Counterintuitive Economics: Why People Are Often Confused About High Prices

 

High costs are not necessarily good or bad; it depends entirely on how things are being measured. The cost is what the consumer sacrifices when they decide on a transaction. If I want solar powered garden lights, I pay the cost; if I want my roof fixed, I pay the cost. Now, suppose there are three types of light I like - spike lights, bollard lights and meteor shower lights. Suppose my preferential order is meteor shower lights, spike lights and then bollard lights. If I buy meteor shower lights, I sacrifice the opportunity to enjoy spike lights and bollard lights - and that forgone experience, plus the retail price of the meteor shower lights, is the cost I incur for my favourite lights. If I love spike lights nearly as much as meteor shower lights, then my cost of choosing meteor shower lights is higher than if I don't really like spike lights then bollard lights at all.

Now, which position of the two do you think is most beneficial to you? Evidently, it's the first option - the one in which you like spike lights nearly as much as meteor shower lights. Even though the first option is a higher cost, it's more preferable than option 2, where you are indifferent to the other 2 options. The take home economic wisdom here is that the better your range of choices, the higher your cost in choosing your favourite, but the higher quality the thing usually (but not always) is.

This can be applied to many other walks of life - employment offers, marriage offers, dating, holiday offers, and so on. Let's take online dating. Suppose you have two scenarios. In the first scenario, you have the choice of dating Fantastic Fay and Amazing Amy. Let's suppose overall quality (looks, intelligence, personality, kindness, trustworthiness, wit, occupation, etc), can be measured out of 100, and say Fay is 95 out of 100 and Amy is 92. The cost of choosing Fay over Amy is 92. In the second scenario, you have the choice of dating only Fantastic Fay or Reasonable Ruby, who scores 63 to Fay's 95. Assuming that you'd rather date Ruby than be single, choosing to date Fay costs you 63. In other words, the cost of choosing Fay over Ruby in scenario 2 (where Amy doesn't exist) is 29 points cheaper than choosing Fay over Amy in scenario 1 (where Ruby doesn't exist).

Clearly, if you date Fay in both scenarios, you're as intrinsically well off in each scenario, but you're not as extrinsically well off in each scenario, because your next best option is better in scenario 1 than in the scenario 2. That is to say, the cost of being in scenario 1 is higher than scenario 2, but it's still better to be in the higher cost scenario. To see why, suppose Fay takes a job abroad, and your relationship ends abruptly just as it begins. You're gutted, but now you look at your next option. In scenario 1, it's Amy at 92 points, whereas in scenario 2, it's Ruby at 63. You are better off in the higher cost scenario (scenario 1), even though here, 'higher cost' is synonymous with 'a more preferable scenario'.

All this we've covered constitutes one of those counter-intuitive things about economics - things that are true yet few people believe because on the surface they appear false. After all, how can the option we don't choose cost anything? That's not how we ordinarily measure cost. When we go shopping in the supermarket and buy £100 worth of goods, we don't think up a bill in our heads of all the items we neglected to buy, and what that opportunity cost amounted to. But to understand opportunity costs in relation to consume and producer surpluses means understanding that as the options get better and more plentiful, so do the costs.

I deliberately saved this one until last, but here's a scenario that should make all the above even more plainly obvious. If you're told you can go to a car showroom and pick a free car of your choice as you have the winning ticket, it would be easy and not feel very costly to go and pick out the Lamborghini if it was alongside rusty old bangers. You would hardly give what you left behind a second's thought. But if you had to select a car from a range of superb, luxury cars of all different kinds, you'd take a lot longer to choose one, and you'd spend more time thinking about the ones you left behind. That's an understanding you should bring to the considerations around high prices. 

Sunday Faith Series: An Interesting Observation About Adam & Eve

Humans are culturally primed to take responsibility for their own misdemeanours. If Celia in Liverpool is caught speeding, we wouldn't expect Carol in Newcastle to get sent the speeding fine. If Jack in Bristol assaults someone in a nightclub, it would be unfair if the judge gave Tom in Manchester a prison sentence. The story of Adam and Eve, then, even when one takes it as a myth intended to convey powerful truths about humankind (as I believe we are meant to take it), is an interesting illustration of what it means to be humans under sin.

Taken literally, it would be a silly story; one man sins, and because of that original sin the imputation falls on everyone who lives. That's even more unfair than my illustration of Carol in Newcastle getting the speeding fine for Celia's offence. It's more like Carol in Newcastle getting the speeding fine for someone who was caught speeding before she was even born.

How are we supposed to take the Adam and Eve story then? I have a rule about reading scripture - I think it all has to be read through the lens of the grace of Christ on the cross. Every book and every chapter is bound to be read anaemically unless understood in relation to God's awesome grace - even the difficult parts. With that in mind, here's a suggested way to view the Adam and Eve story. We know from our present day lens of understanding psychology, biology and neuroscience just how inevitable it is that people will make a mess of things in life. Our heredity, or psychological damage, our emotional weaknesses and the other numerous human shortfalls are now understood to be key components in how we screw up. Or to put it another way, the world is full of things that are bound to make us fall.

In contrast, the scene set for Adam & Eve is a paradisiacal backdrop, where we're told none of these earthly afflictions would have been a danger to them. They had no insecurities, no other people to damage them or bring out the worst in them. But yet even in paradise, susceptible to none of these faults, they were disobedient - they chose 'self' over choosing God - the primary sin that leads to all other sinning.

Perhaps the primary message the story is conveying is that if paradisiacal Adam and Eve can slip up under their conditions, it shows just how hopeless our attempts are at avoiding sin. If even the two safest people ended up sinning, it is quite unsurprising that relatively unsafe people like us were always going to sin. But with that comes the realisation of how the grace lens is brought to bear on our affliction. We are all so naturally screwed by ourselves that the only possibility antidote for us is the same antidote for paradisiacal Adam and Eve - the love and grace of God, given to us through the death and resurrection of Christ as a free gift that we had no chance of earning.

On The Curious Nature Of Incuriosity

I’ve known quite a few people over the years who are largely incurious about pretty much all of the most interesting things available to humans to ponder deeply. They live a fairly contented life, where family, work, friendships, running a household and some leisure time take up virtually all of their time and mental energy. But deep and profound questions and considerations about God, reality, existence, the universe, life, philosophy, morality, consciousness, free will, etc are met with, at best, a brief but transient spark of curiosity, and, at worst, blithe disinterest.

I’ve always found this strange, on at least two counts:

1) Those deep and profound considerations are really the elixir of life’s purpose, joys and wonders, not mere adjuncts to the story

2) It’s near-certain that, with the right balance, your family life, work life, friendships, home life and leisure time are greatly enhanced, not compromised, by an interest in the deep and profound considerations of the world

Consequently, then, if being curious seems to be much more beneficial than being incurious, why do so many people prefer incuriosity over curiosity? One obvious possibility is that being curious requires a lot of effort that being incurious does not, so most people choose not to bother. Another possibility is that curiosity takes you on a journey that engenders more internal mental anguish than simply leaving well alone. Yet another possibility is that curiosity leads to more knowledge and more opinions, and therefore the likelihood of more epistemological conflict with others.

All three of those possibilities seem mutually plausible – they tap in to the human tendency to act according to the law of parsimony (the law of least effort). In order to think competently about something, you need to have learned lots of facts, and also how to reason well, and when faced with that, parsimony can probably seem quite seductive.

But incuriosity is to our detriment. I’ve often pondered whether people can be taught or encouraged to be more curious. I’m pretty sure that once people begin to learn and discover more, their curiosity compounds like interest. I should imagine it’s unlikely that you can comfortably know lots and not want to know lots more. Consequently, perhaps the most influential curiosity is the nascent curiosity – helping create the spark from which all fires can burn. Or perhaps, we have to get excited about thinking big before we can even start thinking small. It may be, as Antoine de Saint-Exupery said, that if we want people to build ships, we don’t get them gathering wood, collecting tools, and assigning tasks – we, instead, teach them to “yearn for the vast, endless sea.”.

 

Sunday Faith Series: Christianity - Genius or Madness?

There are two common binary considerations associated with Christianity - one is: Is it true or false? - and the other is: Is it good or evil? I prefer to frame it a different way by asking; Is it genius or madness? If it is madness, it is probably false and evil too, whereas if it is genius, it is probably good and true. Hang on, I hear you object - why can't it be a work of genius in its moral proclamations, but not in the least bit true when it comes to its claims of Jesus' divinity?

It's a fair question. Telling us to love our neighbour as ourselves, and to be charitable, compassionate, kind and morally excellent is hardly wisdom that could not have been thought up by an excellent human. But as C.S Lewis reminds us in his 'Lord, liar or lunatic' trilemma, Jesus made claims to have co-equality with God, so as long as we accept that the scriptures are an accurate portrayal* then Christ couldn't have been thoroughly excellent if He either a) told so many lies about being God, or b) was under so many false misapprehensions.

Christianity is based on the proposition that Christ is God in human flesh - not a mere man. Therefore, to consider Christianity as true or false, or good or evil, means to consider it in terms of genius or madness. If God loves us, and can see that by ourselves we are all pretty wretched, ego-stroking, status-mongering, selfish creatures, then there may be a certain genius to the creation story - one that even the world's greatest human genius probably wouldn't have the imagination or audacity to think up.

Consider the story. Thanks to His penchant for autonomy and volition, God creates a world full of humans, and gives us the freedom to be ourselves. In being human, we learn, we grow, we slip, we fall, we have joy and gladness and pain and hardship - the whole rich tapestry of experience. Yet constrained by the limitations of being human, God knows that the only way we can reach the destiny for which we were created is to have help - rather like a teacher helps a pupil, or a parent helps their child. God's cosmic story is that He would be born into this world in a backwater village in ancient Palestine, live as we live, suffer immense pain and torture, die under the most horrific circumstances and then demonstrate through the resurrection that bodily death is not the end.

It sounds a strange way to bring justice to the creation story - and I remember it certainly sounded positively bizarre before I became a Christian. But a God who helps us to salvation and to renewal by nailing all our sins to the cross, and inviting us into His kingdom with love and grace, may just be demonstrating the work of a Divine genius - the work of such genius, in fact, that no group of people would be crazy enough to make it all up and proclaim it as the pivot around which the rest of existence revolves.

Surely an ordinary man or a woman, even if they were a genius, wouldn't have thought of such a peculiar thing - it makes for strange consideration at a human level. Why couldn't God have just forgiven us without needing to come down to earth and suffer as a man? Perhaps He could have chosen that method - but the idea of a God who loves us enough to put Himself in our shoes, live all the earthly hardships that we live, and suffer grief, pain, humiliation loss and death for us might just be so something so ingenious that ordinary humans would never entertain it.

You may object that that kind of reasoning could justify all sorts of nonsensical ideas about God. We could just as easily envisage a God who became a five dimensional object, or a God who juggled 100 balls with one hand for a year - the imaginative possibilities are endless.  But hold on, the alternatives may be endless, but they do not have the same gravitas as the real accounts of Christianity. It takes something quite remarkable to change the whole course of human history in the way that Christianity did, and to inspire such a multitude of creative excellence - theology, apologetics, literature, poetry, art, music, architecture, and so on. And let us also not forget the numerous martyrs that died for their faith by standing up to oppressive authorities and refusing to renounce their beliefs. This Christian faith is no ordinary thing. I have no inclination towards false dichotomies or faulty trilemmas - but it seems to me that such an extraordinary thing is either the work of a Divine genius or else it is utter madness.

I won't deny that the idea of an infinitely good God seeing everything we do and knowing our thoughts and our intentions better than we do sounds very much like madness. I also won't deny that the idea of Heaven being a gift earned for us by Jesus on the cross also sounds a bit like madness too. The first one sounds a bit like madness because it involves God as some kind of surveillance camera in the sky from whose attention we can never escape. And the second one sounds a bit like madness because it means that our bad deeds are not quantifiable in terms of desert - so a genocidal dictator and a nice lady volunteering in a charity shop can both be with Jesus in paradise by accepting God's free gift.

But once we conflate the two 'mad' ideas, we see them both in a more enriching way, as two complementary sides to the same golden coin. So much so that even our day-to-day sins - like uncharity, a bad temper and selfishness are up for continual re-examination when we have a relationship with God. But on the other hand, our continual efforts to improve and be better people are part of the grace-centred relationship with God too. So while God sees everything we do, and knows our thoughts and our intentions inside out, He views us not as reproachable sinners but as forgiven sinners. He sees us as sharing in the victory that Christ's free gift won for us on the cross. 

* Not everyone accepts this claim, of course - but given that faith in God involves faith in the accurate propagation of His word, it's a bit of a moot objection.

How Future Humans Will Look Back On Climate Change

Most benefits accrued in the future begin with an immediate short-term cost. To have a successful business, you have to take a risk and invest capital; to have a pretty garden, you have to cultivate it or pay someone else to do it; to get fit, you have to exercise, and so on. Even when you learn something, you have to pass through a period of ignorance or error in order to gain knowledge. Great progress usually begins with birthing pains.

The same can be said of our industrial period, from about 1850 to the present day, and a few decades henceforward – we’ve done a remarkable job increasing the living standards and material prosperity of humanity, and the effects on the climate have been one of the inevitable costs of that. We could have done better, of course, but on balance, we’ve done amazingly well to engender this great enrichment, and we’ll continue to do even better. Throughout this journey, we’ve made the transitions in terms of energy consumption, as we’ve learned how to be even more efficient, and we’ll keep learning, and keep getting more efficient still. We have technological prowess that our great-grandparents wouldn’t have thought possible – and our own grandchildren will make even greater advances than we can possibly imagine today.

When future humans look back in history on our society, I’m fairly certain they will view this generation’s preoccupation with climate change for what it really is (was). They will be incredulous about our worry; they will be shocked by the short-sightedness and lack of perspective; they will be horrified at how much money we spent on it, when it could have been so much more wisely spent; they will see it for what it was – a temporary, monomaniacal, mass-propaganda, peddled by self-interest groups who could gain billions from the indoctrination, and swallowed hook, line and sinker by the public (and, as a consequence, politicians and the media alike). They will be mortified that so many people got so easily sucked in, and that they couldn’t subject climate change to the proper cost-benefit analysis it required, in order to see it with a more appropriate sense of perspective.

But, more so, they will look back with pride and a sense of accomplishment at how adroit we were at passing through the cult of Gaia, and how scientifically and technologically astute we were at giving the religion of climate alarmism its redundancy notice, as we advanced ever further into the next phase of our progression-explosion, at an even greater rate than any of the previous advancements. Future humans will look back at our climate problems with a far more enlightened evaluation, just as we look back at problems our ancestors faced, and pay regard to the fact that they are problems we have left in the past and have learned how to overcome.

Despite the mass-hysteria, many of us today are appalled at the damage done by climate alarmism. In the future, we’ll reach a point where almost everybody is.

Sunday Faith Series: Actually, The Bible Does Look Like The Word God Would Write

Matters that have been debated for centuries are usually compelling, because if we’ve been talking about them for such a long time, they must be interesting and complex enquiries to begin with. One such topic worthy of deep contemplation is the nature of the Bible, and whether it appears to bear resemblance to a book given to us by a Divine, Omniscient, Omnipotent mind. Some Christians think every word of the Bible is infallibly dictated by God, but I’m not in that camp. Others, including myself (and the majority of Christians, I think) believe that the Bible is divinely choreographed, but that it is a created artefact subjected to the limitations of the people commissioned to write it.

Either way, a Facebook friend – let’s call him Mike (because that’s his name), devised a thoughtful post expressing his doubts that the Bible was influenced by a Divine, Omniscient, Omnipotent mind. He objects on grounds that the Bible sounds to him a lot more like the sort of things that primitive tribes of humans from the past would say than the sort of things that a Supreme Being would say, and that it’s what the primitive human imagines God would be like if He had ultimate power. Mike thinks a book influenced by God would contain the most illuminating and profound and insightful things that he had ever read, and is under the impression that a book inspired by God’s revelation would contain special insights that we couldn’t have thought up ourselves, and even factual impartations that would give us knowledge of things we wouldn’t otherwise discover until tens of thousand of years henceforward.

It's certainly an interesting line of enquiry – and one I thought about myself while I was still exploring the Christian propositions in my pre-Christian days. But I think, with further contemplation, Mike might reach stronger conclusions about God’s word. In the first place, on Mike’s insistence that the Bible sounds to him a lot more like the sort of things that primitive tribes of humans from the past would say – well, that’s certain to be true of whenever God sought to give revelation to humans of any particular time or culture; if it is to be transcribed in a manner conducted by humans in possession of the revelation, then it is bound to reflect the cultural and epistemological limitations of the time. And if the purpose of the Bible is to equip us we everything we need to know God and have a relationship with Him, it doesn’t need to contain advanced scientific facts that we can go on to discover by ourselves when we have the sufficient tools and resources to do so.

In the second place, on Mike’s claim that a book influenced by God would contain the most illuminating and profound and insightful thing that he had ever read – well, what makes him so sure that the Bible isn’t the most illuminating and profound and insightful book to which he has access? What are his criteria for a book’s illuminations, insights and profundities, and how does he know that the Bible falls short of his metric? Moreover, how does he know his metric is of a high enough standard to begin with, in order to apprehend what a Divinely inspired book would look like? 

In the third place, how is Mike so sure the Bible, taken as a whole, doesn’t contain special insights that we couldn’t have thought up ourselves? If the Bible never existed, what makes him so sure we would have thought up the central truths of the Bible; that God loves us enough to die for us, and that He wants to offer us intimate knowledge of His character? How could we know God loves us enough to live as a man and suffer and die for us if God didn’t make Himself known through the Incarnation and folk at the time and shortly after recorded those teachings and events for generations to come? It’s not self-evident that we would even understand the Divine standard of truth, goodness, perfection and love without being told about it. Whatever the height of standards we can construct through our evolution, there is always a higher standard than the very best we can conceive, and that's one of the most astounding things we ever get to contemplate.

And then there's the matter I wrote about in this blog post, about how the Bible is the most remarkable book in the world in terms of its multi-layered connectivity and profound complexity, which is worth deep and careful consideration in itself. 

It’s all very well saying we could have thought up all this ingenious stuff by ourselves, but we are saying this as people who’ve already had access to the Bible, and been enriched by its theological, moral, cultural and psychological implantations on our humanity. In other words, we are only making the claims by virtue of having these things already – it is not at all clear that we could have written it ourselves because we only know of a reality in which the people who did write it were claiming to so with God’s revelation. Perhaps we could have, but I seriously doubt it, because these things seem to me to be Divine, and humans certainly seem not to be, at least not without God’s help. We can’t prove that we couldn’t have thought it up ourselves, but we can’t prove we could have either. And given that if we scan the evidential landscape the only experience we have of these things being expressed is through people who said they got it from God, it's plausible to me that we needed God to come up with proclaimed revelations about God. It's good to remember, there is no evidence of anyone thinking up these truths without Divine inspiration, because God had already got in first. We have no idea whether we could have thought these things up without God’s revelation, because we’ve never experienced a reality in which there is no proclaimed understanding of God’s revelation.

A similar point can be observed about nature herself, and can be contemplated like this. A bunch of people claim that nature (however many universes that comprises) exists because God created it, and that without God, nothing in creation would or could exist. And a bunch of people claim that nature can exist without the need for God. The question is, is it even possible for nature to exist without God? If nature can’t exist without God creating it, then the theists are right, and the atheists are wrong. The atheists are only claiming that a nature without God can exist by virtue of living in a nature that God created. If nature can’t exist without God creating it, then we’d never get to live in the atheists’ universe because it would never exist in the first place. In other words, if the universe can only exist by virtue of God creating it, the atheists (without knowing it) are living in a universe that’s only possible because of the God they think doesn’t exist. In saying this universe can exist without the need for God, they are making an impossible claim that they don’t realise is impossible. The theists who say this universe exists because God created it are making a claim they couldn’t possibly make in the atheists’ universe if the atheists are wrong, because such a universe wouldn’t exist.

We don’t know if it’s even possible that nature could exist without God, but we know that if nature can’t exist without God, then the theists must be right. If nature can’t exist without God, then the theists can presume they are right on this fundamental question. The atheists, on the other hand, don’t even know if it possible to live in this world without God, and therefore are wholly unsure of whether their proposition of nature without God is even possible. At least the theists know for sure that their proposition is possible; atheists don’t even know if theirs is possible because we don’t know if such a reality could exist without God. This doesn’t, of course, give us much of clue at this stage about whether the theists or atheists are right – but it does at least indicate that the atheists’ position is guaranteed to be a supposition at least as highly speculative as the theists.

Sunday Faith Series: Why Did God Create The Devil?

 

Have you ever wondered why God created Satan, as described in Isaiah 54:16?

“See, it is I who created the blacksmith who fans the coals into flame and forges a weapon fit for its work. And it is I who have created the destroyer to wreak havoc"

I have. Given the devil causes so much havoc in God's creation, and that presumably it would have been a nicer creation without the notorious fallen angel Lucifer in the story, mightn't it have been a better creation story if Satan had never been created at all? I doubt it, and here's why. Given that God did create the devil, one must presume that his inclusion in the story ultimately works for our betterment. God is clearly more concerned about our spiritual development and building of character than He is our worldly comforts.

That's why I think the devil is actually a provision of God's regard for us, His love for us, and His desire for us to fulfil our potential. Remember, God also tells us through Isaiah that the enemy will not prosper against us. What's absolutely astounding about God's creation is that fallenness, including Lucifer's fall (Ezekiel 28, Isaiah 14), is a key part of the story, and its inclusion makes a better world than its omission.

Even God Himself declares that the inclusion of Satan in creation is part of the provision of His love for us, and an instrument to refine us and sharpen us, ready for being Heavenly creatures. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised; just about everything in nature conforms to a similar pattern: for things to grow and prosper fully, they need to be victorious against competition and come face to face with less-favourable things to resist against, and grow stronger as a consequence. It seems God uses Satan's antics to help us turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones.

Naturally, for humans, in the midst of our "light and momentary troubles" it's often quite hard to focus on the "eternal glory that far outweighs them all" (as per 2 Corinthians 4:17) - but it's reassuring to know that it is an essential part of the best of all possible worlds. And how great that if we live with a steadfast Christ-centredness, we know that "no weapon forged against us will prevail, and we will refute every tongue that accuses us".

Sunday Faith Series: Can You Lose Your Salvation?

 

A long-standing question debated in Christianity is whether someone, once saved, can ever lose their salvation? I feel fairly convinced that the answer is no, we can’t lose our salvation. Here’s why. I believe that the power of having the Holy Spirit gives us a certainty of a relationship with God from which, once we know it, we can never go back. In other words, if you have accepted Jesus as your Lord and saviour, and as a consequence you have the Holy Spirit (Acts 16:31; Ephesians1:13–14, Ephesians 2:8–9) the Holy Spirit will never leave or forsake you, and you will not be able to be anything other than a Christian. A Christian is someone who has accepted that they have been saved by the free gift of grace; they are now a ‘new creation’ (2 Corinthians 5:17). We cannot be separated from God’s love once we are saved (Romans 8:38–39), nor can we be taken from God’s hand (John 10:28–29), and in Christ we are kept from falling (Jude 24–25).

The Bible, coupled with my own experience, seems fairly clear to me that we cannot lose our salvation. But yet I’m sure many of us know people who used to call themselves ‘Christian’ but who have walked away from the faith, and claim to no longer believe. If I’m right that a Christian cannot lose their salvation, then this leaves only two possibilities:

1) They were never a Christian in the first place

2) They still are a Christian and haven’t really walked away

On the first group, St. John seems to confirm this is true for some people, when in 1 John 2:19 he says of dubious believers “They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us”. That’s about as comprehensive as it gets. And I think we see this quite a lot in the modern era regarding those who have walked away. It’s quite possible, it seems, to claim to be a Christian, to be active in church, to say some of the things Christians say, and act out a faith that resembles belief in Christ, but yet not be a Christian ‘new creation’ who accepts Jesus as his Lord and Saviour.

On the second group, it is also possible, I think, that many people who seem to have walked away from the faith were, and are, actually Christians, who are going through a tough time in their faith, and will return to the fold when the time is right. Of course, it should go without saying, that I’m making no personal judgements on either group – only God knows their heart. But I think the likelihood that we cannot lose our salvation leaves us Christians with two important considerations. One is how much we should rejoice in the fact that God has guaranteed our salvation, based on His grace and love for us, and that that guarantee is a perfect springboard from which we can go on to fulfil our potential in Him. And the second is that, when we meet people who appear to have fallen away from the faith, whichever of the two above groups they are in, there is plenty for us to do in being good witnesses. If they never did know Christ, then we have the opportunity to help them see how amazing it is to be in a relationship with Him. And if they do know Christ, but have temporarily stumbled, then we have an opportunity to help them get back on their feet in their walk with God. Either way, I’m fairly sure that nobody has ever been a Christian and then lost their salvation.

Why Energy Prices Are Higher & Why The "People Before Profit" Slogan Understands Neither People Nor Profit

 

People habitually talk about the right quantity of things - they are always going on about whether there is too much of something or too little - not enough being done to tackle climate change, too much sugar in our diets, not enough taxation of the rich, too much currency in circulation - the list goes on. It must be tiring always trying to attribute the proper quantities of everything in life.

The one doing the rounds at the moment is that there is too much profit being made by big energy companies - often accompanied by the misguided "People before profits" slogan. To see why the "People before profits" slogan is misjudged, you first have to see that, imprudent political meddling aside, a business can only survive in the free market if it is profitable. And a business can only be profitable if it can sell its goods or services at a higher rate than the cost of producing them. Businesses that can do this provide not just benefits for its owners, shareholders and workforce, but primarily for society too, by providing value to consumers at prices they are willing to pay. That is, the businesses have taken raw material (human talents and ideas, labour and material resources) and transposed them in a way that makes them more beneficial and valuable to society. It requires abject foolishness to utter the words "People before profits", because profits are about people, where, in terms of value, the one is not distinguishable from the other.

In a competitive market, without government impediments, profits can keep increasing only up to a point, after which they become exhausted, because new competition emerges to ensure that, by and large, the prices are charged in line with supply and demand and consumer preference. If an industry contains diminishing profits, then it is becoming inefficient - and everyone can understand this. But if an industry contains so-called 'excessive' profits (short-term shocks aside), many people become habitually myopic to the opposite truth; that the industry probably has too few providers, and there are likely potential suppliers who can compete in the sector and make smaller profits but still thrive.

Of course, the relationship between proper quantities, proper prices and proper profits is hamstrung by government price fixing, taxes and subsidies, but we'll return to that in a moment. What conditions the analysis is whether or not the good or service is a fungible one – by which we mean whether or not that good or service is easily replaceable in competition. The trouble with energy is that it is not a fungible good in the same way that beer, food, clothes or cars are. If you need to heat your home, you can't suddenly decide to substitute the narrow range of options and the relatively small range of providers able to produce the infrastructure to enable you to stay warm. Whereas, if you're thirsty, and you find that beer is too expensive, you can buy some other drinks instead. Similarly, if the price or BMWs or leather jackets became undesirable, there are plenty of other alternatives you can seek, like Fords, Vauxhalls, wool or denim. The only competition for your energy is from a very small range of big firms offering other tariffs. A small range of big firms that provides a service (like energy to millions of people) is a very hard group to break into, as competition for such a service is hard to generate. It's very costly to start up a rival firm to provide energy to millions of people.

It's true that energy companies are currently making big profits, but the picture the 'windfall tax' proponents are trying to create is inadequate, over-simplistic and misleading. In the first place, these profits must be offset against huge industry setbacks during the pandemic, in which the sector saw huge losses as the price of energy slumped when most people weren't travelling or and trading as much. If you think the huge surge in profits is simply down to greed, then you ought to wonder why the energy firms weren't greedier before the pandemic. If there are shortages in energy (Ukraine conflict, pandemic, etc), meaning that supplies might reduce and prices would go up, then wholesale prices are going to go up too, so one of the main reasons the energy companies are charging us more is because they are paying more.

But there's even more to it than that. Because of the volatility of the industry in recent times, many smaller energy firms have collapsed, which, of course, is a factor in increased profits for the bigger firms able to sweep up their custom. Part of the cause of their collapse was the government-imposed price cap, which meant they were not able to increase their prices in line with supply and demand. Furthermore, the profits of energy firms are not just made by the energy provided to consumers - the profits continued to soar despite a price cap that kept the price of energy below its marginal rate. Many of the profits we have been reading about have come from traders buying and selling commodities and seeing their value increase by the volatility of the market.

The upshot is, energy prices are caused by a number of complex factors - supply, demand, global (in)stabilities, future projections, and the minutia related to raw materials and provision of those materials in generating those supplies. People may bemoan what they think are high prices and excessive profits, but finding something hard to afford does not enable you to claim that it is too expensive. We can say why something is expensive, and we can acknowledge that the price is too high for some people to afford, but neither of those things means it's too expensive. A £5000 Porsche might be unaffordable to a jobless man, but that doesn't mean £5000 is too expensive for a Porsche.

Price caps, taxes and subsidies muddy the waters, because price caps mean goods and services are not sold in line with supply and demand's prices; taxes mean businesses are bearing more than the full production costs of their operation; and subsidies mean businesses are not bearing the full production costs of their operation. The plethora of articles that compare the relative prices and profits of energy in various countries, are fairly pointless, as they are oblivious to the complex distortionary effects created by respective price caps, taxes and subsidies in the respective nation's economy.

Further reading on this subject: 

On The Economics Of High Oil Prices (And Why They Can Be Good)

A Brief Word About Governments And Inflation

Politicians from both sides keep telling us about their plans for dealing with inflation, while all the time ignoring the fact that they are the main cause of the problems. You see, inflation is one of those things we think we observe when we look at rising prices, but in reality, the world is more complex, because price differentials and inflation are not the same thing, despite being connected. A relative price change can occur distinctly from inflation, but affect inflationary rates. A relative price change is the distinction between an observed price change (linked to currency rates) and the inflation rate. For example, if the inflation rate is 4%, and the pound sterling price of sandals rises by 2%, then there's been a 2% decrease in the relative price of sandals.

Inflation is observed by the naked eye as a general increase in prices, and it’s folly to cite individual price changes without factoring in relative price changes occurring independently of inflation. Prices can change without inflation affecting the change, and inflation can occur independently of the relative price changes of individual goods.

When we talk about inflation, what is often meant is the combined effects of relative price changes and inflationary effects. The amount a price of something changes should not be just attributed to ‘inflation’, as most people do, because the effects being observed are really inflation plus the relative price change. Put it this way; Alice may have a clean car (z) by applying soap (x) and water (y) to the process, but while x and y contribute to z, it wouldn’t make much sense to say that z contributes to x.

So, here’s why the governments are largely to blame for the ‘inflation’ problems they are trying to help alleviate by, in their words, dealing with the ‘cost of living crisis’. Aside from supply side shocks caused by things like pandemics and wars, there are two main ways that our purchasing power is negatively affected; 1) no change in the money supply, but fewer goods to obtain, or 2), no change in the goods to obtain, but new money supplied with which to purchase these goods.

When the governments restrict the acquisition of goods, either by over-regulation, distincentivising investment and production, price fixing, or artificially starving the supply, prices go up and shortages occur, negatively affecting living standards. When the governments increase the money supply over and above public demand, there will be a drop in the purchasing power of that money, and citizens will feel the effects of inflation. If you increase the money supply, then you increase nominal prices of goods and services, and you reduce people’s purchasing power, negatively affecting living standards.

The next time you meet a politician who tells you what they are trying to do to combat inflation, tell them you already know what they should do; they should cut taxes, and stop increasing the money supply and saddling us with more and more debt.

It's Impossible To Love The Truth And Deny Evolution: Final Part - How We Know It's A Tree Of Life, Not An Orchard

We know that the evolution of life has been occurring on this planet for over 4 billion years, and that the underlying system is descent with modification. But even though we know that the nested hierarchy forms a tree of life, I've encountered creationists recently who say they believe in a common designer but not in common descent. Or to put it in their preferred language, they think evolution is like an orchard not a tree.

It isn't; and to see why it isn't, let me explain why the orchard hypothesis falls down. For starters, let's talk about alleles. If you recall from part 2 in the blog series, an allele is two or more alternative variants of a gene on the same place on the chromosome, that arise by mutation, inherited from two parents. We can study the correlation of pairs of alleles within populations and use the data to measure genetic distance between populations. This is called the coancestry coefficient. We know biological organisms are all related on a tree of life, because we can observe the comprehensive evidence for common ancestry by visualising the genetic relatedness explained by the coancestry coefficient of shared alleles and descent. Through the comprehensive range of multi-allelic genomic data, we observe that the evolutionary tree of life places every species on branches in terms of genetic similarity and relatedness. The genetic relatedness between two individuals is measured probabilistically regarding whether their alleles are identical by descent - that is, whether there is a matching segment of DNA shared by two or more individuals and inherited from a common ancestor (with the occurrence of no other recombination).

The coancestry coefficient is what predicts a coefficient of relatedness between two individuals - a genotype is observed at a locus in one individual x, and matched with genotype of another individual y at the same locus. While there are some misleading putative patterns of relatedness between individuals that share alleles that do not descend directly from a parent pair, just about every subset group of any population is measurable by its allele frequencies, where relatedness is characterised by their shared alleles that are matched by descent.

This is the exact same state of order in the animal kingdom; the greater genetic similarity between organism x and y than between x and z shows the last common ancestor between x and y is more recent than the last common ancestor between x and z. Using the formula, if you map the similarities and differences between any two species, you can place them on a family tree of biological evolution and know which species is more closely related to which. For example, there is greater genetic similarity between humans and gorillas than between humans and elephants, so we know that the last common ancestor of humans and gorillas is far more recent than the last common ancestor of humans and elephants. There is greater genetic similarity between tarsiers and guinea pigs than between tarsiers and kangaroos, so we know that the last common ancestor of tarsiers and guinea pigs is far more recent than the last common ancestor of tarsiers and kangaroos. Tarsiers, gorillas and humans all share a common primate ancestor, but the common ancestor between humans and gorillas (and chimpanzees, orangutans, gibbons and monkeys) is more recent than the common ancestor between any of those apes and tarsiers. Every time we apply this formula to any pair of animals by sequencing the genome, we can confirm how closely related they are in evolution's family tree.

The upshot is, the formula for the tree of life in evolution is that there is more genetic similarity between species more closely related (that is, the common ancestor between them is on a closer branch) than between species more distantly related (that is, the common ancestor between them is on a branch further back), and this is true with such predictability and evidential demonstrability that the tree of life becomes impossible to reasonably deny. By equal measure, the 'orchard' hypothesis completely falls down because this pattern would not be observed if every species or every taxonomic group (or however the orchard proponents define what constitutes a separate tree) was created as a separate tree in the orchard of life. The patterns are formed by genetic relatedness and distance, and they can be deciphered informationally like reading computer code, to leave us in no doubt that the orchard hypothesis is wrong.

From a Christian perspective, I believe we have a common Designer, but from a scientific perspective, I know all living things have common ancestry, and that the vast evidence accrued from sequencing the genomes of most living things confirms this beyond any reasonable doubt. It's not possible to make the square peg of the orchard hypothesis fit in to the round hole of common ancestry, because if the orchard theory was correct, we wouldn't have the genetic patterns we see when we sequence animal genomes.

On top of all the other evidence, there is another absolutely compelling predictive element to evolution too; if evolution is descent with modification in a tree of life, where organisms become more genetically distant from each other over time, then we’d expect to see more and more molecular convergence the further back in time we studied historical DNA. That is, if you could travel back in time a few million years, and find the ancestors of organism X and organism Y, you would find they are historically more similar to each other than modern Xs and Ys are to each other in the present. If you followed the same time line back a few tens of millions of years, you’d find even greater genetic convergence. This formula: more evolution, more genetic divergence; less evolution, more genetic convergence is such a robust predicative model, that it’s another one of those reasons why we can be absolutely confident that we are all ancestrally related.

This is precisely what we find when we compare the DNA of other species and place them in a nested hierarchy of relatedness. If you look at other primates (our most recent evolutionary cousins on the tree of life’s branches) we always find that when two distinct lineages have been evolving independently since their most recent common ancestor, the traces of common ancestry are there, but there are more genetic dissimilarities the further that line evolves. Humans are more closely related to chimps than to gorillas, we are more closely related to gorillas than to orangutans, and so on. In fact, chimpanzees and bonobos are more closely related to humans than to gorillas and orangutans, and gorillas are more closely related to humans than they are to monkeys. Everything fits exactly as we’d expect, given all the other evidence we have for evolution too. Perhaps, now, an illustration will help…..

Genetic analogy
Earlier in the series, I explained that the genetic code comprises DNA made up of a simple alphabet where the order of these letters across the genome creates a unique organism with a unique genetic code. I also posited the analogy of a genome being like a book, consisting of chromosomes, which are like paragraphs, made up of genes (which are sentences). Sometimes it's hard to visualise systems like genetic algorithms and common ancestry if you're not familiar with what biology 'looks' like - so to make this even clearer, let me develop the illustration of books to show how certain this genetic relatedness is in terms of common ancestry within a tree of life.

Let us suppose a highly sophisticated supercomputer could map the genomes of all the species in existence and assign unique combinations of letters of any unique common ancestor algorithms that could be represented with words and then literary sentences. Imagine that as evolution begins, from the crude biochemical stages into creation of the genetic code shared by all living things, we reach a point on the tree of life in which any of the genomes of the last common ancestors of a particular set of branches of different species is represented by a literary work. Imagine too that similarities in literary types and evolutionary branches follow similarities between morphological phylogenetic trees and molecular phylogenetic trees, in that the genes that code traits in terms of size, shape, and structure of an organism are consistent with how those traits are observed both phenotypically and genotypically. In other words, in this computer program, a Jane Austen novel is more like a Charlotte Bronte novel than it is an Arthur C. Clarke novel or a Philip K Dick novel, similar to how a guinea pig is more like a squirrel than it is a chicken or a snake, and so forth. In this illustration, the branches on the tree of life would resemble a literary library in terms of genres, authors, books and styles. 

In reality, analogies are limited, and we have many more pages of text on the evolutionary tree, because genes expand across species in a non-linear way too, and each species has thousands of protein-coding genes - but a literary illustration will suffice to convey the broader point. Evolution works by shuffling the letters (sexual recombination of genes) where the exchange of texts (the genetic material between different organisms) produces the offspring with combinations of traits that emerge from either parent. We are using a literary library to illustrate the trajectory evolution follows, where each successful recombination of genes over populations goes on to produce the vast diversity of animals we see in evolution, each with their own unique sequences of DNA.

Now, suppose we zoom in further on a particular sequence of, say, a mammalian genome and find that it contains the following sentence: 

“I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been - if you've been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you - you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing is ever going to happen again.”

Let’s say that this sentence, From C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, is found on the guinea pig genome. We’d expect to see on other rodent species quotes in the genome that resemble these works from Narnia (or, at least, the same author); for example porcupines are closely related to guinea pigs, so we wouldn’t be surprised to find something like “Awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.” (from The Magician’s Nephew) on a porcupine genotype. Perhaps on beavers we’d find texts from Lewis's The Great Divorce, whereas on rabbits we might find texts by Tolkien (because rabbits are not rodents but they are similar). We’d find nothing from Ayn Rand or Phillip Larkin in the rodent group, and likewise, if John Donne and George Herbert were found on marsupial genomes, then we’d find quite a genetic distance in our library between them and something by John Paul Sartre or Albert Camus, who might be sharks or swordfish. We’d find Dostoevsky and Tolstoy on closer branches than we’d find Evelyn Waugh and PG. Wodhouse. Dickens would be closer to Hardy than he would Burgess; bonobos would be closer to gorillas than they would wombats - the tree of both biology and literature form a compatible nested branching structure.

Evolution here looks like a library. And extending the library analogy to all biological life, we can read the genomes of most species that exist in a similar way to how we can discern patters in text sequences (it’s not quite the same, but the library analogy is to make it easier for you to visualise). That is, we can read the DNA of any 2 species (or as many as we choose) and plot the genetic relatedness and get exactly what you'd expect from common ancestry and a nested hierarchy within a tree of life.

And here the story goes deeper, because every literary sentence we could read on genes, whether it's from Hemingway, Homer or Hugo, would itself be subject to mutations within species, where we could map which lines come from which branch, and observe how they've evolved too. Take the line from Narnia again, which appears on a particular gene sequence on a particular guinea pig: 

“I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been - if you've been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you - you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing is ever going to happen again.” 

A few hundred or thousand generations down the line of breeding, we might find this: 

“You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you," said the Lion.” (From The Silver Chair) 

And we might have got there on a journey like this:

1) "You one who looks this book unless been quite as miserable as Susan and Lion"

5) "You would not looks this book unless been quite as calling as Susan and Lion"

10) "You would not looks this book unless I had as calling as Susan and Lion"

15) "You would not have this me unless I had as calling as said and Lion"

20) "You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you," said the Lion.”

That is, not only can we observe different authors, works and genres in our library of life by significant changes in the genome at the level of species, in which splits into more genetically distinct descendant populations isolates groups so they can no longer breed successfully, we can see the gradual accumulation of genetic differences along the way, as books by single authors evolve into new books, and eventually brand new authors, and brand new styles and genres. That's one of the profound things about both evolution and literature - there is so much distinction and at the same time so much similarity and relatedness and common ground.

As we saw in part 4 in the series, speciation begins when a population of interbreeding organisms divides into two populations of different species. At the point of speciation, there has been a recent divide from common ancestor (or really it's a population of ancestors), which means the two new species will have close to identical genes in the early stage. As time goes on, those organisms will begin to develop grater differences in their genomes. Returning to our literary library analogy, as the genomes evolve, they are a bit (although not entirely) like texts of novels being copied but with copying changes (mutations), where once a change has occurred, that becomes the new text from which future copies will be made (and so on). Let's take this passage from C.S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and imagine it is found on the genomes of a species of rodent that is about to divide into two sub-populations. 

“A powerful dragon crying its eyes out under the moon in a deserted valley is a sight and a sound hardly to be imagined.” 

Now consider two independent copies are made of that gene, with the following coping error in each, respectively:

Copy A (49) -“A powerful dragon crying its eyes out under the moon in a dewerted valley is a sight and a sound hardly to be imagined.”

Copy B  (2) - “A bowerful dragon crying its eyes out under the moon in a deserted valley is a sight and a sound hardly to be imagined.”

Copy A has the first copying error on letter number 49 in the sequence, and Copy B has the first copying error on letter number 2 in the sequence. Now observe when both Copy A and Copy B are copied a further time, and these are the results.

Copy A1 (49, 10) -“A powerful cragon crying its eyes out under the moon in a dewerted valley is a sight and a sound hardly to be imagined.”

Copy B1 (2, 15) - “A bowerful dragob crying its eyes out under the moon in a deserted valley is a sight and a sound hardly to be imagined.”

Copy A has a further copying error on letter 10 in the sequence, and Copy B has a further copying error on letter 15 in the sequence. Let's observe two further copies that emerge from each:

Copy A2 (49, 10, 54) -“A powerful cragon crying its eyes out under the moon in a dewertef valley is a sight and a sound hardly to be imagined.”

Copy B2 (2, 15, 20) - “A bowerful dragob cryihg its eyes out under the moon in a deserted valley is a sight and a sound hardly to be imagined.”

Copy A3 (49, 10, 54, 4) -“A poqerful cragon crying its eyes out under the moon in a dewertef valley is a sight and a sound hardly to be imagined.”

Copy B3 (2, 15, 20, 63) - “A bowerful dragob cryihg its eyes out under the moon in a deserted valley is s sight and a sound hardly to be imagined.”

A bit further down the reproductive line, you see a genome with the following sequence:

Copy ?? (49, 10, 54, 4, 17, 26) -“A poqerful cragon ctying its eues out under the moon in a dewertef valley is a sight and a sound hardly to be imagined.”

Just one look at the sequence shows beyond any reasonable doubt that this is the progeny of the A lineage and not the B lineage. You can see the sequence consists of past mutations and two new ones, making it obvious to which text (genome) it belongs. Imagine what the biological world is like, where we are analysing whole books of thousands of related species that have been copied over and over again, with small changes in text every time it is copied in a fertile sexual union. This is what we see in evolution's tree of life. Genomes that are similar, with chapters and paragraphs and sentences that have undergone mappable changes, telling a story of evolved genomes. This literary-like biological story doesn't just give us an observable trail of evidence for common ancestry, it also equips us with robust predictive power about the data and patterns we should expect to observe when we analyse the genomes in the biological sphere.

Be careful not to take analogies too far though. The library of evolution has been to convey that the entire tree of life can be read as though it is journey of evolution, where text-like information shows common descent, and a nested hierarchy of relatedness. Studying genetics confirms beyond any reasonable doubt that all species evolved from at least one early common ancestor, and that the further we observe along the evolutionary tree the greater the genomic similarities occur in exactly the places we would expect if evolution really happened.

Be wary, you will meet creationists who proclaim that these similarities in DNA are simply the result of God's 'common design' not descent with modification in separate species in a tree of life. But common design is not sufficient to explain the patterns of relatedness observed with the comprehensive studies of genetic relatedness, and how the chapters, paragraphs, sentences and copying changes are expressed in line with the ancestral pattern predicted in the tree of life.

Answers To The Proust Questionnaire

 

What is your idea of perfect happiness?
When God is happy with me

What is your most marked characteristic?
My height

What do you consider your greatest achievement?
The books I've written

What is your greatest fear?
The death of the people I love most

What historical figure do you most identify with?
C.S. Lewis

Which living person do you most admire?
Anyone who is the best in their field

Who are your heroes in real life?
Kind, generous-hearted pastoral folk. And people who have given their lives in battle to protect our freedoms

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
I asked my wife what is my most deplorable trait, and she says I don't have any. She's a great judge of character, so I'll settle for that. Haha! If I'm being less generous, I'd say my getting frustrated and uncharitable when I think people are wrong but won't budge on it or (in my view) yield to reason 

What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Arrogant foolishness with an unwillingness to learn

What is your favourite journey?
Our daily road to increased wisdom and knowledge

What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Social justice, and striving for equality

What talent would you most like to have?
I would like to be able to play musical instruments

Which word or phrases do you most overuse?
"Through the lens of"

What is your greatest regret?
Things I didn't do, that would have benefitted me later in life

What is your current state of mind?
Exhilarated, fulfilled and hopeful

If you could change one thing about your family, what would it be?
I wish my dad didn't have dementia

What is your most treasured possession?
Anything my wife has written to me or bought for me as a gift. The memory sticks with my life's writing on them are pretty treasured too

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
It would be living a lonely life without purpose and hope

Where would you like to live?
Primrose Hill

What is your favourite occupation?
Anything you can do that you love, and at the same time makes a big difference in people's lives

What is the quality you most like in a man?
A strong character who is secure in himself and loves the truth

What is the quality you most like in a woman?
Kind, gentle, strong, witty, intelligent and loves the truth

What is your motto?
I don't have one, but if I did it would be something like; Love the truth, and every other good quality falls into place

Women In Church Leadership - A Novel Idea

In the UK, most Christians I know (myself included) support women in leadership, and by extension, women preaching. However, I do have quite a few Christian friends who don’t support women in leadership, and they attend churches that do not permit women to deliver sermons. They tend to base this on their interpretation of St. Paul’s teaching on the subject (notably, 1 Timothy 2:12 - “I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man” and 1 Corinthians 14:34 - “Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says.”). But most Christians take those verses to be contextual admonitions directed at particular church cultures of the time, not blanket prohibitions of women’s roles in leadership to be religiously adhered to in perpetuity.

Certainly, the spirit of the Bible, and other verses, seem to indicate the acknowledgment and encouragement of the role of women in leadership. St. Paul, in Romans 16, speaks of Phoebe as a “deacon of the church”; Luke, in Acts 18:26, acknowledges Priscilla as a teacher; and in Acts 21, we learn that “Philip the evangelist had four unmarried daughters who prophesied.”. Moreover, great Old Testament women - like Rebecca, Leah, Deborah, Rahab, Esther, to name but a few - were given great authority and responsibility in furthering the Biblical story and enhancing God’s Kingdom.

Consequently, I think the correct Biblical interpretation is that it’s not just fine, but beneficial, to have women in leadership. But that said, those who disagree with me on this are probably just as confident that their interpretation is correct. And it has to be said, given debates like this one are long-standing, and given that the Biblical texts are too low-resolution for any of us to be certain what God wants for His church regarding women in leadership, there is no external metric to which we can assent to find out which group of Christians have got this one right.

My possibly novel idea
With this in mind, I have an idea that’s a bit off the wall, but is probably worth a moment’s consideration. Maybe we can’t know which option is right, but maybe God wants us to make a choice, and maybe God doesn’t mind all that much what we choose about women in leadership (as long as we are kind and conduct ourselves with goodness) because our subjective preference in this matter is a dignity He has bestowed upon us. In other words, as long as churches stick to the fundamental Christian tenets, maybe it’s fine to celebrate the diversity of church styles and denominations consistent with individual consumer preferences.

The church is broad and diverse; some people like to be monks, some like to be nuns, some people are Christian missionaries, some are business pioneers, some people prefer dancing in Pentecostal churches, some prefer quiet contemplative church services, and so on. Maybe it’s possible that that’s how God feels about our preference for leadership; for those men and women who prefer to be led by men, God is fine with a church that sets itself up with only male leaders; and for the rest, who value women in leadership, there are many churches for them too. 

Don’t get me wrong, if we had access to God’s perfect knowledge, and knew all the facts ourselves, there may be a definitive set of right answers about women in leadership that would make everything clear with that degree of hindsight. But given that we are imperfect humans, trying to do our best with limited information and our best efforts at scriptural interpretations, it may well be that God is perfectly fine with our a la carte model of individual preferences, where male leadership churches are fine for people who prefer that, and mixed leadership churches are fine for everyone else.