It's Impossible To Love The Truth And Deny Evolution

Since the genomes of hundreds of animals have been sequenced, it is impossible to grasp even the basics of genetics and deny the fact that evolution happened over millions of years, and to deny the fact that every species is genetically related to each other in a tree of life. These are biological facts that are impossible to reject. Don't get me wrong, evolution denial has never been in the least bit credible, and always shameful and intellectually repressive, but these days it's so abundantly and incontrovertibly clear that evolution by natural selection is the correct explanation for the diversity of life on this planet that the remaining attempts to persist in its denial are merely cases of scraping the barrel and feeding a scientifically and theologically impoverished minority.

The story of evolution over four billion years is this; all organisms can be traced back to a common ancestor, and so all of the diversity in life we see today is due to common descent with modification, through natural selection, genetic mutation, and genetic drift. We have a lot of evidence to back up this theory, including the fossil record, geologic evidence, and most comprehensively, genetic data. There are three mechanisms for evolution: natural selection, genetic mutation, and genetic drift.

Natural selection: Organisms who are better suited for their environment have a higher probability of surviving long enough to reproduce and pass on their genes. This is pretty much common sense.

Genetic mutation: Changes in genetic code occur naturally during reproduction, and at random. There are several types of genetic mutations, including the insertion of a base pair, the deletion of a base pair, and the switching of positions of two pre-existing base pairs. These mutations occur all the time.

Genetic drift: This is the relative frequency of how often an allele (a specific genetic trait) appears in a population, based on how many currently-existing organisms contain that trait. Over time, some alleles that are not well-suited for the environment may become less common and eventually disappear completely. This can reduce genetic variability.

The axioms of evolution claim that all life evolved slowly and gradually from the first life forms. Traits are inherited from one generation to the next with slight variations. This being true, we should be able to create a kind of family tree of organisms and their traits, just like we create a family tree for our human ancestors. If you hired a professional genealogist to study your genealogical tree, you'd find the branches form nested groups of families based on the name of the husbands. As new generations marry, the daughter lineages create branches with the names of their new husbands, and the sons simply create newer and more complicated branches with the same name. In my father's and mother's family tree, for example, even in just a few generations we have family members with over a dozen different surnames.

In biological evolution over 4 billion years, traits in organisms evolve in the same way. If you replace the new family line where the husband's name comes in with a new novel trait in an offspring, you find the same thing. That organism with a new trait creates a new branch where the descendants keep that trait and also accumulate new ones as they go along, much like how all the grand-daughters will take on new marital names and form their own branches. This is what is called in biology a "nested hierarchy".

The genome of every single organism contains the totality of genetic information within that organism – we each have a unique one (it’s mostly the same, but every individual has slight variations). A genome is like a book, consisting of chromosomes, which are like paragraphs. These paragraphs are made up of genes (sentences in this book analogy) and they act as instructions to make molecules. Each gene is like a sentence that defines its protein structure, and the letters in the sentence convey the building blocks of the DNA strand (a subset part of the gene). DNA is a molecule in the shape of a double helix, which is a long spiral staircase made up of nucleotides – and it is these that determine the genetic code of all living things.

As the genomes of so many animals and plants have been sequenced, we have a picture of evolution so clear that we know where every living thing appears on the tree of life. We know this because the information available to us from genome sequencing is computational – that is, from the sequences we can compute the relational distance of every species to each other, just as if we subjected books to a computational process and saw them undergo mutations, we would track the computational steps at every part of the journey and know which copies of books emerged from which other books and so forth. This is because genes are best thought of as passengers that use bodies as vehicles for propagation – just as in this analogy, letters and sentences would be using the book structure to get themselves passed on. The DNA code is a digital code that has no non-trivial difference from computer coding that can be mapped in precise accordance with the journey its constituent information units have taken. A gene is a sentence that conveys the structure of a protein, and just as would be the case if we subjected books to the same kind of evolutionary process and read every intermediary stage as the sentence structures changed bit-by-bit over time, the same computational process is analysable when it comes to code read in the cells of every living thing.

We can look at the rich diversity of species and map the phenotypic variation – variation due to underlying heritable genetic variation. We know from our genetic story that we are equally related to dogs as we are whales, and bats as we are hippos, and hedgehogs as we are deer, because the last common ancestor we have with, say, the dog, is the same as the last common ancestor shared with, say, the whale – even though regarding the appearance of an organism, characters and traits, the difference between a dog and a whale, or a bat and a hippo, is immense. Because we can read the code in the cells of every living thing, we also know that regarding the genetic distance on the phylogenetic tree, we are more closely related to mice, rats, rabbits and guinea pigs than any of the animals of the previous list (take most other animals and we’d know the genetic distance too). And genome sequencing shows us, beyond any doubt, that we are most closely related to other apes (chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas, bonobos, etc) and all primates diverged from a common ancestor.

These studies show other conclusive evidence too. For example, inherited strands of past viruses (called endogenous retroviruses) show clear relatedness between species, and in a way that is exactly consistent with the tree of life. So too do the homologies – the common features and traits shared by organisms also matches both the genetic data of the family tree of all species, and the data that shows the trajectory of endogenous retroviruses.

The upshot of all this is, if you reject this as conclusive evidence for evolution, and remain unwilling to reject creationism and embrace these facts as instruments of God's creative genius, then you don’t understand how significant and decisive these data are, and how deep and wondrous the theology can get. There is simply no way of denying the fact of evolution and living with a clear conscience and a content mental state.

It's Not That Easy To Help The Poor

Let me tell you something very interesting about economics: it is hard to make the poor better off if they don’t make themselves better off. When we do anything in a complex economy, there is a chain of events that extends way beyond our sensory apparatus. The reason why it is very hard to make the poor better off if they don’t make themselves better off is because it’s hard to make any one poor person better off without making another person worse off somewhere else. It’s counterintuitive, but it’s true. Here’s an illustration to explain.

You have £1000 savings, so you decide to give Jack £200 to buy some shopping at Sainsbury’s. The food had to come from somewhere. It didn’t come directly from you, so it either came from other people producing extra food or other people going without that food. Or to break it down more perspicaciously, here’s an individual scenario. Jack gives Jill £10; Jill buys a £10 bottle of wine that would have gone to Tom, who instead buys a cake that would have gone to Dick, who instead buys a turkey that would have gone to Mavis, and so on, until somewhere down the line somebody misses out on something and goes without. Jack’s £10 gift to Jill created a chain of events where someone, somewhere is bereft.

Or here is another scenario. Luis works a bit harder in his vineyard to produce that extra bottle of wine, sacrificing some other task or pleasure. Perhaps the knock-on effect is that he doesn’t buy a cake in Henrietta’s café, which means Giuseppe misses out on Henrietta's purchase of his flowers, and so on, until someone somewhere can’t get the pair of trousers they want. If Jack only had £10 and he gave it to Jill, then Jack gives up £10 worth of goods that he now can’t afford. But if Jack gives up £10 and it means he still doesn’t have to give up anything, then someone else down the line gives up something against their will. If Jack never spends the £10, then he leaves the wine, cake or flowers for somebody else.

It may be slightly easier to grasp this complex chain of events if we instead think of it this way. Jack is quite well off, so draws £500 from his bank account and gives it to Jill. Somewhere down the line the banking system has £500 less, so someone somewhere misses out on a mortgage, or on a loan so buys one less car, whereby a car salesman buys one less laptop, and so on. If Jack took it from his wallet, and had never banked it, his £500 being put in circulation drives up prices to the tune of £500 (not that it would be noticeable to the naked eye), which means Tom, Dick or Harry responds with a bit less consumption or a bit more work. The converse of that point is if you worked for £500 and never spent it then you worked for free, because you cost society nothing in consumption. Your gift to society was £500 of consumption that you never cashed in.

That's not a reason to neglect being kind and generous to the most vulnerable in society - but it remains true, and will always remain true, that increased productivity is the only way to reduce a nation's poverty. 

Boris Johnson Misunderstanding Democracy

 

I've just seen this woeful Twitter video from our Prime Minister, where he tells us that:

"If we want to achieve a truly representative Parliament, then we cannot rest until 50% of MPs are women."

This has to be Boris at his absolute worst! Knowing the sort of character Boris is, we all know he doesn't really give two hoots about whether 50% of MPs are women - he's just making this disingenuous appeal because he thinks it's what people want to hear. But even if we grant him this sincerity, then once broken down, his statement is incoherent. The Parliamentary system is not set up to be representative on account of resembling the demographic of society; it is set up to be representative on account of reflecting the voting preferences of society. Desiring Parliament to resemble the demographic of society on arbitrarily chosen traits like sex misses the point of the democratic process. There are lots of xenophobic people in society, but we don’t want a proportion of Parliament to be xenophobic; there are lots of religious fanatics, football hooligans, polyamorists, adulterers and drug addicts in the UK, but we wouldn’t wish for that sub-section of the demographic to be reflected among our 650 MPs.

Some might object on grounds that sex is a different category of consideration, and that desiring a more equal representation of males and females in Parliament is to be lauded. Ok, even though that’s not a good counterpoint – let’s grant it for the sake of generosity. But even allowing for this, the desire for equal representation between males and females is still a preference that goes against the grain of the electoral system, because MPs are elected from 650 individual constituencies, and an individual person cannot resemble a demographic. If 1 individual cannot resemble a demographic, then 1 x 650 individuals cannot resemble a demographic without seriously departing from the rubric under which the electoral system is mandated. To do this would mean straying into something that selects on a different kind of preference to the one in which voters are being asked to participate.

Attempts could be made by political parties in the selection stage to artificially increase the number of women standing as candidates for election, but this no longer necessarily reflects the preferences of the electorate. If there is not a 50-50 split between male and female MPs when Parliament reflects the voting preferences of society, then why does Boris’s preference that this is redressed trump society’s revealed preferences after they have voted in their own constituency for the candidate of their choice? How does Boris (and the like) know that the current ratio is unjust and needs correcting? What if there are many other complex factors involved in the process, and that, actually, the fact that men outnumber women in Parliament occurs for perfectly reasonable reasons based on a complex range of preferences and considerations – Boris and other party politicks have no justification for imposing their preference over ours. If enough people do care significantly about having more women in Parliament then we can expect that to be reflected in constituencies, when more people could vote on the basis of sex than anything else.

My instinct is that, however prudent or infelicitous, what people mostly care about when they vote is the party of the candidate, and the perceived qualities, polices and ethics of the individual candidate and their party. Even those who care a lot about how many women there are in Parliament are unlikely to see that preference supersede the other factors at an individual constituency level – and it is therefore always likely to be the case that the revealed preferences of the electorate (at the individual level) are more representative than artificial attempts to make Parliament resemble the population demographic.

An Evening With The Philosophical Muser #2: Discussion with Extinction Rebellion's Mark Fletcher

 In this edition, I'm joined by Mark Fletcher from Extinction Rebellon:

The Biggest Bang

I saw an interesting blog on the big bang - it was Tim Reeves' response to astrophysicist Ethan Siegal's Big Think Article stating that the big bang isn't the beginning of the universe anymore. I'll paste Tim's article below, and I'll add my response to the responses.

SIEGEL: Extrapolating beyond the limits of your measurable evidence is a dangerous, albeit tempting, game to play. After all, if we can trace the hot Big Bang back some 13.8 billion years, all the way to when the universe was less than 1 second old, what's the harm in going all the way back just one additional second: to the singularity predicted to exist when the universe was 0 seconds old? The answer, surprisingly, is that there's a tremendous amount of harm - if you're like me in considering "making unfounded, incorrect assumptions about reality" to be harmful. The reason this is problematic is because beginning at a singularity - at arbitrarily high temperatures, arbitrarily high densities, and arbitrarily small volumes - will have consequences for our universe that aren't necessarily supported by observations. For example, if the universe began from a singularity, then it must have sprung into existence with exactly the right balance of "stuff" in it - matter and energy combined - to precisely balance the expansion rate. If there were just a tiny bit more matter, the initially expanding universe would have already recollapsed by now. And if there were a tiny bit less, things would have expanded so quickly that the universe would be much larger than it is today. And yet, instead, what we're observing is that the universe's initial expansion rate and the total amount of matter and energy within it balance as perfectly as we can measure. Why? If the Big Bang began from a singularity, we have no explanation; we simply have to assert "the universe was born this way," or, as physicists ignorant of Lady Gaga call it, "initial conditions. Similarly, a universe that reached arbitrarily high temperatures would be expected to possess leftover high-energy relics, like magnetic monopoles, but we don't observe any. The universe would also be expected to be different temperatures in regions that are causally disconnected from one another - i.e., are in opposite directions in space at our observational limits - and yet the universe is observed to have equal temperatures everywhere to 99.99%+ precision. We're always free to appeal to initial conditions as the explanation for anything, and say, "well, the universe was born this way, and that's that." But we're always far more interested, as scientists, if we can come up with an explanation for the properties we observe.

REEVES: Siegel is warning us against the extrapolating right back to a space-time singularity. That makes sense to me on this basis: I always have doubts when a theory predicts an infinity and I'm inclined to believe that this is a sign of an incomplete theory that is being pushed too far.  But in the above quote Siegel's reason for rejecting an initial singularity is to do with scientific prediction: For unless one is to engage in the ad hoc business of patching in arbitrary initial conditions, a cosmos that starts with an arbitrarily high temperature doesn't perform well on the prediction front. Siegel then goes on to tell us that a good origins theory would predict important cosmic features like the  flatness of space, the absence of magnetic monopoles, and the uniformity of temperature and density across the observable universe. As we shall see Siegel doesn't contradict Einstein's great theory of gravitation which predicts the possibility of a space-time singularity. Instead he conveniently side steps the question of whether space time space-time singularities are physical by telling us to stop yourself before you go all the way back to a singularity.

My Comment: The universe is a mathematical object, and mathematics is more primary than physics, and God is more primary than mathematics. So while the notion of a singularity may be a difficult concept in physics, it is less difficult as a comprehension of the creation of God the cosmic mathematician. We shouldn't use theology to answer scientific questions, but equally we shouldn't rob the universe of theological gravitas by attempting to explain it only with scientific concepts, because science is only confined to physical descriptions. We've been doing sophisticated science for a few hundred years now, and have a deep understanding of much of the universe. But there will always be a hiatus in certain areas of potential discovery, and it's in those areas where the tools of science are going to remain too blunt - because if the observable universe has its origin in a singularity, it is likely to be something akin to God speaking it into being, rather how Genesis conveys. But, as we'll see below, the singularity isn't the end of the consideration, even in physics.

SIEGEL: Inflation accomplishes [(correct) predictions] by postulating a period, prior to the hot Big Bang, where the universe was dominated by a large cosmological constant (or something that behaves similarly): : the same solution found by de Sitter way back in 1917. This phase stretches the universe flat, gives it the same properties everywhere, gets rid of any pre-existing high-energy relics, and prevents us from generating new ones by capping the maximum temperature reached after inflation ends and the hot Big Bang ensues. Furthermore, by assuming there were quantum fluctuations generated and stretched across the universe during inflation, it makes new predictions for what types of imperfections the universe would begin with.

REEVES: So, inflation theory predicts a) a near enough flat universe, b) the absence of high energy relics (like magnetic monopoles), c) essentially a uniform distribution and d) makes predictions about the magnitude of fluctuations away from perfect uniformity.  Sounds good so far.

My Comment: Yes, inflationary theory purports to explain why opposite ends of the universe exhibit the same temperature and density, without which they wouldn't have been in thermal contact at the point of origin. Inflation theory also purports to explain the observation that, to a very good approximation, the universe appears to be flat. Inflation theory is still tentative: we don't know the source of the energy needed to generate inflation (although it could be dark energy). There is also the long-standing matter of unifying gravity and quantum mechanics, and that's probably not an area for Inflation or dark energy to solve, because when the inflation is pegged back, we hit the discrete barrier of the so-called quantum gravity limit, when space-time curvature is in the order of the uncertainty principle, prior to gravity being formally quantised.

SIEGEL: But things get really interesting if we look back at our idea of "the beginning." Whereas a universe with matter and/or radiation - what we get with the hot Big Bang - can always be extrapolated back to a singularity, an inflationary universe cannot. Due to its exponential nature, even if you run the clock back an infinite amount of time, space will of time, space will only approach infinitesimal sizes and infinite temperatures and densities; it will never reach it. This means, rather than inevitably leading to a singularity, inflation absolutely cannot get you to one by itself. The idea that "the universe began from a singularity, and that's what the Big Bang was," needed to be jettisoned the moment we recognized that an inflationary phase preceded the hot, dense, and matter-and-radiation-filled one we inhabit today. This new picture gives us three important pieces of information about the beginning of the universe that run counter to the traditional story that most of us learned. First, the original notion of the hot Big Bang, where the universe emerged from an infinitely hot, dense, and small singularity - and has been expanding and cooling, full of matter and radiation ever since - is incorrect. The picture is still largely correct, but there's a cutoff to how far back in time we can extrapolate it.

REEVES: Yes, I get the point: Running a positive exponent exponential backwards means that it never reaches that mathematically mysterious singularity.  And yes we may well need to jettison the singularity postulate. I for one regard it as ontologically suspicious and unlikely to be physical.

My Comment: At the big bang, the universe inflated with astounding rapidity, but we don't know what set up the conditions for the big bang. We know about the big, but not exactly what caused the bang, because we don't know everything about what inflated the inflation. What they call cosmic inflation is supposed to have lasted only a trillionth of a second, and is supposed to be an even more rapid event than the big bang itself. And then there is conjecture about what they call a 'reheating' process, where the relatively cooler matter became hot enough to bang and set the universe in motion. Whichever way we cut the cloth, the beginning of the universe required extreme energy, and astounding mathematical complexity in the initial conditions.

Moreover, I think some physicists are being a bit slippery here, talking about what's prior to the big bang here. Considering what short timescales we are dealing with here, in terms of kickstarting the universe, they can for all intents and purposes be treated as two parts of the same event. Furthermore, the singularity or cause of the universe is ultimately theological in nature. Being physical beings, we are locked in physical descriptions of science - and it seems certain that we can only wind the clock back 14 billion years to the very hot & dense big bang, beyond which we stop describing reality using a physics we've been built to understand. This is compounded by the fact that time itself is measured using the physical ticks provided by the material substrate (such as vibrations), and given that gravity modifies these ticks by slowing them to zero, time for us reaches a cul-de-sac at t=0 because there is no up and running physical standard by which it can be measured (the cosmic microwave background provides limited data on this as it only extends back to just after the big bang, and even future sophisticated particle accelerators are unlikely to ever reach the astronomical energies needed to recapitulate the very early universe).

SIEGEL:  Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we can no longer speak with any sort of knowledge or confidence as to how - or even whether - the universe itself began. By the very nature of inflation, it wipes out any information that came before the final few moments: where it ended and gave rise to our hot Big Bang. Inflation could have gone on for an eternity, it could have been preceded by some other nonsingular phase, or it could have been preceded by a phase that did emerge from a singularity. Until the day comes where we discover how to extract more information from the universe than presently seems possible, we have no choice but to face our ignorance. The Big Bang still happened a very long time ago, but it wasn't the beginning we once supposed it to be.

REEVES: Yes, I can accept Siegel's talk about our ignorance: in fact Siegel himself doesn't comment on two outstanding questions: Viz: What provides the energy for inflation? The nearest he gets to this question is a reference to a the cosmological constant which is another patch-in not greatly different to patching in initial conditions to fix the problems. The other baffling issue is this: As we follow the shrinking exponential of inflation back in time there comes a point where the scales of gravity and quantum theory collide: What happens then?   But quoting Siegel once more we've at least got this to hang onto: The [Big Bang] picture is still largely correct, but there's a cutoff to how far back in time we can extrapolate it. So further extrapolation beyond the hot big bang period is an extrapolation into the dark unknown. Therefore, apart from speculation on all sides, I guess that is how the situation will remain for some time to come. As I said in my last post on Big Bang: People still hanker and yearn after the idea that there was something  before the big bang. But what was it? Was it God or just more  algorithmically compressible bytes and bits?  It might help when the incommensurability of gravitational theory and quantum theory is sorted.

My Comment: As above, I think any notion of before the big bang is so distinctly minuscule that it's ostensibly part of the same physical process - where, what sits outside of it, belongs in the realms of the mathematical algorithms that bootstrap the event, and ultimately thoughts in God's mind. The upshot is, not only do we reach a natural limit with physics, we also have every reason to believe that the physics we have been bestowed is expressed with Intelligence at the heart of its mathematical engine. As mathematics is more primary than physics, then the way we view quantum mechanics is as a form of mathematical information signalling that channels a form of random walk, but in a way in which it imposes a restriction (a mathematical bias, described in this blog post) on the combinatorial search space in which the walk can take place - a bit like putting up barriers in a city so when the drunk man stumbles out of the pub he has restricted pathways that favour a route in which he will eventually find his hotel. As I said in my book on God's Genius:

"This is a truly astonishing element for God to have incorporated into creation. It's so profound that we have to ask: which is real, the practical limit on the physics of the body, or the infinite equations that embed the reality? And here we return to the primacy of mathematics, in that the physical truths are accurate through the physical lens, and the theoretical parts (zeros, infinities, and difficult to interpret negative numbers) tap us into the more complex reality of mathematics that exists over and above the physical universe. This is a mindblowing example of how we dance with the finite and the eternal in one complex embrace. What the above shows is that we are forced to dance with eternity. Here's another one to consider; take the example of gravitational singularities in black holes. Suppose an object was approaching the black hole; the object would be torn apart by tidal forces. As the debris settled into the event horizon, time would pass much more slowly for the stuff than it passes for an outside observer of the stuff. But then the debris would be trapped in a 'forever falling around the hole' situation, never making it into the hole, because time becomes distorted at the event horizon and approaches infinity as a limit (for anything to happen in the event horizon). This propounding shows another clear discontinuity between the theoretical and the actual; terms like 'event horizon' and even 'infinity' or even time coming to a stand still at c cannot really be literally true in a finite spatio-temporal cosmos. They are only useful as theoretical approximations, not as actual facts about physical reality. Although current physics does come up with two infinities in the form of gravitational singularities and in re-normalisation in quantum field theory, this involves the hypothetical subtraction of one infinity from another, so it is only applicable as a concept of ideals rather than as practically useful in dealing with nature. There are no such things as physical infinities. Imagination is not merely a way of transcending reality - the imagined is our ability to dance with a part of reality at an eternal conceptual level, where the real and the imagined lock horns and give us a glimpse of a greater reality outside of spacetime, and of what is to come."

An Evening With The Philosophical Muser #1 - God's Genius

Given that the spoken word has became such a prominent source of online communication in recent years, I thought it would be interesting to invite some guests to have a chat, record them, and put the videos on YouTube. Here is the first one, with my guests Terry Houser, Nina Russ and Conor Duffy:

For future reference, you'll be able to access all these videos in the link below under My Other Writing:

Writer's Update: It's Been A While

Greetings, it seems like ages since we said hello. As I write this, I've realised that this blog is approaching its 10th birthday. If it were a human, it would probably be wondering whether it was happy with its gender, and be convincing itself that to have any chance of reversing the impending planetary doom its parents must rally to get rid of that ghastly secretion called carbon. But I digress.

Thank you for joining me today, on what is post number 737 on the Philosophical Muser's journey in blogosphere. I think overall my blog has settled into a pretty good steady state. I'm averaging about 3,000 hits a month and I'm hardly producing anything new, for which I'm grateful. My blog-writing paucity has been largely down to the fact that I've been working on the final edits of two more books - which means I'm pleased to say that I have now finished the first drafts of four books from my list of books to do. It feels so good to have ticked the first four off:

A book about Christianity called The Genius of the Invisible God P

An epistolary of wisdom and general philosophies for life P

A book on morality P

A comprehensive book on economics P

A book about love

A book about Christianity called The Economics of being a Christian

A book called Marvin The Supercomputer, based on a massive thought experiment

A book on psychology and human behaviour

A book on fundamentalism ,cults and other dangerous in-group tribalisms

A couple (maybe three) of books of essays comprising the material that doesn't belong in any of the above

There are plenty of scraps that didn't make the books, and some of that will make good blogging material, so you might see a rise in new material published, especially as the drive to carry on with the others is still alive. I suppose writing is a little like Lord Wotton’s remark in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray about a cigarette being the perfect type of pleasure, because it is exquisite but yet it leaves one unsatisfied. A pleasure that leaves you satisfied is one that ceases to be a pleasure the moment it stops. In terms of physical responses, sex and food are of this kind. Right after you’ve had either, the last thing you immediately want is more (This was brilliantly phrased by Shakespeare in one of his sonnets – “Past reason hunted; and no sooner had, past reason hated”). 

Writing (for me at least), on the other hand, has usually been like the opposite of sex and food, in that the more one engages with it the more exquisitely satisfying it becomes. I suppose that’s because writing is an extension of thinking, and thinking is one of those delights that just keeps opening up new vistas and horizons in one’s cognition, reminding us that even with a full life our actual time on earth is dwarfed by our aspired achievements.  

In other news, I'm also going to be making a foray into the area of publishing videos, which is exciting, so watch this space! 

The Seven Real Reasons for Unbelief

If Christians are to make a significant evangelical difference in the lives of atheists, it will help to understand more about the real reasons that people are not Christians. Don't assume the plausibility of what you hear superficially, because things on the surface are rarely everything they seem. Atheists like to give us a multitude of so-called intellectual reasons why they claim to not believe in God - but I think this needs exploring further, because I believe it is built on self-deception.

Even a reasonably competent thinker can discover with a little effort that there are no scientific or reason-based arguments against God. Even though most atheists claim their position to be based on philosophical and empirical grounds, the reality is, there is nothing in these categories that provides reasonable ground for disbelief in God. To think otherwise is to fool oneself with a cheat. Believing that you're an atheist because of rational persuasion and a well thought out set of views merely provides a cushion to the psychology that drives the beliefs.

I believe that if we could drill down right into the heart of why unbelievers are not Christian - the real reasons apart from what people claim on the surface - we would find that they are based on a combination of the following seven reasons:

1) Inadequate knowledge or consideration of the propositions
This is far and away the biggest reason why people are not Christians; for them, the Christian faith is simply not something they have ever explored properly or learned about, and its central tenets have never been deeply contemplated. All of us not born into a Christian household can recall a time when we were significantly unapprised of the basics so as to have only a trivial regard for what Christianity offers us. But although this is the biggest cause of unbelief, there are many who have a fair understanding of Christianity and still claim not to believe. For those people, numbers 2-7 are more prominent.

2) Unwilling to become the person Christ wants us to become
This one applies to those who understand enough of the faith to fear it and be apprehensive about it, but who have done a fair job of suppressing those realisations so they don't have to undergo any radical transformations. I know this feeling as well - to begin to realise that becoming a Christian is going to involve life-changing standards and improvements we've not yet attempted, and accountability and responsibility of which we've never felt the full force - it's pretty unnerving - and it's little wonder that so many people stay in the comfort zone of their own much less challenging moral system. To use an analogy; Christ wants to take our house and help us refurbish it, and eventually turn it into a palace, whereas left to our devices, we think we are quite happy with just a light spring clean every now and then.

3) Pride, ego and narcissism: the need for status over substance
People love being lord of their life, they love to court status, seek prestige, covet admiration, behave as they want, make rules that suit themselves, and find comfort in superficial approval - this stuff really matters to people, and it's not easy for them to give it over to pursuits with more meaning and substance. I've known people who have admitted that they think Christianity is probably true, but they are not willing to sacrifice their idols for religious discipline just yet. Giving up things that are going to be futile in the end is not an easy thing to do when the pleasures are so immediately satisfying.

4) Too many other priorities in life
This is linked to number 3, and often number 1 - but for a great many people, the everyday priorities of life (relationship, family, home, job, career, hobbies, health) are just so consuming on their time, energy and resources that religious considerations just don't get a look in.

 5) The PR problem of Christianity
There are those who have a reasonable understanding of Christianity, and regard for its core strengths, but make an easy excuse not to explore further on the basis of some of the whacky, extreme, nonsensical and sectarian elements of the faith. There will be elements of 2, 3 and 4 in this too. Sometimes the church makes it too easy for potential members of the ecclesia to disregard it.

 6) A personal psychological barrier
For this group, there is some underlying issue - to do with guilt, past traumatic legacies, sexuality, parental upbringing, disability, and so forth - that acts (either consciously or subconsciously) as a barrier to further exploration of the faith.

 7) They've never been asked or invited
This is a very interesting group. Think about it - there are lots of potential Christians out there that no one is reaching out to - people who would accept what Christ is offering if only they were exposed to some good hearted Christians.

 (To some extent numbers 2-7 are also likely to contain elements of number 1 too)

I think it will do both Christians and non-Christians a lot of good to contemplate those human factors that act as barriers to belief. People are forever telling us why they don't believe, and they usually try to justify their unbelief with a suite of argumentation around science or philosophy or rational viewpoints. But these arguments are not why they don't believe; they are a mask used to conceal the real causalities listed above. It is for this reason as well that you can never talk an atheist out of their unbelief using the same language they use to defend it. There is no argument that will ever persuade them, because arguments are not the cause of their unbelief.

I hope that the identification of these states of mind can help bring about helpful dialogue about what people are really thinking - because it can do a lot of good for progress if folk who are predominated by these positions can learn to identify the deception and stultification those standpoints prolong. Understanding these seven principal factors gives us a route into the heart and the psychology of a person; into fears, insecurities and barriers.

Writer’s Update: Great Advice From Charles Bukowski

Having completed two books now, with several more fairly close to completion (see here for more detail), I’ve been flitting around each of them for the past two months, trying to decide (alongside fervent prayer, of course) which one I should focus on next. It’s fair to say, the work on these books isn’t coming as easy as it did on the first two – the well of passion has dried up slightly on one or two of them.

And then, today, I stumbled upon this great poem by Charles Bukowski, called So You Want To Be A Writer – and I found he gets it just right, as he alerted in me a salutary reminder of how working on a book should feel. When you’re hot on topic, the creativity (either writing or editing) is flowing out, and you’re producing the best stuff that’s inside you; you’ll feel it “come bursting out of you, it’ll be “unasked out of your heart”, and it will “come out of your soul like a rocket” where the “sun inside you is burning your gut”.

Yes, that’s how you know what you should be prioritising – a really timely reminder as I press forward and try to find more of the sun inside me.

Here is the poem in full (in its original format). Hope it helps, fellow writers:

SO YOU WANT TO BE A WRITER
by Charles Bukowski

if it doesn’t come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don’t do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it for money or
fame,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don’t do it.
if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it,
don’t do it.
if you’re trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.

if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you’re not ready.

don’t be like so many writers,
don’t be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don’t be dull and boring and
pretentious, don’t be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don’t add to that.
don’t do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don’t do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don’t do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

On The Dangers Of Home-Schooling

This is a blog post about home-schooling - and by home-schooling, I don't mean having to teach your kids at home because of Covid; I mean the radical decision to permanently teach your children at home and not ever send them to school.

I respect anyone’s decision to home-school their children, but I strongly suspect home-schooling is less good for children’s overall development than a traditional education, and that the costs will be brought to bear on young adulthood and beyond. Here’s an analogy. I think humans are like trees, and socialisation and encountering and dealing with the world full on is what makes us strong, grounded, and gives us the deep roots to withstand most natural forces. Home-schooling treats children more like bean plants, as a light, gentle organism requiring careful protection at all times, and with a trellis so it can be carefully guided in a safe manner.

Superficially, home-schooling can appear successful – especially if your child gets good grades and turns out to be a half-decent young adult. But it probably isn’t successful in the medium to long term. I’ve never met a home-schooled young adult who doesn’t lack some key behavioural traits that come from healthy socialisation, or who isn’t ill-equipped to manage the world in several essential ways, even though they themselves do not pick up the nuanced social cues that would help them understand why they are different. It won’t appear immediately obvious where the lack is when a child is not socialised properly or exposed to the challenges that come from being surrounded by peers. Although one obvious disadvantage is that if you are only being taught by parents and grandparents then you are limited to the scope of their understanding, and devoid of a diversity of input.

But there’s another profound reason that’s harder to apprehend. It’s to do with the more abstract life picture you create when surrounded by fellow pupils – it’s a bit like being immersed in a drama, with complex, multi-layered plots, intimately connected to your cognitive development - emotional cultivation, intellectual exploration, authority, diversity of problems, friendships, cultural identity, sexual awakening (interest in the opposite sex), and so forth – it resembles a shared drama, where you abstract out of it everything, good and bad, that plays a part in shaping your childhood identity. That’s an immeasurably valuable part of growing up that is not catered for in home-schooling, and its absence is not likely to be felt very tangibly by those who underestimate its power.

A bean plant, however bright and lovely, is not going to be equipped to handle the demands a tree needs to endure – and we should resist the temptation to wrap our young in cotton wool and place them in gilded cages. It won’t do them the good they need in the long run.

The 5 Categories Of Facebook Users

Having been on Facebook for many years, and observed people’s habits, my observation is that by and large Facebook consists of roughly 5 categories of people.

The Joker: This person spends most of their time posting things to make other people laugh, but not much else.

The Evoker: This person almost exclusively puts up comments about their moods and feelings, their life with family and friends, and photos of associative events. They thrive most on relationships and connections. 

The Thought Provoker: The person who uses Facebook for almost nothing else except posting opinions and having debates, sharing and citing the occasional link or meme if it helps them post even more opinions and have even more debates.

The Stud Poker: This person is the silent lurker who very rarely (often never) posts anything of their own, but vicariously feeds off the posts of others. Their absence makes you forget they are there, but you can be sure they are watching your every move.

The Pipe Smoker: The rare person who regularly and comfortably encapsulates all of the above, and offers the full package of variety.

Look at your friends list and you'll see most of them fit into one of those categories. 😆

My Top Movies Of Each Decade

 

I enjoy bringing to attention and recommending great accomplishments – and here I’d like to do so with movies. These are some of my favourites over the past decades; listed alphabetically, and with the director alongside. Hope you enjoy.

1930s

All Quiet On The Western Front – Lewis Milestone

The Bride of Frankenstein – James Whale

Bringing Up Baby – Howard Hawks

Gone With The Wind – Victor Fleming

La Grande Illusion – Jean Renoir

It Happened One Night – Frank Capra

M – Fritz Lang

Mr Smith Goes To Washington – Frank Capra

Ninotchka - Ernst Lubitsch

Swing Time – George Stevens

The 39 Steps – Alfred Hitchcock

The Wizard of Oz – Mervyn Leroy, King Vidor, Victor Fleming

Wuthering Heights – William Wyler

1940s

The Bicycle Thief - Vittorio De Sica

Casablanca - Michael Curtiz

Citizen Kane - Orson Welles

Les Enfants Du Paradis (Children of Paradise) - Marcel Carné

The Grapes of Wrath - John Ford

Great Expectations - David Lean

It's a Wonderful Life - Frank Capra

A Matter of Life and Death - Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

Miracle on 34th Street - George Seaton

Orpheus - Jean Cocteau

Out of the Past - Jacques Tourneur

The Philadelphia Story - George Cukor

Rebecca - Alfred Hitchcock

The Third Man - Carol Reed

1950s

All About Eve - Joseph L. Mankiewicz

The 400 Blows - François Truffaut

High Noon - Fred Zinnemann

Night of the Hunter – Charles Laughton

Rashomon - Akira Kurosawa

Seven Samurai - Akira Kurosawa

Singin’ in the Rain – Stanley Donen

The Seventh Seal – Ingmar Bergman

Some Like It Hot – Billy Wilder

Strangers on a Train – Alfred Hitchcock

Sunset Boulevard - Billy Wilder

Tokyo Story - Yasujiro Ozu

Twelve Angry Men - Sidney Lumet

 

1960s

L’Avenntura - Michelangelo Antonioni

A Bout De Souffle - Jean-Luc Godard

Dr. Strangelove – Stanley Kunbrick

The Good, The Bad and the Ugly – Sergio Leone

Inherit The Wind – Staley Kramer

In The Heat Of The Night - Norman Jewison

Lawrence of Arabia – David Lean

Psycho – Alfred Hitchcock

2001: A Space Odyssey – Stanley Kubrick

West Side Story – Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins

Z - Costa-Gavras

1970s

All The President's Men - Alan J. Pakula

Annie Hall – Woody Allen

Apocalypse Now – Francis Ford Coppola

Cabaret – Bob Fosse

Chinatown – Roman Polanski

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie – Luis Bunuel

The Exorcist - William Friedkin

Five Easy Pieces - Bob Rafelson

The Godfather & The Godfather Part II – Francis Ford Coppola

The Goodbye Girl - Herbert Ross

Jaws – Steven Spielberg

Kramer vs. Kramer - Robert Benton

Manhattan - Woody Allen

One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest - Milos Forman

The Out-of-Towners – Arthur Hiller

Taxi Driver – Martin Scorsese

 

1980s

Airplane - David Zucker, Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams

After Hours – Martin Scorsese

Amadeus – Milos Forman

Back To The Future Trilogy – Robert Zemeckis

Cinema Paradiso - Giuseppe Tornatore

Midnight Run – Martin Brest

Once Upon A Time in America – Sergio Leone

Raging Bull – Martin Scorsese

Raiders of the Lost Ark - Steven Spielberg

Ran - Akira Kurosawa

The Shining – Stanley Kubrick

 

1990s

American Beauty - Sam Mendes

Before Sunrise – Richard Linklater

The Bridges of Madison County - Clint Eastwood

The End of the Affair - Neil Jordan

Fight Club – David Fincher

Forrest Gump - Robert Zemeckis

Glengarry Glen Ross - James Foley

Goodfellas – Martin Scorsese

Groundhog Day - Harold Ramis

Magnolia - Paul Thomas Anderson

Naked - Mike Leigh

Pulp Fiction – Quentin Tarantino

Secrets and Lies – Mike Leigh

The Silence of the Lambs – Jonathan Demme

Six Degrees of Separation - Fred Schepisi

 

2000-2021

About Schmidt – Alexander Payne

Adaptation – Spike Jonze

Barney’s Version – Richard J. Lewis

Before Sunset - Richard Linklater

Closer - Mike Nichols

The Departed – Martin Scorsese

The Descendants – Alexander Payne

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – Michael Gondry

Ex Machina - Alex Garland

Happiness - Todd Solondz

I'm Thinking of Ending Things – Charlie Kaufman

Little Miss Sunshine - Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris

Lost in Translation – Sofia Coppola

Memento - Christopher Nolan

Million Dollar Baby – Clint Eastwood

Mulholland Drive – David Lynch

1917 - Sam Mendes

No County For Old Men – Coen Brothers

Once - John Carney

The Pledge - Sean Penn

Sideways - Alexander Payne

The Social Network – David Fincher

Stranger Than Fiction - Marc Forster

21 Grams - Alejandro G. Iñárritu

Tyrannosaur - Paddy Considine

 

Films I need to watch that I’ve heard are excellent: There Will Be Blood and Synecdoche, New York

Racism's Overton Window

 

As many readers will know, there’s a concept called the Overton Window (developed by Joseph P. Overton) which suggests that in every generation there is a “window” of acceptable views, ideas, beliefs and political policies that are categorised as standard and expected, and that everything outside of that window is unacceptable and beyond the pale. The window gets shifted over time because when ideas outside of the window are considered at the extreme, the less extreme but still radical ideas start to become more widely accepted and move within the purlieus of the window.

Views go from so far outside the mainstream that few people accept them into the mainstream >> to radical >> to peripheral >> to mainstream >> to incontrovertible (whereby you’re now considered far outside the mainstream if you ‘don’t' subscribe to them, and could even find yourself in jail if you speak out against them). Here are some examples; In a few decades we’ve gone from climate change alarmism being a belief only subscribed to by a few off-the-wall crackpots, to a situation where if you don’t subscribe to it you’re seen as a filthy capitalist rogue who doesn’t give a damn about anything other than money. In a few decades we’ve gone from homosexuality being illegal, to the slightest intolerance of it being seen as a hate crime. In those same few decades, we've gone from thinking of 1984, Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 as dystopian fiction, to them being actual political realities imposed on us by the establishment.

Being the hot topic of the day, I want to talk about racism in terms of the Overton Window. Racism is best categorised as unfair segregation or hostile aggression on the basis of race. It is telling people they are not allowed on a bus; it's lynching; it's beating up, it's murdering people because of their skin colour or ethnicity - that is what racism is, and we can all agree that these things are bad. The trouble is, once something is rightly identified as bad, it becomes tempting for people to stretch its meaning and apply it a bit more widely to encapsulate their own cause. Then the Overton Window begins to shift, and it gets applied a little more widely still, then even further, until it means nothing more than 'disliking or disagreeing with someone who happens to be of a different ethnicity or skin colour', and then even further to become 'holding a different view to a view that's popular within a particular group'.

Once terms like racism, sexism, hate crime, misogyny and Islamophobia become more mainstream, people become readily tempted to use them even more widely for their convenience. Before you know it, it's possible to cry 'racism' if someone with different skin colour demolishes your argument; it's possible to cry 'sexism' if someone doesn't support all-women shortlists; and it's possible to declare that you've been the victim of a hate crime just because someone insulted your religion on Twitter (and worse still, perhaps, it's easy to find swathes of people getting offended on your behalf).

And once society is at that stage, it's scarily easy to descend into absolute ridiculousness, where things like the denial of the biological distinction between the sexes, the eroding away of a the concept of competence-based achievements, the refusal to believe that IQ makes any significant difference to success, the denial about the fact that many of the reasons for our struggles are due to our own bad decision-making, the differences between men and women are socio-culturally determined, etc are mainstream views, and to be outside of them is to be beyond the pale.

Social grifters
As I indicated in a recent blog post, it seems clear that most tribal groups that peddle extremist propaganda (whether that's extreme left or right wing movements, environmentalists, woke social justice warriors or feminists) are doing so because they want to seek attention, find some meaning and purpose in their life, assuage their own insecurities and moderate their own self-dislike. And in order to this, they have to artificially construct injustices that aren't really there, or inflate the ones that are already there into something much more severe and unrepresentative of reality. An analysis of radical extremism that fails to consider what the participants personally get out of it is an anaemic analysis - and it is absurd that people go about their business as though this consideration doesn't matter. It really does matter; because if you find what's lurking beneath their virtue signalling and agenda-driven search for purpose, you'll find something dark and horrible (I'm sure it's in most of us).

One way to look at today’s society is to say that we must still be in the throes of racism if mobs of people feel the need to the streets and pull statues down, and demand the removal of others. Another way to look at today’s society – a way that at least has some truth attached to it – is that we must have done an awful lot right to bring about the decimation of most racism if people have the luxury of having to focus on statues of people who died before they were born. As always, I expect the truth lies somewhere in between.

But there is something significant, to do with balance, that we are probably getting wrong about the racism matter. I think it’s partly in the misdiagnosis, and partly in the misallocation of attention. The misdiagnosis is that I think virtually all acts that appear to be racist are, in fact, only proximally identified. I think the distal, and far more prominent causes of apparent racism are built on more fundamental kinds of pain, weakness, fear, resentment and insecurity (often flavoured by national and cultural heritage too). In other words, when someone appears to show racial hostility, it is often only superficially to do with the victim’s skin colour or ethnicity – it is largely driven by the inner hostility and self-contempt of the perpetrator. If we looked for the hurt in the racist, we’d see damaged people who have not been given the sufficient education, diversity of life experience, love, guidance and opportunities to enable them to be better, more tolerant, less hostile people. Attacking someone by their label is the outward manifestation of an inner self-disgust – I don’t think it’s much to do with a genuine prejudice against skin colour or ethnicity. As Graham Greene observed in The Power and The Glory:

“Hate was just a failure of imagination.”

And that leads me to the misallocation of attention. Having regularly misdiagnosed racism, society then places almost all the emphasis on the victim, and almost none on the perpetrator. Don’t get me wrong, it is certainly important to create a society in which the victims of any prejudice are loved, respected, supported, valued and encouraged to thrive. But unless we begin to identify racism and prejudice for what they are, we won’t help the victims or the perpetrators to move forward, and we’ll remain mired in a false stratification that neglects to focus more accurately on the poison and on the medicine.