated through extension or rearrangement of prior experiential patterns. This might sound counterintuitive - after all, science seems full of predictions. Sure, but as we’ll see, from a broadly Humean perspective, what we call predictions are better understood as extrapolations from prior experience. They are reasoned extensions of patterns we have already observed.

Our knowledge of the world is deeply grounded in experience, in that sensory perception, emotional learning, and many of our expectations about how the world behaves arise from accumulated interactions with reality - whether first-hand or socially transmitted. On this view, reasoning alone is insufficient to generate entirely new facts without experiential content to work upon.

David Hume - probably the most influential empiricist philosopher (and definitely the best empiricist writer) - argued that much of what we know about the world derives from experience, and that our impressions of reality are shaped within the limitations of human perception. Without experiential input, our capacity to form expectations about the world would be drastically constrained. (Hume himself distinguished between “relations of ideas,” such as mathematics and logic, and “matters of fact,” which concern the empirical world - and it is primarily the latter that concern us here.)

To illustrate this, imagine a philosophical thought experiment: a child - let’s call him Henry - is born and raised in conditions of complete sensory deprivation. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Henry survives physically but receives no sensory data at all. Philosophers have long used similar abstractions to probe the origins of knowledge. In such an extreme scenario, Henry would likely lack language, learned concepts, and expectations about how objects behave. His mental life, at least with respect to empirical knowledge, would be profoundly impoverished.

Of course, modern philosophy and science have strongly indicated that Hume over-stated his assertion – we now know that the human mind possesses innate structures that organise experience, and that infants are not entirely blank slates. Still, Hume’s insight remains one of the great contributions to philosophy.

You still might feel like objecting: but James, don’t we predict new things all the time? In fields like evolutionary biology or physics, scientists often forecast outcomes not yet observed. Even everyday expectations - like “the sun will rise tomorrow” - feel like predictions. But there’s an important distinction to draw here. From a Humean perspective, many such predictions are rearrangements or extensions of existing knowledge rather than anticipations of conceptually independent novelty. What we call “new” often remains anchored in prior patterns and expectations.

Hume also famously argued that while we observe regularities in nature - patterns that lead us to expect one event to follow another - we never directly perceive a necessary connection binding cause and effect. Building on Hume’s insight, in my books I tend to use a working distinction (not a standard Humean term) between “causality,” meaning observed regular patterns, and “causation,” meaning the deeper necessity we often assume but cannot directly observe. Causality, in this sense, is empirical: it arises from repeated observation. Causation, by contrast, represents the unseen necessity we project onto those patterns. We cannot reason our way to that necessity independently of experience.

For example, we expect that if an apple detaches from a tree it will fall to the ground, or that banging your head on a doorframe will hurt. These expectations are grounded in repeated observation and in learned regularities. However, even these expectations are shaped by the models we construct from experience. Classical physics describes gravity one way; quantum theories offer deeper and sometimes counterintuitive accounts. Without the empirical investigation that revealed the quantum world, its laws would have remained inaccessible to us. Our theoretical understanding grows through experience-informed inquiry rather than purely armchair reasoning.

I wrote a neat illustration in one of my books to convey this. Suppose that as of midnight tonight, a fundamental regularity of nature changes: electricity no longer produces a magnetic field. When you wake up, nothing initially seems different - until your radio falls silent, your doorbell fails, and coils of wire refuse to generate magnetism despite functioning batteries. At first you suspect a mechanical fault. Only after repeated failures across society would you infer that a deeper regularity has shifted. The point is not that such a change is scientifically likely, but that without prior experiential clues, we would struggle to anticipate radically unfamiliar behaviour. Our expectations are tethered to what we have already learned.

Even some of the most celebrated scientific “predictions” can be understood, from a Humean angle, as extensions of existing conceptual frameworks. Neptune’s discovery followed unexplained perturbations in Uranus’s orbit; Dirac’s equations mathematically implied antimatter; Maxwell’s equations pointed toward radio waves. Many philosophers of science would still call these genuine predictions - and rightly so within scientific practice. Yet they were not conjured from conceptual nothingness; they emerged from rearranging established ideas within existing theoretical structures. Theory guided discovery, but it did so on the basis of prior empirical and conceptual foundations.

Let us return to Henry. Suppose at age 18 he is suddenly granted the full range of senses. In front of him are two billiard balls, and an experimenter rolls one toward the other. Hume used a similar image to illustrate his point: without prior experience, Henry would have no basis for expecting what happens when ball 1 strikes ball 2. Will ball 2 move? Shatter? Remain still? Only after repeated observations would he begin to associate events and form expectations about physical interactions. What seems obvious to us - that the second ball will roll - is obvious largely because we have learned the regularities of physical reality through experience.

Don’t get me wrong, we mustn’t over-egg Hume here. Hume’s enduring challenge is not to gainsay reasoning’s utility – it is to frame our understanding of empirical reality as inseparable from experiential learning. Of course, Kant developed this by arguing that the mind contributes structuring categories, and modern Bayesian epistemology in some ways extends Humean ideas, somewhat like how Riemannian geometry extends classical Euclidean models. Yet the central problem of how we justify our expectations about the future when they depend so heavily on past experience remains one of Hume’s most enduring philosophical legacies.

Everything At Once Part 2

 

If you’ve dipped into ancient Christian philosophy, you might have come across Boethius’ idea of how eternity is the simultaneous and complete possession of infinite life, and how that means for us, as creatures created to spend eternity with God (should we choose to accept the gift), that there is a sense in which our state of being encompasses all of life at once (see an earlier blog post Everything At Once that conveys something similar).

I think there is a sense in which that’s true - and to see why, we only need to think of what it’s like being ourselves in the present moment. Our ‘now’ sensation encompasses our history, where we can recall to mind the time we had a burger and chips with our chum in secondary school, and the time we grazed our knee when falling off our skateboards, our first day at work, and so forth. Our whole remembered life is in us in the present moment, even though we’ve forgotten much of it. What is remembered is there.

God doesn’t have the problem of forgetting things; His perfect Mind persists through endless time by being both part of time and outside time altogether. He sees all events - past, present, future - in a single, timeless now. But while we don’t have perfect minds, we are made in His image, and we do, in one sense, possess the fullness or potential fullness of life all at once, in that everything we are, everything we’ve done, and everything we could be, are all part of a single, unfolding reality. A kind of unified experience of being in which there always exists the potential tapping into the ever-present totality of life - a bit like how a tree contains its whole life in a single moment: rings of the past, leaves and branches of the present, and all the future growth contained within, all existing together in the living organism.

Consider what this means for you and for your potential if you think about it in the right way. Imagine that your life is like a film reel composed of countless frames. Each frame shows a single moment of your experience - a snapshot of what you think, feel, and perceive at that instant. If your life is everlasting (this life and the afterlife), then the film reel simply stretches on forever. Frame follows frame, moment follows moment - the story continues indefinitely, but always one scene at a time. Now imagine something stranger. Suppose that instead of a film reel, your entire life is encoded in a holographic plate - a two-dimensional interference pattern that contains, within every microscopic region, the information for the entire three-dimensional image. In a hologram, the whole is present in every part: each tiny patch of the plate can reconstruct the whole scene, though with varying degrees of clarity. In this “holographic” version of your life, every point of time contains the fullness of your whole existence - not just a slice of it.

I like what that implies about our potential - and the fact that we are never all we could be. Through this model, every thought, every stage, every experience is co-present within the single timeless structure of your being, and you can tap into the entirety of your life simultaneously, as the hologram possesses the entire image for us to navigate at once. It gives a real sense of what you might call a totality waiting to be awakened step by step with each new improvement, every fresh edification from experience, and every new unfolding – that all that we could be is, in some sense, already here in potentia - shimmering beneath the surface of our awareness, waiting to be drawn into the light of our becoming. Life is a journey, of course, and a continual invitation to open ourselves up to the infinite depth that already dwells within.

Cutting The Psychological Root Of False Beliefs

It’s strange that so many people believe so many obviously false things (which includes excessive over-interpretations). Let me offer you a hopefully useful way to think about the nature of false beliefs in a more expansive way. When people believe so many false things, you’ll find that those individual false beliefs are often trojan horses for other beliefs, which at their root are usually rationalisations for self-serving interests. If false belief x is really a proxy for false belief y, which is really a justification for self-serving interest z, then you can expect that when people try to justify false belief x they will produce all kinds of auxiliary defences which support x, y, and z.

Let’s take …. I don’t know……rent controls as an example. Rent controls are often defended as a straightforward way to make housing affordable. Yet this surface belief clearly functions as a proxy for a deeper socialist mindset that wants to believe markets are morally suspect and cannot be trusted to allocate essential goods. Beneath that, in turn, lies a self-serving interest in expanding political control over prices while virtue-signalling compassion at low personal cost.

Another example - climate alarmism commonly presents itself as genuine concern for the planet (also ticking the box for virtue-signalling), but in its more extreme forms it also often operates as a vehicle for the belief that only centralised governance can manage society’s problems. That belief then serves an interest in enlarging the scope, budget, and moral authority of the state, while fostering a sense of belonging for those involved in the cause.

A third example - cancel culture is often justified by the claim that certain speech causes direct harm and therefore must be curtailed. But this claim frequently masks a broader belief that some ideas are illegitimate and should not be heard at all, which itself supports a self-serving interest in status and power through moral gatekeeping. Hence the rapid escalation of rhetoric in which disagreement becomes “hate speech”, offence becomes “harm”, and enforcement is applied selectively to protect the gatekeepers’ own norms.

In all the above cases, you’ll notice too that justifications are offered by depicting challenges as unvirtuous, and they treat the economic and social costs of intervention as negligible or non-existent. At the same time, the short-term psychological benefits (but longer term psychological harm) are that these beliefs and causes stabilise identity, elevates status, and legitimise control to lessen anxiety - while allowing all of this to be experienced as perceived moral virtue. And it should be blindingly obvious now why most politicians jump on board with this – it serves the majority of their interests and conveniently aligns with what much of the electorate believes and seeks comfort in.

It’s much the same with protectionism too (political, economic and intellectual protectionism) - it is commonly defended as a way of saving domestic jobs, and protecting belief systems, yet this belief frequently substitutes for the assumption that exchange of goods, services and ideas is zero-sum and that external gain must imply internal loss. And, of course, that assumption conveniently serves political interests and intellectual grifters tied to protected industries or organisations. And you’ll probably notice too that political, economic and intellectual protectionism all present competition (of goods, services or ideas) as predation rather than cooperation.

You can see this too, of course, in young earth creationism - which is usually expressed as a claim about the age of the Earth based on the hyper literal interpretation of Genesis – but, of course, it frequently acts as a trojan horse for a deeper need for worldly things to remain subordinate to their particular theological reading to assuage fear and insecurity (see here). That, in turn, serves the preservation of group identity, perceived moral and spiritual superiority, and theological and communal authority.

Naturally, we could go on and on with further examples, but suffice to say, I think all the above is an important thing to understand in critical thinking. In each case of false beliefs, the surface belief attracts intense defensive pleading against all reason and evidence because it is psychologically, socially and culturally load-bearing. To abandon it would not merely concede an error; it would threaten the deeper beliefs, identity and interests it surreptitiously supports.

And consequently, to be rescued from false beliefs in the x and y category really means addressing the deeper interests in z that they protect. It requires more than correcting facts or pointing out errors of reasoning or interpretation; it requires lowering the psychological, social, and moral costs of abandoning those beliefs, and offering alternative ways for people to secure identity, meaning, and status without having to defend what is demonstrably false. Because the reality is, until the need for status, power, identity, belonging or moral superiority is met by the proper means - that of truth, competence and authentic virtue - and until the underlying psychological and social payoffs are removed or replaced, the false beliefs that pervade our society will continue to be defended with ever-greater ingenuity, precisely because so much else depends on them.

Why We Cannot Hold God Accountable

 

For years, I held the view that God is morally responsible for the creation story He chose to create. Given presumably an infinite number of possible creation stories He could have chosen, I wondered why He chose one with quite so much suffering in it. I guess, in a C.S. Lewis-esque ‘God in the Dock’ kind of way, I tended to put God “on trial” by judging His creation story by my mere human standards. But about twenty five years ago, I had an epiphany, where I started to develop the kernel of an idea about how absurd it is to even think of our perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God in terms of humanly discerned responsibility and accountability. So much so, that I came to realise that it’s preposterous to hold God morally responsible for anything, but that the reason why is far from obvious.

When we think of human responsibility in terms of right and wrong, and better or worse, we assign value judgements based on various possible scenarios - and if we have high standards, a hypothetical ideal that we bring to bear on the metric. When writing an essay, dealing with a noisy neighbour, or fixing something in the house, we can do a good or bad job, and make the results better or worse according to our efforts and conduct. But that is because everything we do is measured against a standard higher than ourselves, where however well we do, we always fall short of perfection. And the more complex the task, the further from the ideal we end up - a bit like how the bigger the circle we try to draw with a pencil, the less like a perfect circle it looks.

Now, to be clear, I’m not of the school that thinks all genuine value reduces to intrinsic value, and extrinsic value is wholly derivative. Some philosophers subscribe to this - they contend that greatness is identical to, and exhausted by, intrinsic value. That is, there is no greatness in itself apart from such value, and what is called extrinsic value is merely value derived from intrinsic value. But I reject this, because as far as humans are concerned, it’s clearly not true that an item has extrinsic value only insofar as it contributes to, or realises, something possessing intrinsic value. Some values are fundamentally relational - like, say, loyalty, fairness, courage, responsibility, artistic expression, comedy, hospitality, solidarity, and so forth - and not merely instrumental. To put it in formal mathematical language, even if intrinsic value exists, “greatness” is a multi-dimensional evaluative space rather than a single axis.

I can show further why it’s wrong by applying this to God, but with a caveat that, in actual fact, the proposition that genuine value reduces to intrinsic value, and extrinsic value is wholly derivative, is much truer of God than it is us. In fact, it’s nearly entirely true of God, but not quite wholly true. To say that God is the greatest possible being is to say that God possesses intrinsic value to the maximal degree permitted by possibility. In other words, God instantiates intrinsic greatness at its logically maximal extent by being the I AM under consideration (Exodus 3:14, John 5:58) - there can be nothing greater than God. But even God, about whom there is no possible increased greatness, has a greatness that is not maximally contained intrinsically; and we can surmise this because we know He desired to create - that is, to express His perfection extrinsically in creation - in order that He could have a loving relationship with His creation. God couldn’t have been maximally manifest or wholly fulfilled in His intrinsic perfection because He desired extrinsic value in terms of loving relationships. Don’t get me wrong, I do think God’s desire to create is itself part of His perfection, and His relationality is not a limitation but an expression of maximal perfection. But it must be true that God + creation is superior to God alone; otherwise, God would have had no reason to create anything at all.

An analogy from physics might help. We could think of intrinsic value like a rest mass: a property something has in itself, independent of external reference frames; and extrinsic value as being like kinetic energy - it exists only relative to interactions or relations; it is not a fundamental property but one that arises from a system’s relation to something else (a frame of reference, a field, a transformation). On this analogy, claiming that a being’s value is entirely intrinsic is like claiming that a particle’s rest mass is its fundamental property, while any additional energies - such as kinetic or potential energy - are purely relational and therefore derivative. And when applied to God, the analogy suggests that calling God the greatest possible Being is akin to saying that, if a particle possessed the highest rest mass permitted by physical law, that intrinsic property would define its fundamental status, with all other forms of energy remaining secondary and relational.

Perhaps now you can see what I mean by saying that it’s preposterous to hold God morally responsible for anything. Jack is morally responsible if he chooses to commit a bad act instead of a good one, or does a bad job rewiring the house because he chose to get drunk, because he had better options available to him, and better versions of himself that could have conducted those decisions. But our perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God cannot do anything better, and has no higher intrinsic or extrinsic state He can manifest. So, therefore, He cannot be responsible for something He cannot possibly be or enact, and He cannot possibly be or enact anything that is not good or perfect. 

You may say that in attributing goodness and perfection to God through my human-centric lens I am making a value judgement and assigning some kind of positive responsibility, but only insofar as I am projecting human standards onto a Being for whom such standards simply do not apply in quite the way a human can understand. It’s perhaps a bit like how a dog can discern a happy marriage from an unhappy one, but could only import crude canine speculation about the nature of deep love between beloveds.

God cannot be morally responsible for who He is, and who He is, is perfection, under which He has maximal compulsion to do the greatest things, even if by our human standards we might foolishly dwell in the illusion that we are equipped to act as judge. The accused stands above indictment, and the plaintiff lacks standing to bring a case.

Unifying Moral Philosophy

 

If you're new to philosophy, you'll get told that there are loads of moral theories to consider, and you'll end up entangled in a complex web of interrelated and competing propositions that take you far off course from fundamental principles. Here I’m going to show that you only really need the big four, and I'm going to radically simplify things by showing that the big four moral theories in philosophy are really just partial rational reconstructions of a unified moral reality whose fullness is revealed in Christ. In other words, the fundamental moral theories we engage with in moral philosophy are partial, distorted, or truncated apprehensions of a deeper moral reality that finds its unity in Christ.

First, I’ll briefly summarise the big four moral theories. Consequentialism judges actions by their outcomes: the right act is the one that produces the best overall result. Deontology is underwhelmed by outcome-based morality, insisting that some actions are inherently right or wrong because of moral duties and principles that must be followed regardless of consequences. Virtue ethics shifts the focus from isolated acts to the formation of character, arguing that morality is about becoming a good person whose habits naturally produce right action. Natural law provides the deeper foundation for all of this by asserting that morality is grounded in the purpose and structure of human nature, so the good is what fulfils the kind of creature we were created to be, and moral rules are practical guides to flourishing.

To see how the fundamental moral theories are embedded in a deeper Christ-centred reality, we must first recognise that Christ is the moral telos: the final purpose toward which all moral action is directed. Creation has a purpose - relationship with God - and moral norms are ordered toward that end. Outcomes matter in worldly terms, but they matter primarily because they shape us toward or away from that end. Likewise, God’s commandments are truthful expressions of the good life for creatures made in God’s image.

From this perspective, each of the four moral theories presents a genuine aspect of moral reality, but each is but a subset of the full picture - the moral perfection of God. Let me try to lay it out. Consequentialism correctly insists that the consequences of our actions matter; God cares about results, because results shape the moral formation of the world and the flourishing of individuals. But consequentialism becomes incomplete when it treats outcomes as the sole criterion of rightness, inadequately capturing the wrongness of actions even if they produce good effects.

Deontology corrects this by insisting that moral duties are binding, but it can become rigid when it divorces duties from the moral telos and the real effects of action, treating rules as if they are extricable from human flourishing, which scripture confirms is untrue. Virtue ethics rightly returns us to character, arguing that morality is about becoming a person who naturally loves well; but it can become incomplete if it fails to specify the objective good toward which virtue aims, or if it ignores the need for moral rules in a fallen world.

So, here we could say that natural law provides the missing foundation, in that it explains why moral norms bind, why virtues are ordered toward human flourishing, and why outcomes and duties are not ultimately mere human construct, but in fact rooted in the purpose God built into human nature.

Thus, when seen most truthfully, the “big four” are not competing systems, as many philosophers think - they are more like four lenses we use to view the same horizon. Consequentialism highlights the moral importance of results, deontology highlights the binding authority of duty, virtue ethics highlights the formation of character, and natural law supplies the metaphysical and theological grounding that makes all three intelligible. When they are properly understood, they complement each other, and they all point toward the same moral reality revealed in Christ.

We are nearly there, but while I think everything above is correct - it won’t quite do by itself, because we now have to frame this though God’s love (agape) as the inner power that explains why telos, duty, consequence, and virtue all cohere. Because at the very deepest level, the unity of these moral perspectives cannot be explained by abstract teleology alone, only by Divine love. To offer a musical analogy, the telos explains the intended harmony of the piece, but only love explains the Divine unity and expressiveness of the performance. In other words, one can play some of the correct notes and still miss the music; love is what binds the timing, tone, cohesion and emphasis into something intelligible as music rather than mere notes and chords.

Or to put it another way, the telos explains where the journey is going, but love explains the call to undertake it, persevere through it, and be united with fellow travellers along the way - because the whole journey and the final destination is all about love really. If we could peep behind the stage door and see the full production scenes for the grand cosmic narrative, we’d see that every human motive, aspiration, connection, desire and decision - from the clothes we wear, the career we pursue, the friendships we cultivate, the families we form, the sacrifices we make, the approval we seek, the meaning we chase - was really a reaching out for love rightly ordered and finally fulfilled in God.

That is why I think Christ names love of God and love of neighbour as the two great commandments, because in doing so He reveals love not merely as one moral value among others, but as the true form of all moral goodness. Love explains why consequences matter, because to love another is to seek their true good; it explains why duties bind, because love respects the dignity and inviolability of persons; it explains why virtue is central, because love must be learned, habituated, and embodied in character; and it explains why natural law has authority, because love is ordered toward the flourishing of the kinds of creatures God created us to be. Detached from love, consequentialism becomes a mere calculus of instrumental optimisation, deontology becomes mere legalism, virtue ethics becomes mere self-cultivation, and natural law becomes mere biology. Rooted in love, however, these are revealed as distinct but harmonious ways of articulating what it means to live rightly before God and with one another.

Ways Not To Believe Part II

Having argued that non-belief is probably the best term to describe people who are not Christians (see here), it’s probably worth considering whether disbelief is just belief in the negation or a distinct cognitive standpoint. If we think that to not believe q = to believe not-q, then we contend that If Jack believes p, then he automatically believes not-(not-p), which is equivalent to believing p again.

But if not believing is a distinct cognitive standpoint, in at least some way independent of belief in negation, then it’s more akin, say, to how distrust is not identical to belief that someone is untrustworthy, or how dislike is not identical to belief that something is bad. On this view, one can believe p without actively disbelieving not-p. Under this condition the distinction of not believing constitutes a more robust, attentive, or attitude-laden response than simply believing the negation.

Logically: belief(p) → disbelief(not-p) – but whether in the case of rejecting Christianity that feels to the sceptic like it applies may be a matter open for debate with the beholder.

I think if I were to probe the sceptic and take it to its natural course, I’d conclude that whether disbelief is really just shorthand for “belief in the negation,” or whether it is a distinct cognitive standpoint in its own right, depends a lot on whether we are dealing with professed disbelief, unbelief or non-belief. And I wonder, if you asked most non-Christians, would they instinctively know straight way which of the three applies to them? For many, under the terms above, they may not have given it much thought.

If disbelief is simply the flip side of belief - nothing more than affirming not-p when one denies p - then the distinction I’ve drawn collapses neatly into classical logic. On that account, to believe Christianity is false just is to disbelieve it, and the psychological texture of that rejection is irrelevant. But I have argued before that disbelief is more like a worldview in itself, and is a more intentional state than mere logical complement, and far more than most sceptics would like to acknowledge.

Taken with my part one article, it seems quite a compelling case that disbelief occupies a firmer, more deliberate space than either unbelief or non-belief - not because logic requires it, but because lived cognition and behavioural values exhibit it. It’s not quite the same for, say socialists vs. capitalists, because in that case, once we understand human minds as packages of values, economic assumptions, moral priorities, and social aims, socialists are actually capitalists pretending not to be (see here). 

 

The Philosophy of Miracles

In a recent article, I defined a miracle as an event that requires action from God because it defies the natural laws or scientific explanation within His creation. I argued that miracles are everywhere, and that they are one of the best arguments for the truth of Christianity. Now I’d like to follow up with a philosophical piece that considers what it’s like for a sceptic who has never experienced a miracle, and the thought process that will hopefully aid their evaluation.

When it comes to miracles, an open-minded agnostic has two sets of propositions to consider.

Here is the first set:

P1: If an event is impossible in naturalism, then it is a miracle.
P2: If a proposition is known to be impossible, it is near-certain to be disbelieved.
P3: Christians claim to have experienced miracles.
C: Therefore, there is a reasonable chance that miracles occur.

Here is the second set:

P1: If an event is impossible in naturalism, then it is a miracle.
P2: If a proposition is known to be impossible, it is near-certain to be disbelieved.
P3: Atheists claim to have experienced no miracles.
C: Therefore, there is a reasonable chance that miracles do not occur.

Let’s unpack how we can arrive at the best conclusion about which set is most likely. Using the well-known Popperian black swan problem, the situation with miracles works like this. In philosophy of science, a “black swan” is something that seems impossible or extremely unlikely because it has never been observed - like how Europeans once believed all swans were white until black swans were discovered. The discovery of even one black swan overturned what people thought they knew. In the same way, when Christians testify that miraculous events occur, they are essentially saying that “black swans” exist - relatively infrequent events that challenge ordinary expectations. Remember, as noted in the previous article, these events are only infrequent relative to the enormous number of non-miraculous events that occur; they are frequent relative to the sceptic’s assumption that they do not occur at all. Unbelievers argue that since they’ve never seen such events, miracles probably don’t exist, much like someone who assumes all swans are white simply because they’ve never encountered a black one.

Starting from scratch, the empirical evaluation can be undertaken as follows. Statements that insist that black swans do exist cannot be falsified without a rigorous search throughout the whole swan domain to confirm that there are no black swans. But although showing that black swans exist is not easily falsified, their existence is more easily verified, because one example of a black swan is sufficient to verify the statement. Assigning a universal property to all items of a set and decreeing all swans are white can be falsified by one black swan. The trouble is, where the statement ‘all swans are white’ is relatively easy to falsify, in most empirical investigations it is not so easily verified, because the whole swan domain must be searched and checked before the statement “all swans are white” can claim to be verified.

Furthermore, one can seldom fully verify or falsify claims of a miraculous nature from the outside, because our observations are mediated through complex and variable conditions, through inward phenomenological experiences, and through a host of anomalous events that fall beyond the reach of ordinary empirical investigation. This difficulty is especially clear when we recall that verifying the proposition “black swans exist” requires only the observation of a single black swan - something straightforward in uncomplicated empirical science - whereas verifying the proposition “miraculous events exist” cannot be observed through quite the same straightforward process, since it requires us to probe a vast, complex, and often inaccessible domain of human experience.

The statement ‘all swans are white’ is testable by being falsifiable, yet it should also be remembered that deductive falsification is not the same as proposing an absence of verification. In order to comprehensively falsify a grand sweeping claim, one must compress all this hard to manage data into a true falsifying singular statement, and sceptics who do not wish to believe tend to dismissively shade over into selectively proactive induction as the objects they deal with get more complex, intractable and inaccessible. The epistemological pathways for miracles are not converged upon by this method because they are usually highlighted by a few known dots, which can be joined by large tracts of inference and a proactive search, rather like when one visits a single Internet web page with just a few search tags typed into a search engine.

Given that there is a fairly large degree of asymmetry when one compares empirical science and the establishing of evidence of the miraculous, the swan domain is best used analogically as a sense-making interpretive structure that seeks to piece together numerous testimonies and anecdotal claims (the more the better) and consider a more innovative method of investigation into the miraculous than most sceptics currently employ.

Because miraculous events, unless experienced first-hand, are not easily comprehended through standard empirical methods that rely on observing patterns and drawing general conclusions, one of the hardest things for unbelievers to apprehend is that the full scope of created reality, with its intractable and inaccessible web of human experiences and divine intervention, does not offer an easy epistemological route to explaining everything naturally. Instead, comprehending such events requires a methodology where one infers and evaluates the experience against their own background to determine if it is truly miraculous by the above definition.

Clearly, given that the miraculous seems to be a dish that is only consumed by those who experience it first-hand, we can be sympathetic as to why unbelievers remain unsatisfied with second-hand testimonies. However, sceptics must be careful not to quarantine themselves from investigation by adopting an attitude that allows them to hastily dismiss all anecdotal evidence as unsatisfactory and preclude themselves from proactive investigation. When God does act miraculously in people’s lives, one thing is abundantly clear, if you do not adopt some proactive search or radical thought process that brings you into contact with the real nature of the investigation, the chances of you finding this truth are seriously minimised.

To summarise at this point, the problem for unbelievers is that they cannot be sure that no black swans exist unless they know for sure that miracles are impossible, and they cannot know that miracles are impossible unless they are sure that there are no such things as black swans. Christians do not face the same epistemological problems because many (if not most) have experienced some kind of miracle that has demonstrated to their satisfaction that God is active in their life. Naturally, the unbeliever may claim that the Christians are using a debatable explanatory filter that defaults to intelligent agency as the best explanation of such events, but as I said in the first article, the Christian can rightly insist on two powerful things; 1) that the unbeliever has no experience of the Holy Spirit, so is not rightly placed to discern the miraculous; and 2) that miracles are everywhere if you know where to look, and remain one of the very best arguments for Christianity’s truth.

If an enquirer’s first steps lead him into huge sense-making structures that attempt to embed a very wide degree of life into a grand creation story narrative, where Christ is recognised as the Creator and sustainer, then he will undoubtedly find it gets more exciting the further he gets into it.  As above, a search engine only needs a few key search words to sift out a few web pages from millions - so, in principle, if this venture into the miraculous is seen as a join-the-dots experiment (that may well involve a lifetime of growth), a few dots may be enough to put one on a solid conceptual footing to begin the adventure.

All this shows why, between the consideration of the two sets - set 1 there's a reasonable chance that miracles occur, or set 2 there's a reasonable chance that miracles do not occur - set 1 is astronomically more likely than set 2. Even aside from the positive reasons to believe in miracles cited in the previous article, on philosophical grounds too, set 1 ought to seem more reasonable to an open-minded agnostic than set 2, because if miracles occur by virtue of God performing them for our benefit within the context of relationship, then you'd expect that in the vast majority of cases, Christians are the only people to have experienced miracles in terms of God's providence. But equally, if miracles occur because God performs them for our benefit within the context of relationship, then it is to be expected that most atheists have not experienced a miracle that would convince them that miracles, and ultimately God, exist.

Therefore, given the astronomically high number of claims of the miraculous in the world, you'd expect set 1 to have a higher probability of being the right set of propositions than set 2. Much like, if there were a group of people in the world who couldn't see the colour red, you'd expect them to be the people claiming there are no such thing as a red experience, even though a lot of other people are claiming to have had them.

And one final point that I think is vitally important but so often neglected. Miracles won’t just pop into the creation story in random fashion. Something as profound as the miraculous in the creation story is going to be a deliberate intervention from God Himself, and inevitably bound up in a deeper narrative related to how clearly and humbly we perceive Him and discern His will, much like in the case in Mark 8:22-26 with the healing of a blind man at Bethsaida.

 

Everything At Once

 

During the only slow bit in the Thursford Christmas show (the raffle, for those like us, who didn’t have tickets) I was thinking about how, in astronomy, when we look at something very far away, we’re seeing it as it was in the past, not as it is now - like we would if there was a distant mirror suspended in space. And I was thinking about my mum being born 80 years ago, in 1945, and how, if a giant planet-sized mirror orbiting a star roughly 40 light-years from Earth (because light has to go there and back) existed, I could see her on her day of birth (light too faint, interstellar dust, etc, might be a problem, but let’s pretend we’ve solved that issue).

Now, if you think about it, that kind of conceptualisation can act as an analogy for how we temporal physical beings interface with our eternal, timeless God. So, we know from relativity that the universe can be thought of as a four-dimensional spacetime “block”. In that model, all events - past, present, and future - co-exist within a single geometric structure. From within time, we experience periods of it: “now,” “before,” and “after”. But from outside, for God, every moment simply is.

But here’s another fascinating thing, and I think you might know what I mean here; I fancy that our consciousness is a bit like a mirror that reflects the entire block at once, sensing every moment as equally present, equally real, equally vivid, but yet at every moment locked in the present ‘now’ we call the self. Through the mirror, there is a sense in which tomorrow is not really “later” and yesterday is not really “gone.” All of it - the whole history of the universe - is immediately present in the sense that we are made in God’s image and seeped in the Divine plan, like a vast landscape seen in a single glance, where we are always eyeing our past, our present and our potential, and always deeply connected and integrated in the grand narrative.

Because if we pay close attention, we can sense that in being conscious there are always glimmers of the same timeless light that holds all things together, yet always at the same time reflecting hints and yearnings of how much more we can yet become. Because we are beings of sequence who sense eternity, and fragments who are always tapping into the whole; every past, present and future thought, deed, hope, regret, mistake, act of love, and so forth is a small reflection of that greater life in which all our moments are already complete in God’s cosmic narrative.

Perhaps we can consider a symphony to further illustrate. When we listen to it, the music unfolds in time - note after note, movement after movement. The beauty exists through succession: beginnings, climaxes, resolutions, and what have you. That is a bit like how we experience our own lives - as a melody played out moment by moment. But….now imagine the symphony not as sound but as a standing wave - a single vibration that contains within its structure all the frequencies, harmonics, and resonances that the symphony would otherwise express through time. From within the music, we would hear the passing of notes; from outside it, an external cosmic mathematician could see the entire waveform at once - the total pattern of the piece existing simultaneously. That’s the difference between the human, temporal view and the Divine, eternal one. Life for us is living through the music, where God is the whole symphony, perfectly complete, with no need for sequence.

Why Greatness Produces The Highest & Lowest

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carrier Off Course With Cause

 

Standard variants of the Cosmological Argument are built on this syllogism:

P1: Everything that begins to exist has a cause other than itself.
P2: The universe began to exist.
C: Therefore, the universe has a cause other than itself.

Christians who understand the essential two category distinctions, God (uncaused, necessary Being) and creation (caused, contingent things - basically, everything that isn’t God), accept the Cosmological Argument is correct in some form, but I think it’s better to have ‘creation’ in the premises not ‘universe’, in case God’s creative dispensations extend beyond this universe. So, an improvement is:

P1: Everything that begins to exist has a cause other than itself.
P2: Creation began to exist.
C: Therefore, creation has a cause other than itself.

A Being powerful enough to bring all of creation into existence is the necessary, uncaused, eternal cause traditionally understood as God, who has made Himself personally knowable in Christ.

Recently, atheist Richard Carrier tried to offer a fundamental issue with the Cosmological Argument, where he says:

“Everything that begins to exist has a cause other than itself” is literally logically impossible. Why? Because “Everything” includes all laws of physics. Causality is a law of physics. Therefore it is logically impossible for any law of causality to apply before that law of causality even exists. The first premise is therefore logically necessarily false. Not just probably false. It is necessarily false. It can never be the case that “everything” that begins to exist has a cause. Nor can “physical reality” be an exception-case to “everything”. Those are part of the contents of what is beginning in “the universe began to exist” and therefore cannot exist before that so as to cause it. Causal laws cannot exist before causal laws exist.”

There are two main things wrong with Carrier’s assertion – one is a philosophical error, and the other is a category definition problem that is already negated if we use ‘creation’ in the premises’ not ‘universe’. The philosophical error is in stating that “causality is a physical law, so it can’t apply before physical laws exist” – because causality is not only a physical law, it is a metaphysical proposition that’s fundamental to reality itself. Carrier’s confusion, which is a popular one, rests on the mistaken assumption that the only things that exist are physical things, which is fundamentally wrong (see my mathematics blogs in the tab here for more on why this is the case). The premise “Everything that begins to exist has a cause” is about ontological dependence, not merely physical cause-effect relationships governed by physics – which are only a subset of all of reality. Moreover, it doesn’t make sense to talk of ‘before’ except in the physical sense (as time is intrinsically linked to space, as per the spacetime of modern physics), so God bringing creation into being is not temporal causality in the sense that a physical human might imagine.

Secondly, my replacing “universe” with “creation” in the premise already addresses Carrier’s objection in a few ways. Creation is metaphysically broader than the physical universe, as “creation” means all contingent reality - not just physical entities or laws. The cause of creation is not limited to physical laws, and the cause that brings creation into existence isn’t subject to physical laws like causality. Replacing ‘universe’ with ‘creation’ grounds causality itself, and no longer remains limited by it. Talking about “creation” rather than “universe,” allows for an atemporal or transcendent cause, which is essential when you realise that time and causality are also created realities.

The claim “Everything that begins to exist has a cause other than itself is literally logically impossible” is false under the above terms, where ‘creation’ replaces ‘universe’ in the syllogism. But if we are just talking about the physical universe – a long-standing matter of discussion in philosophy and cosmology – then applying the standard notion of causality to the origin of the entire physical universe when you think the only things that exist a physical is also problematic. What makes it most problematic is if you make the error in thinking that the only things that exist are physical, which is one of the many limitations of the philosophy of naturalism. 

What God Knows

 

Even though I can’t even know 0.000001% of 1% of what it’s like to be God, I do get intrigued sometimes by peculiarities understood through my limited, finite human brain. For example, God is omniscient, omnipotent and a perfect Being – so what does that mean in terms of some of the supposed limitations of mathematics, logic and information? For example, we know that there cannot be a set of all truths (especially in mathematics or logic), because Tarski proved that truth cannot be defined within the same language in which the statements are expressed. Suppose you try to form a set of all true sentences in a formal system (like arithmetic). Then you would need a truth predicate that determines whether a sentence is true – and such a truth predicate cannot be defined within the same system - it leads to contradictions, like the liar paradox.

Ok, so, I actually don’t think that is a wholly unsolvable problem in this context, as I explained in this blog post. It says more about our own human limitations. But I do not know what a set of all truths could mean for God, because if each set of truths entails further propositions about those truths, then a set of truths is a problematic concept, even if presumably this must be contained in God’s mind somehow. This recursive, self-expanding structure creates an essential tension in the idea of omniscience when it's imagined in my limited human logic, but perhaps that’s because semantic hierarchies are also a phenomenon attached to being human. I don’t know what it means for God to know a set of all truths that entail no further propositions or any kind of semantic hierarchy. This process isn't set-like - it seems more like a dynamically unfolding, internally structured totality – at which point, we humans cannot compute it.

Maybe this means that the idea of a set of all truths is a human limitation not a Divine reality. Sets are static mathematical objects, but God must be a unified act of understanding where He intuits all relations and truths simultaneously. I suppose it’s a bit like trying to write a complete dictionary, but for every definition, you also have to include; 1) the fact that it’s a definition, 2) the implications of its use, 3) the relationships it has with every other definition, and 4) the meanings of those implications… it would loop back and extend outward endlessly. Maybe that’s what such a dictionary would be like for God, but obviously even more complex than mere words.

And, next, what about Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, which shows that for any sufficiently powerful, consistent formal system (like Peano Arithmetic), there are true statements about natural numbers that cannot be proven within the system. So even we try to gather all provable truths, we miss some that are true but unprovable. Therefore, even the idea of a set of all provable truths doesn’t capture all truths. Or consider Russell’s Paradox - the set of all sets that do not contain themselves, which leads to contradiction. A universal set (the set of all sets) is not allowed in standard set theory because it also leads to paradoxes. Moreover, the set of all true sentences in arithmetic is not recursively enumerable, because there’s no algorithm that can list all and only the true statements, even in principle. This again means the "set of all truths" isn't just seemingly impossible to construct, it’s not even properly definable.

With God’s omniscient mind, does He know all truths, or only all knowable truths? I assume there is nothing God doesn’t know, although His truths have to remain within the internal consistency of their own logic – so He can’t create a rock so heavy He can’t lift, because that’s just a human nonsense, just as it would be if I said, “My dog is half past three steps into next week”. For us, the set of all truths is not well-defined or not formally capturable - but again, that is presumably a human problem connected to being human (like cause and effect), not a God problem connected to being God.

Consequently, we’re left with what we kind of know already – that God's knowledge must transcend formal systems, and He must know truths that no human language or formal system can express, which means the human mind reaches the level of analysis here where it goes blank. The way I picture it is like light before it breaks into colours. In a sense that we might be able to sparsely capture for our own illustration, what we call "truths" are to God as colours are to unbroken light: distinctions that arise only when unity is filtered through the prism of human limitation, but still absolutely glorious for our having done so.

Mind The Gap

 

The so-called “God of the gaps” critique is a classic straw man. Virtually no serious Christian thinker ever claimed, “We have a gap in our scientific understanding, therefore God did it.” It's a flimsy criticism of a proposition that is rarely, if ever, seriously made.

By contrast, there is a valid “Science of the gaps” criticism, easily directed at figures like Richard Dawkins and others. It goes something like this: “We don’t currently understand X, but eventually science will explain it - so there’s no need to consider other possibilities.”

This attitude assumes the primacy and completeness of the scientific method, even in areas where it may not be applicable. Science is inherently limited to the lens of reality it can measure and quantify, which means the framework often narrows until only scientifically tractable phenomena are treated as real or important. Anything outside that scope is dismissed as trivial, mistaken, or irrelevant.

In this light, the “God of the gaps” critique is significantly over-attributed, and the ‘Science of the gaps” critique is hugely under-attributed.

On The 'Evil God Challenge'

 

A philosophy student was discussing philosopher Stephen Law’s ‘Evil God Challenge’, and I chipped in on his thread with this comment, which I made before on my own page:

“Stephen Law's ‘Evil God Challenge’ seems popular and well regarded in many atheistic circles – but while it’s a neat tool for exploring a contentious matter, I don’t think it’s a convincing philosophical device in the end. I think an evil God would not have the genius to create the kind of love, grace, kindness, forgiveness or laughter we see in the world. But a good God might quite conceivably create a world in which the absence of the best qualities produce hate, bitterness, unkindness, resentment and despair.”

The philosophy student asked a good question in response:

“But if omniscience is built into the hypothesis, why wouldn’t evil god have the know-how to create those things?”

Here was my reply, which I think touches something deep, and may be of wider interest, hence the re-posting here:

“I think this is a qualitative matter. Omniscience might grant the know-how of a good God or an evil God to create love or beauty, but we are really considering motivational plausibility here, not technical capability. Omniscience grants the possession of knowledge - not its application in any particular moral direction. Qualitatively, in the creation framework, it’s more plausible to believe bad things in creation can serve ultimately good ends than gratuitous joy, deep and selfless love, or acts of redemptive grace can go on to serve a darker end. That is, qualitatively, the good God and the evil God hypotheses do not seem equiprobable, even if we could grant that omniscience contains the knowledge for both.

There is also probably something even more profound in the notion of creational capacity, regarding know-how, which may be hard to get our heads around – but would be something like this. Even with omniscience, evil God might not have the know-how to create such profound beauty and goodness, because it takes a certain qualitative depth of goodness to be able to create goodness in creation. You might call it an ontological asymmetry between good and evil, one that transcends mere power or information – a kind of metaphysical limitation. Suppose we have two musical geniuses, a good one and a bad one – and they both know everything about the theory of music. The good genius can certainly create dissonance, tension, even moments of ugliness - but only because they understand harmony, tonality, and structure. They have the inner ear for beauty, and they can subvert it meaningfully. The bad one knows the theory, and can create dissonance, tension, even moments of ugliness, but if they have a deaf spot that prevents them from hearing beauty or harmony, they could not generate it on a piano. Technically, perhaps the bad genius could reproduce the notes, but I don’t think we would say they created beauty in the way that the good genius did. The art would ring hollow, because the very source from which it springs - an attunement to beauty - is absent.”

More On Critical Thinking

 

If you’ve found my previous blogs on critical thinking helpful (see here and here for previous entries), you might also like to consider a further piece of insight that will serve you well. Most of the incorrect beliefs or viewpoints in the world succeed in duping people by cunning sleight of hand omissions, or by omissions due to basic ignorance or misinformation. That’s why, if you want to detect the errors in bad ideas, look for what is being omitted, because if you were to put the omitted evidence or data back in, it would usually undermine the argument.

It’s like if someone predicts that you should invest in a particular stock in the stock market because it has been rising consistently over the past 10 years. The evidence omitted is that periods of growth are often followed by significant downturns which has to be factored into your risk. Or if someone declared that, as their father smoked all his life and lived until he was 89, perhaps smoking isn’t that bad for people. The evidence omitted is that large-scale studies consistently show that smoking increases the risk of cancer, heart disease, and early death, even if some individuals appear to be exceptions. Or they do it a lot with statistics by omitting the base rate; so they’ll say doing x increases y risk by 20%, so x is dangerous, even though the 20% increase is relative risk, not absolute, and the base rate is a fraction of a percent, and the absolute risk remains relatively low.

Practice the art of looking for what is being omitted, especially in politics and pseudoscience, and you’ll become attuned to seeing what’s wrong with all kinds of bad arguments, manipulation claims, and misinformation. Before long, instances of selective referencing, data-mining, half-baked reasoning, cherry-picking, false framing, and misleading narratives will be like second nature to you.