Joy In Suffering

As you may know, I might write a book on St. James’s verse about considering our sufferings ‘pure joy’, because one of the most challenging things to discern in a world full of suffering is why we should consider it ‘pure joy’ and the difficulty in doing so. Because if in all things God works for the good of those who love Him (Romans 8:28), then our suffering is a gift, especially in the long run, even when it’s prohibitively difficult at the time to see why. As someone who has been through immense suffering in the past 3 years, I believe I have become equipped with some of the understanding and experience to enable me to have this perspective, yet still always with so much more to learn, of course.

I think the main reason suffering doesn’t feel like joy or a gift is because at the time it is laden with many tangible costs and few tangible benefits. But that’s because with the right approach the costs are part of the process of dying of self to better things; the death of hubris ushers in the emergence of greater humility; the death of self-reliance gives rise to the emergence of deeper strength; the death of self-image gives rise to the emergence of Divine focus; the death of entitlement ushers in the emergence of deep gratitude; the death of fear gives rise to the emergence of stronger faith and more intense devotion, that sort of thing.

It’s one of the key parts of Jesus’ teaching regarding losing our life to find it (John 12:24-25), and denying ourselves by taking up our cross and following Him (Luke 9:23-24). It’s only through the gradual death to self that we find life, and it’s only through suffering that we begin to understand the necessity of the gradual death to self. 

 

On The Trinity

I haven’t read anything by the Christian philosopher and theologian Richard Swinburne, but I know he posited a famous defence for the Trinity on the grounds that with the three-person God, where God is perfectly loving, He needs to be triune so you have each person loving the others, and each pair jointly loving the third. The thinking goes that if God were just one person, He couldn’t be essentially loving unless He had someone to love - which would make love dependent on creation. And mutual love between two persons of God is good, but not the highest form of love, because the highest love requires two persons jointly loving a third in a self-giving, cooperative way. Consequently, a three person God is both the minimum needed (as per above) and the maximum (because anything additional is superfluous).

Now, I’m of the school that says God is so far beyond our comprehension that speculating about the precise nature of God as triune is a bit like …I don’t know….a chimpanzee speculating on the equations in quantum theory. But that’s ok, it’s fun to speculate, and we are loved by God and made in His image, so I’ll share some thoughts.

I do think it’s probably right that God must be a Trinity - three persons - because perfect love requires mutual love (at least two persons), and shared, cooperative love (at least three persons). And it’s probably compelling that those two types of love are also fundamental to the three most powerful loves in the world; marital love, parental love and love between friends.

But I also think we have to be smart enough to see that the Trinity as described in scripture is (like a lot of scripture) the most simplistic way that humans can get a limited sense of who God is and what He is like. In other words, we know that in describing God as three persons, one God, we mean that somehow He is tri-aspectual (three aspects of one God) and that the Trinity is God's way of revealing Himself in scripture in a way we can grasp - allowing us to understand aspects of His nature. Apart from what we can discern through scripture, through the Incarnation where the Word became flesh, and through our own relationship with Him through the Holy Spirit, we perhaps only understand God as tri-aspectual in the same way that a foetus tries to understand its mother - surrounded by her, sustained by her, hearing the rhythm of her heart, yet unable at this stage to comprehend the fullness of her being.

It is at that level that we can comprehend God as three distinct persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, where each is fully God, not a part or a third of God - and where they are distinct in relation, not in nature or power. Perhaps the most helpful way to think of this - in admittedly very limited human form - is that of a single music chord; it is made of three notes sounding at once, and each note is fully itself, fully part of the chord, yet the chord isn’t the chord without all three. There's unity, diversity, and shared essence - and that might be a little like how we can sense God as triune, and how His triune nature invites us to love Him even more deeply.

We might even glimpse something compelling in the way God describes us: as His friend (John 15:15), His bride (Isaiah 62:5), and His child (1 John 3:1). Perhaps these are more than metaphors - they may be the ideal descriptors to echo the mutual, self-giving love within the Trinity itself - a love so complete and overflowing that it gives rise to the three most powerful forms of love we know: friendship, covenantal marital love, and the bond of family. These aren’t just ways we relate to God - they’re reflections of how God, in His very being, relates within Himself and then with us.

 

The Philosophy of Miracles

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

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

Here is the first set:

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

Here is the second set:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Four Types of Relationship Problems

 

Concerning romantic relationships, I would say there are only four types of relationship problems, which I presented as taxonomic categories in my book The Divine Truths of Love. These categories can shift and overlap - they are: 

1)    Minor everyday issues: tiny disputes about domestic preferences, trivial behavioural irritations, things each beloved needs to work on, etc

2)    External life issues: stressors unrelated to the relationship itself (health, work, grief, living in extreme poverty, living in a war zone, etc) that indirectly erode relational satisfaction.

3)    Fundamental incompatibilities: mismatches in religious belief, values, physical attraction, wanting children, life goals, psychological or developmental wounds, etc, that may require dissolution if they can’t be managed or compromised.

4)    Bad beloveds: one or more partner is just not a good/mature/faithful/honest enough person to sustain a good relationship.

From an economic and rational-choice perspective, relationships can be modelled as systems of interdependent utility functions. Category 1 problems (minor everyday issues) represent low-cost inefficiencies that persist due to limited self-awareness or lack of proper attention and responsibility. On their own, these should never be the cause of breaking up. If all your problems are category 1 problems, then with more truthseeking and effort, your relationship is likely to be sustainable and healthy.

Category 2 problems (external life issues) act as negative shocks to the relationship’s system - they depress relational utility without necessarily reflecting intrinsic partner quality or compatibility. Jack and Jill may be compatible as a couple, but a big stress, crisis or trauma unrelated to the relationship itself can cause dissolution. However, many relationships not only survive these but go on to be stronger because of how the beloveds got through the situation together. Couples ill-equipped to deal with category 2 problems will likely find that cumulative transaction costs and emotional debt make optimisation nearly impossible.

Category 3 problems (fundamental incompatibilities) are usually a deal-breaker - and often should be - because they are akin to essential structural mismatches in alignment, where they cannot be mitigated or reconciled. And lastly, category 4 problems (bad beloveds) are usually insurmountable without radical change, because they not only naturally generate lots of category 1 and 3 problems, but bad beloveds constitute agents whose behaviour systematically destroys utility for their partner, necessitating that ‘fail fast’ exit rather than further investment is the dominant and prudent strategy.

I believe that a proper understanding of these categories provides a framework for evaluating relational investment, risk, and potential returns. I also believe that any unmarried, childless couple can work together to assess their relationship in the short-to-medium term, under the above heuristic, and have a judicious stab at whether to invest more in the relationship or dissolve it and (hopefully) part amicably.

The Preposterous Micro-Cult of Richard Carrier

 

Richard Carrier is at it again - this time abusing probability theory to use Aristotle’s existence in order to undermine Jesus’ existence. Carrier has built a small cult-like following on his absurd work centred around the historically ridiculous idea that Jesus never existed. And like all cult figures, he is supported only by the gullible few who cannot discern his squalid tactics and poor reasoning, he calls his critics (which is most people) cranks, insults those who point out his errors, and shores up his narcissistic ego by claiming the experts are deceivers or fools, and that his charlatanism is the right way forward. No, Carrier is a grifter of the worst kind (I’ve tackled him before - see here, here and here).

Yet again he’s written a stinker - an outrageous defence of Jesus’ so-called non-existence by being confused about probability theory, where his entire argument rests on a foundation of methodological errors, circular assumptions, pseudo-statistical theatrics, and an unrecognisable form of historiography. Let me go through his four most fundamental errors:

Error 1
His first amateurish absurdity is his invention of reference classes to predetermine the outcome. He begins by dividing ancient figures into two “reference classes” - mythologised superheroes, who rarely exist historically; and ordinary mundane people, who usually do. He immediately places Jesus in the first class, Aristotle in the second, and then declares - based on his own invented categories - that Jesus must start with a very low prior probability of existence. Even a sketchy understanding of Bayesian probability would show Carrier that this classification is circular - where he’s basically argued: Jesus is mythologised, therefore low prior; mythologised means low prior, therefore Jesus is mythologised. If he had a proper grasp of history, he’d know that historians do not use “mythological superhero” as a category, much less use these invented accounts to lower the prior probability that the underlying person existed. Carrier’s entire Bayesian edifice collapses if his arbitrary priors are replaced by historically grounded ones.

Error 2
Next he arbitrarily imputes likelihood ratios masquerading as mathematics. His article is filled with invented numbers: Aristotle’s writings are “100 times more likely” if he existed, an inscription is “1000 times more likely.”, student testimony is “10 times more likely.”, later historians are “5 times more likely.”, etc just like a cult leader spews out ridiculous claims and expects his acolytes to digest without critical evaluation. None of Carrier’s ratios are derived from data, statistical analysis, or historiographical practice. They are simply numbers Carrier makes up and plugs into equations to produce meaningless results. Carrier loves to sound clever to dupe his pliable readers, then insult or dismiss those outside of the gate as being ‘cranks’ if they see through his nonsense - and he gets very defensive when he fears he’s being exposed. But to see through him is to see quite clearly that his clever-sounding writing is mostly guff – absolute guff. His error 2 violates basic Bayesian methodology for at least three reasons: 1) no empirical calibration of likelihoods; 2) his numbers have no grounding in actual frequencies, error rates, or comparative studies, and 3) the evidence is not independent. Carrier multiplies dependent evidences as if they were independent, deceptively inflating the totals. I don’t know if he understands that small, uncertain datasets cannot sustain precise Bayesian ratios - but if he does, then he’s conning his readers, and if he doesn’t, then he needs to learn by reading more. If he did so, and reasoned honestly and competently, he wouldn’t assign arbitrary values that produce a desired outcome of Jesus’ non-existence, nor does he compare incomparable social strata.

Error 3
Carrier also artificially reduces all early Jesus evidence to zero by redefining everything as dependent, mythical, or derivative, including even some of the most historically testified evidence we have, like that of St. Paul, who is one of the earliest and most independent sources, and wrote within twenty years of Jesus’s death, mentions meeting James the brother of Jesus, refers to Jesus’s execution, and knows of Jesus’s teachings; like that of Josephus, even though the scholarly consensus across atheist, Jewish, and Christian historians holds that the core reference to Jesus is authentic; and like the other gospels, attempting to collapse all of them into a single fictional source, even though they demonstrably have different content, interests, and theology. For more on this type of error, see my blog post The Resurrection and Bayesian Reasoning here.

Error 4
Carrier also misuses Bayesian requirements for independence. He multiplies likelihoods - 100 × 1000 × 10 × 10 × 5 × 2 - as if each piece of Aristotle’s evidence were independent when they are all connected to the same Peripatetic tradition, preserved by the same Hellenistic libraries, and cross-quoted within the same literary networks. Like error 2, this violates the independence requirement of Bayes’ theorem. What makes it more preposterous is how, to suit his own agenda, he does the opposite in treating every Christ tradition as though it is entirely dependent on Mark, even when multiple layers of tradition clearly exist. His Bayesian model is structurally distorted. Carrier claims Christ’s miracle stories lower the prior probability of His existence. But even if you don’t believe in the miracles, the idea that miraculous attribution lowers the probability of the existence of the individual blatantly reverses standard historiographic logic - as anyone who has heard of Alexander, Pythagoras, Augustus or Apollonius would tell you. Moreover, founders of religious movements in antiquity who attract the kind of religious material Jesus attracted almost always did exist - which is another point that reverses Carrier’s logic. The prior probability of Jesus’s existence is high, not low - and Carrier’s model was rigged from the start in order for him to attempt to woo his followers into submission to his mistaken logic.

No, the truth is, Carrier is an amateur grifter posing as a confident, smart authority figure - and only the kind of people who typically latch on to charlatans like him are those likely not to see through him. In fact, once you condition on ‘already impressed by Carrier,’ the posterior for ‘sees through the act’ drops to about the same level as a p-value in bad psychology research, heh heh. 😊

When Carrier assigns probabilities, his prior is usually whatever number first wandered into his Bayesian dreamscape. His result in this article is both mathematically and historically meaningless. And this, I’m afraid, is what all charlatans, cranks and cult gurus do - they draw vulnerable, easily-swayed people in by constructing a distorted narrative to output the answer they already believe, and wish to convince cult shoppers to purchase what he’s selling (yes, he continually calls for financial donations too).

Betraying The Rules Of Truth & Reason

 

Many dodgy belief systems are based on accepting propositions that are so obviously not true or factual, it really is remarkable to me how and why people assent to such beliefs. What I find most remarkable (and disturbing) is how so many people who believe these things appear to have zero chance of budging from their folly, or exhibiting even a flicker of curiosity towards the opposing (and truthful) propositions. It's one of the strangest things about human beings, but many have become inured to it by its ability to become so commonplace.

The main reason it's so utterly strange is because it wantonly betrays what I call the rules of truth and reason - the rules that most humans ordinarily act as though they value most of the time. You have to think of the rules of truth and reason as being a bit like a language game to which we all know the rules. The reason the world of beliefs has become so muddied is quite a bit to do with the fact that most humans are not willing to pay the full costs of truthseeking, but perhaps even more to do with the fact that language has been so readily transposed and distorted. 

Think of the rules of truth and reason as being a bit like a game of snooker. The rules of snooker include procedures about how and when you should take your shots - like potting a red and then a colour, like how each colour is worth a different number of points, like how only one player can be playing at the table on any given shot, and so forth. If you depart from these rules, then you are no longer playing snooker. If you play by those rules, but cheat when your opponent isn't looking, you are no longer playing a fair game.

The same applies to the rules of truth and reason - they are fairly well fixed in a way that makes language meaningful, in a way that makes arguments logical, and in a way that makes the rational and the empirical essential tools for discovery - but they are only the explicit ones. There are implicit rules that are more like obligations - like the obligation to be open to learning from more informed sources, like the obligation to consent to rational persuasion, like the obligation to change your mind when the counter-arguments are compelling, and like the obligation to embrace facts and truths over convenient and expedient falsehoods. These are duties and responsibilities that have been widely compromised by the many who attempt to create the illusion that they are playing by the same language game, but are really not.

The Most Shocking Changes Your Old Self Wouldn't Have Believed

 

Imagine if you were a child of the 1970s or 80s in Britain, and you went into a coma, and then awoke in 2025. I’m sure lots would startle you about how things have changed, especially technologically. But I doubt there’d be much that would shock you more than the following four things: 

1)     The absurd phenomenon of men competing in women’s sports, using women’s toilets, and being incarcerated in women’s prisons, where a significant proportion of the nation’s population is actively encouraging it, and witch hunting those who actually stand up for real women’s rights and oppose it. 😠

2)     That so many people have become so insane and hysterical about climate change and alarmist environmentalism, and can’t see through the scam artists at the top who are pushing this for their own ideological and financial agenda. 😠

3)     The severe undermining of robust debate and free speech in mainstream institutions, but especially in universities. Universities, once bastions of learning, free enquiry and spirited debate, are now havens of woke, supine, censorious cancel culture, almost unrecognisable from the institutions of academic excellence that once defined them.  😠

4)     Or on a lighter note, that the writer of the blog you're currently reading has been churning out posts of such scintillating quality, unflagging wit and unbroken consistency for so many years - and yet still walks among the unfamous, with no viral YouTube channel to his name. 😀

Calling In The Armey

 

I often lament how large the state has become in the UK, in terms of public services sub-optimally performing because they have become too bloated (as per Gammon’s Law, diseconomies of scale, etc). But in my book Benevolent Libertarianism, I also devote some time to considering the trade-off between money put into public services and money spent in private enterprise. I explore the matter of a healthy ratio of public and private spending in GDP, and ask if most of the spending was on private goods and services and we just had a small state - only functional for defence, law, health, social services, police, welfare, roads, and a few other light regulatory things - would all the money spent in the private sector be money well spent, or would it just mean we buy lots more consumerist stuff we don’t really need?

Last time I looked, total UK government spending was about 45% of GDP, which is large. If you tend to dip into economics, you’ve probably heard of the Armey Curve - an inverted U-shaped relationship where, as the public share of GDP rises from a tiny level, the economy often benefits (via public goods, infrastructure, human capital, etc), but beyond some threshold additional public spending tends to deliver diminishing or negative returns to growth. There has been much debate over the decades about the optimal percentage, but there’s a general consensus that 45% is way too high - although the optimal figure is also contingent on exactly what the money is being spent on. If the UK government was spending 45% of GDP primarily on defence, law, health, social services, police, welfare, roads and a few other light regulatory things, and all those sectors were thriving, it would be a different proposition to the one we are currently faced with; a bloated state that’s out of control with its spending, and the sectors performing poorly (in some cases dreadfully).

A smaller state would shift spending towards greater private consumption and private provision of things the state used to supply, but in many cases with better value for money. But it isn’t self-evident what the optimal trade-off is, because it’s a hugely complex, variable and intractable set of considerations. When private spending is allocative and productive, it increases productive capacity and long-run welfare. But when it’s consumerism with low social return, like unnecessary marketing-driven upgrades, or over-consumption of low-value goods we don’t really need, then shifting public money to private consumption can reduce social welfare if it replaces productive public services.

The big challenge is twofold. Firstly, no single “optimal” ratio exists, because range and composition matter more. And secondly, if we shrink the state to a “minimal” model, private substitutes will emerge - but unless private markets and institutions can fully and equitably fill the gaps, there will be a different kind of deterioration in social cohesion.

I have a chapter in Benevolent Libertarianism devoted to striking this balance. But, alas, there is very little appetite in most developed countries to even acknowledge this problem, let alone attempt to solve it. The Armey Curve should serve as a continual reminder that public spending has a positive impact on the economy up to a certain optimal threshold, after which it has a detrimental, negative effect. But politically, it’s far easier to expand spending than to rein it in, because often the benefits are visible and immediate while the costs are diffuse and long-term - and the general public is frequently seduced by low-hanging fruit and offers of so-called ‘free lunches’.

Miracles Are Everywhere

 

Let’s define a miracle as an event that requires action from God because it defies the natural laws or scientific explanation within His creation. One of the best pieces of evidence for the truth of Christianity is the sheer number of miracles experienced in the world. But unbelievers aren’t convinced, largely because they simply have no experience of miracles, and even when they do, they reject them as dubious if they think they cannot explain them.

Yet once you start to walk among Christians, you’ll see that there are miracles everywhere. Most Christians you meet have either experienced miracles themselves (and many, multiple miracles) or they know other Christians who’ve experienced them. Even if you just take miraculous healings that defy modern science, most Christians have either experienced some kind of miraculous healing (I have experienced two myself, and witnessed several others) or know other Christians who have. And when you consider that there are over 2 billion Christians in the world, that is a stupendous weight of evidence for the miraculous, with millions, perhaps even billions, of miracles experienced.

Every objection to the above - and they are frequently offered - simply collapses under honest examination. To the “But other religions also claim miracles” objection, I say, these almost never happen, and when they do, we already know that not all supernatural activity is divine. The Bible itself warns that supernatural signs can arise from sources opposed to God (as per Matthew 24:24 and 2 Thessalonians 2:9). Moreover, the scale and frequency of reports among Christians is so much overwhelmingly higher than the false religions, it is like measuring the size of an ocean compared to the size of a few small puddles.

The other objection I hear frequently is “But miracles could all be coincidences or placebo effects” - to which I say, most of these miracles go far beyond what placebos or coincidences could explain, especially when you factor in the timing of prayer and the miraculous results thereafter. I’ve seen before my eyes blind people given their sight back, deformed limbs regenerate, a lady confined to a wheelchair standing up and walking - and I’ve experienced two miraculous healings in my own body too. These are not coincidences or placebos.

Some people merely brush all this off with the cliched “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” But this is exactly what most Christians have experienced; we are offering extraordinary testimony of extraordinary events.

Finally, many sceptics protest with the classic “If miracles are real, why doesn’t God heal everyone?” - to which I say, He has all sorts of complex reasons that we cannot possibly understand. But, even given that God is selective in His outward demonstrations of the miraculous, it still doesn’t undermine the abundant stacks of evidence when the miraculous does occur, just as rare diamonds don’t cease to exist simply because they are not found in every handful of sand.

No, the upshot is, there is an abundant existence of miracles in the world from Christian experience and testimony, and the existence of those miracles is one of the strongest arguments there is for the truth of Christianity. In fact, it strikes me as strange that Christians don’t present the argument for miracles as one of their primary apologetics, as there are not many stronger arguments for Christianity within the domain of everyday, accessible, lived experience.

Reflecting On Celestial Light

 

I was talking with a friend the other night over a few drinks, and Wordsworth came up. Especially this:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day.
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
William Wordsworth

Those are some of my favourite lines from William Wordsworth’s great Immortality Ode, in which he is reflecting on a deep, emotional change in how he perceives the world around him. He describes how, in his youth, nature appeared magical and divine - the “meadow, grove, and stream” seemed “apparelled in celestial light.” - which is one of the great expressions of seeing spiritual or heavenly beauty in nature. Then he turns to adulthood and laments that he no longer sees nature with that same spiritual glow or intensity. The line “The things which I have seen I now can see no more” expresses a profound sense of loss, as he can no longer access the deep, instinctive joy and awe he felt as a child.

Wordsworth is expressing a tragic, more general reflection; that children are closer to the divine because of their sense of deep, untainted curiosity and wonder (wisdom that’s reflected in Christ’s guidance in Matthew 18:3) - but as we age, that connection weakens - "Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy", he puts it. Yet Wordsworth is hopeful that although the childlike sense of transcendence may fade, it is never entirely lost, and can be rekindled through the pursuance of the sacred beauty of existence, and a sense of wonder for our place in it.

I’ve been blessed to live in a constant state of awe and wonder, yearning for more and more of God in my life. But I’ve also undergone, and am still undergoing, some intense life suffering that has not yet abated. Yet despite this, I’m thankful to say that the awe and wonder are almost always powerful enough to keep my life perspective “apparelled in celestial light.” God, through His love and grace, endows me with enough memory and imagination to frequently reconnect to the "intimations" of immortality, even when suffering abounds. Sometimes my mind drifts back to innocent joys of childhood as I reflect on the enchantment of early memory with fondness. Yet equally, each year of life is at least better than the last, in terms of increased spiritual maturity, wisdom and a deeper relationship with God. So the adult awareness of this growth becomes a source of deeper insight, reflection, understanding and immense gratitude - which taps into St. James’s wisdom to ‘consider it pure joy whenever you face trials of many kinds.’

For me, the ‘pure joy’ invitation is one of the hardest callings, but it’s so hard only because it’s so potentially transformative. It’s the pathway to a more enriching power of experience, finding a kind of compensation and ultimate contentment in the maturity of thought and a deeper appreciation for the whole journey, good and bad. It’s perhaps the quietest triumph, in that it reflects Christ’s desire to experience life as we experience it, so that we can experience reality as He experiences it, and have that intimacy sustained by the Holy Spirit, from Whom we draw continual strength through the eternal truths glimpsed in our earthly life.

Courageously Seek Inside For The Truth

 

A combination of psychological literature and an honest appraisal of our inner self make it pretty clear that we don’t easily think things through with careful consideration, using rigorous logical and empirical analysis as tools to arrive at our views and then respond with the appropriate behaviour – we actually become driven by our emotional needs and utilitarian enticements in establishing what we want to believe, and then we employ the confirmation bias in looking to justify those beliefs. That is, we put the cart of incentives before the horse of wisdom and the reins of reason, when it should be the other way around.

That doesn’t mean this method is always wrong; emotions and will are a great signpost towards many profound discovered truths and artistic expressions, and should not be gainsaid or trivialised complacently. But with considerations involving complex considerations, dynamical reasoning and important facts, then this cart-before-the-horse tendency is a malady on the human condition.  

In a world which seems to have gone a bit mad, and is overrun with climate fundies, the triggered wokerati, snowflakes, extreme political ideologues (both left and right), religious crackpots, conspiracy theorists and journalistic snake oil salespeople, here’s what you should do to check if you’re on the right side of the empirical propositions in question. Make a list of the political, religious, socio-cultural, economic and scientific beliefs that are important to you, and rank them regarding how certain you feel about your position on them. Then take all the ones you feel less certain about, and even have inner doubts about (don’t worry, you’ll know which ones they are - your gut will tell you and it won’t lie to you).

And then take each one and search yourself inwardly, with as much honesty as you can summon, to distil how these beliefs make you feel. What do those views do to you when no one is looking; do they make you feel strong or weak, proud or ashamed, comfortable or uncomfortable, confident or doubtful – this authenticity is what you need to be measuring. You’ll ask yourself; am I really giving this my best shot? Have I really got a good grasp of the situation? Am I being overly-simplistic? Have I given this the proper investigation or just been too easily convinced by someone else? And if the latter, what do I think of those people – do I really trust them, and do I think their motives are good?

There’s not a person who can fail to benefit from this examination, and it’s just about certain that if you do this with a passion for knowing the truth, and are prepared for the full consequences of the adventure and journey on which you’ll find yourself, you will be enriched. 

Non-Random Thoughts On Creativity And Untapped Success

 

Most of the greatest artistic achievements in life - songwriting, non-fiction prose, poetry, painting, design - succeed not by producing grandiose, complex outputs (although there are many exceptions, which are obviously impressive), but by capturing simplicities that have previously remained untapped.

You can see this wide across the artistic landscape - from George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, which consists of clear, direct writing that changed how people think about clarity itself, to C.S. Lewis’s brilliant Christian writings, to classic songs like Let It Be and Hallelujah, which are musically simple, lyrically straightforward, yet profoundly moving.

Brilliant but simple creativity is there awaiting discovery, and when it is produced in writing, music or other art forms, it resonates because it expresses something we all recognise but didn’t personally articulate, as we were waiting for someone else to notice it. Creativity at its finest often lies in noticing and expressing what’s already there but unseen - in distilling something vast into something simple, essential, and resonant.

And it also reminds me of the wisdom about good listening and paying attention, hearing not just what is said, but unsaid, because what is unsaid is often equally important.

Why The Poor Should Be Thankful To The Rich

 

If you’ve been paying attention in the past 150 years, you’ll know that as a ratio of total beliefs to correct ones, the left gets most things wrong when it comes to economics, capitalism, socialism, labour, wealth, inequality, and the like. To see why, let’s construct a caricature of a leftist - an extreme one who believes all the false things they are told, and campaigns for a so-called fairer world. Let’s call him Torquil. Torquil believes the system is grossly unfair; that the workers are producing all the wealth for the rich capitalists; that the poorest people in the UK are poor because they have been unjustly disadvantaged; that if we had complete equality of opportunity then almost everyone would do about as well as each other; that there is a ‘fair’ hourly wage based on how hard people work and how much we symbolically value those roles; and so on. Every single one of those propositions is almost entirely wrong - and where it is fractionally right, it is nearly always the fault of political interference.

The reality is this: except for the aforementioned political interference, nearly all jobs make important contributions to society - and in accordance with market power, bargaining, sensible regulation, and alongside fluid information, each individual is paid according to their marginal product (that is, for the value they create) in a supply and demand economy. Except for illegal or unsavoury activity, the money you have demonstrates how much productivity has been created. Low income individuals are on low incomes due to lower productivity, which is usually due to lack of useful skills or knowledge, or a lack of motivation, ingenuity and responsibility. And there is an inequality of talent, effort, good choices, industriousness, luck, ambition, intelligence, creativity, conscientiousness, health, positive influences, and good life circumstances.

In a nutshell, the economic right is largely correct about these matters, and the economic left is largely incorrect.

No worker can do what they do on their own - they rely on the ingenuity, risk and investment of the company owners, and the teams around them. And the more productive the worker, the harder it is to replace them - which means at an individual level each one of them is more valuable than each individual worker they employ. If, for example, a chief executive can make his 2500 employees just 0.5% more productive, he is 12.5 times as productive as a single employee. You might find this statement uncomfortable (though it is true), but in most cases in the labour market, if someone is on a low hourly income they are either unwilling to work hard enough to earn more (sometimes for good reason), unable to earn more, or at the start or end of their career, where they will go on to earn more, or used to earn more but are now winding down. There are practically zero cases where individuals wholly unjustly earn a low hourly income. There are one or two exceptions - but the rule of thumb is that people are paid according to their marginal product, and most people in the private sector (and indirectly, the public sector too) earn their marginal product because of those richer than them making capital investments.

And the rich pay for the majority of the public services too, and the lowest quintile pay for a small fraction of them. Last time I checked, the top 1% of earners in the UK paid a whopping 28% of all income tax; the top 10% paid 60% of all income tax; and the top 50% paid about 90% of all income tax. It’s also true that those on low incomes contribute less in absolute terms, but proportionally more of their income, as the poorest 20% pay about 38–48% of their income in taxes. But that is more to do with ratios and arithmetic scaling than unfairness. And any sociological focus on data, causes, and impacts would show that crime rates are higher in poorer areas, the poor require more public services in health, education, housing, social services and welfare, have lower civic participation, and so forth.

Let me be crystal clear, I am not making any accusations here or looking to blame anyone for being poor or on a low income - there are countless circumstances at play. This post is simply to show the utter absurdity of this constant narrative by the left that the poor should be aggrieved at the rich, or feel hard done by them. It’s almost the opposite of the truth. Modern prosperity depends on both entrepreneurs who take risks and workers who provide the effort and skill to make those risks pay off, sure. But the ratio of wealth creation, productivity, and increased living standards falls so heavily in favour of the rich’s influence, that the poor, far from resenting them, should be thanking them in recognition that much of modern prosperity - the jobs, technology, and material comfort we enjoy - exists because of their innovation and risk-taking.

Cosmic Open-Endedness

 

When we consider mathematical patterns describing our cosmos, it is worth exploring the question; is the cosmos mathematically open-ended - that is, does it resist compression into a finite description? This can be a misleading question because - assuming the cosmos is spatially finite - how can it be both open-ended and finite? But there’s a subtle yet important thing to grasp, because 'open-ended' should not evoke a picture of the physical cosmos stretching into the far horizons of infinity, like a cave that just seems to get bigger and deeper the more we enter it (although analogically that seems to be somewhat true of our observable cosmos too through a scientific lens). No, it is a mathematical term about whether or not the cosmos has patterns that can stretch to infinity (stress; patterns, not physical properties), and can be finitely characterisable. The answer is, we don’t know whether or not the cosmos has patterns that can stretch to infinity, but we do know that if they follow rules expressible by a finite description, then the system would count as “closed” in the algorithmic sense.

If we look at a pattern, we may try to extend it to infinity based on its observed order; if the extension is fully predictable and can be described by a finite algorithm, then in that sense the cosmos could be considered algorithmically “closed” - though this would still leave us far short of complete knowledge, of course. It is a subtle concept to grasp: that a pattern extending indefinitely can sometimes allow for a finite description.

However, there is a practical problem that likely prevents a definitive theory of such closure. When searching for patterns in the cosmos, there is no guarantee how far a pattern reliably extends before it is overtaken by another, more complex pattern. Perhaps the pattern we have inferred only applies for a limited range, then shifts according to some higher-level rule. Even if we identify this higher-level rule, it may itself be limited, replaced in turn by yet another overarching pattern. With this potential succession of pattern changes, the cosmos reveals itself as a tapestry of staggering mathematical depth and intricacy, where patterns layer upon patterns in a hierarchy of ever-expanding complexity.

But it’s even deeper than that because, given previous writings on the nature of mathematics and how the cosmos unfolds as a monument to mathematical majesty (see my side bar), the physical creation is, to all intents and purposes, effectively mathematically “open-ended,” because at best our efforts can yield only local, provisional theories, where each is but a fleeting glimpse into the infinite web of mathematical structure that underlies all of physical reality.

Let me explain it another way, for clarification. Consider that every time our "window" on the cosmic patterns increases we find that we require a new or more complex algorithm to describe the broader patterns; in effect, the pattern never stabilises into something describable by a single final, comprehensive algorithm. By the way, this is another reason why I argue in my paper on free will and determinism that determinism and indeterminism are not binary opposites, but part of a spectrum.

As our window into the cosmos gradually expands, the stock of short algorithms would eventually be exhausted, forcing algorithmic descriptions to grow ever longer and more intricate - thereby surpassing human comprehension and reaching a level of complexity that can only be accounted for by the cosmic intelligence underlying mathematics itself. And here we are talking about God - which begs the question: which kind of cosmos would the God of the Bible be most likely to create? Naturally, we can only speculate, but here’s a possible way to do so.

If God created the cosmos as “closed”, He could have created the mathematical engine with fundamental laws that are simple, consistent, and finite in description - a cosmos where patterns can, in principle, be fully captured by finite algorithms. This would be elegant and potentially intelligible - and may be tailored to God’s creative dispensation of exhibiting a cosmos with order and purpose in a background of mathematical wash.

If God created the cosmos as “open-ended”, He could have designed the cosmos to be infinitely rich, with layers of patterns that continually evolve, so that the full scope of cosmic mathematics is never exhaustively describable. This would reflect a depth of creative freedom, leaving room for unpredictability, novelty, and ongoing discovery - and may be tailored to God’s creative dispensation of exhibiting a cosmos with mystery and adventure.

In my view, neither fully satisfies - which may well be why, from our observations, God’s creation appears to deliberately combines both - exhibiting a finite set of fundamental laws (closed at a base level) that give rise to an emergent, open-ended complexity that stretches into a mystery that can only be fully captured by Omniscience Himself.

How We Made a Nation Too Fragile to Cope

 

You’ve probably noticed it’s hard to state tough and unpleasant truths without sounding unsympathetic; but that is quite strange when you think about it - for it’s quite easy to be sympathetic to genuine cases of x but also speak frankly about false claims or instances of x that cause mass harm (see my blog post here for further commentary on this phenomenon).   

Last week, I mentioned a horrible problem to solve, as we hear that Britain is sliding 'into economic crisis' over our £85bn sickness bill. I’ve touched on what I think are some of the problems and solutions in a previous blog post (see here). And I take absolutely zero pleasure in saying that I’ve been warning about this danger for years - especially how we’ve coddled young minds in a way that’s left many of them ill-equipped to face life head on, much less pursue the adventure that life offers all who pursue her courageously and truthfully. And this plight is especially bad for weak young men, because there is nothing good at all about being a weak man (either for men or women). And let me remind you, being strong here doesn’t mean aggressive, excessively dominant, or hard - it means the strength to endure, to be brave, to take responsibility, to be vulnerable, secure, and grounded.

What underlies the UK’s rise in sickness-related economic inactivity, increased anxiety, and a lack of strength, perspective, resilience and responsibility is a crisis that will be very hard to peel back. Hard, but absolutely necessary, as we simply cannot go on like this. The UK has been beset by a culture of dependency and avoidance - where personal responsibility and resilience have been eroded by a system that over-pathologises normal life struggles, and tells too many people they are sick or hopeless when they are really struggling to function adequately or simply unmotivated (the type 1 and type 2 error problem I discussed in the blog linked above).

Everyone knows the positive effects of our becoming more aware and accommodating of illness and mental health (reducing stigma, encouraging people to seek help, increasing understanding, etc). But I think few can deny now that in the past decade and a half the pendulum has swung too far toward medicalising ordinary life challenges, lowering expectations of resilience and responsibility, creating a culture of dependency and over-reliance on the state, and in some cases even producing systemic incentives against work.

Alas, I actually doubt whether there is an easily manageable solution to this - we’ve let things get too out of hand - and there are certain impediments to reversal. One of which is that the people who superficially find advantage from this dependency culture reap most of the benefits while the rest shoulder most of the costs (although the ‘benefits’ enjoyed by the former group are, of course, a poisoned chalice). Second is that the politicians, media and institutions have deliberately orchestrated this to secure compliance and control, and feather their own nests, so it’s unlikely that they will willingly unwind it or champion virtues that undermine it, for fear of compromising their own careers, and of a backlash from the wokerati.

The task of restoring shared responsibility and purpose, while balancing it with compassion and expectation, is hard to achieve at the best of times. But given that the culture has shifted so deeply, it feels prohibitively difficult. But not impossible, because, as with most things, I think the erosion of personal responsibility, resilience, virtue and a more strongly integrated shared moral framework coincides with the decline of Christianity in this country. And plenty of great writers, many before most of us were born, warned societies that a lack of Christianity means the decline of a narrative of meaning, moral duty, and transcendent purpose. It’s one of the many ways in which the decline of Christianity has left a vacuum that secular institutions haven’t filled well.

Everything At Once

 

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

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

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

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

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

Why God Likes Science & Capitalism

Suppose you're sent off to another universe in a super cosmos-travel machine and you land on the first planet you find with evolved life. The most intelligent species (which closely resemble humans) has evolved a belief in a god they call Z as their main religion, sustained over thousands of years, with hundreds of other religions that have come and gone over the centuries. You look at their recent history and find that for 199,800 of the previous 200,000 years their progression has been slow and steady with mostly subsistence level living, high infant morality, widespread poverty, where the pattern has been very slow steps up a very gentle slope. Then in their last 200 years they fused science and capitalism with industry, improved travel, population increase and more widespread communication, and suddenly those very slow steps up a very gentle slope became very fast steps up a very steep slope of progression. In fairly quick time they saw the diminution of subsistence level living, high infant morality and widespread poverty being replaced with better health, wealth and prosperity. On seeing this you might be inclined to think that their religious belief has at least in some part been inadequate to the task of lifting people into genuine progression.

With that in mind I'll give you some empirically verified evidence of how the world has gone for human beings on earth in the past 200,000 years. For the past 199,800 of those 200,000 years we had low global populations, and humans lived in meagre conditions, with lots of primitivism, low life expectancy and frequent infant mortality. People's earnings stayed around the subsistence levels (save for a tiny minority of aristocracy and ruling classes), and despite our being religious or worshipfully inclined for most of that time, our beliefs had no real impact on human beings at a scientific or economic level. Yes it is true that great works were produced by some great religious minds - but compared with everyone who ever lived they amount to a tiny minority. And while it is true to say that fabulous cathedrals and temples were built in reverence to God - it is equally true that around those great buildings most people were still barely subsisting - and nothing built or designed or written from worshipful inclinations changed that with any real significance.

The point being, Christian belief is based on supernatural and metaphysical truths, and truthful beliefs are extremely valuable to individuals and communities at a devotional and communal level, but it would be false to say that in the past few hundred thousand years religious belief had any significant impact on people's health, wealth and material standard of living, or on their economic and scientific development, when compared with the effect that science and capitalism had, because it didn't. The argument that some great scientific innovators and pioneers were religious won't help here, because it still fails to account for their relative scarcity, or for the thousands of years that preceded them where not much progress was being made.

So, despite the evolution of religious belief and moral ideas, for the past 199,800 of the aforementioned 200,000 years human progression moved at a snail's pace. Then a couple of hundred years ago something changed. People started to become more scientific, more empirically minded, richer, and populations began to increase more rapidly (it's still going on).  It was primarily science and capitalism that caused this sudden cheetah-like sprint of progression. This science and capitalist-based progression can be explained by a simple rule of thumb - people innovate, improve and provide answers to problems - and the more people, the more innovation, improvements and problems solved.  The more ideas and the more people to share those ideas with, the more humans prosper, and the quicker they do so.

Now let's be clear; science and capitalism haven't created a materialist utopia (far from it), nor a panacea against moral ills, and they are not without their negative spillover effects - but their prominence has seen an exponentiation effect that has brought more progression in the past 200 years than in the previous 198,800 years. In those 200 years, earnings, health, wealth, knowledge, scientific and technological capacity, and overall well-being has improved at an astronomical level not seen in any period of time that predated it.

Failure to recognise this puts one in a potentially knotty situation if one is a theist, because purely on the record of human health, wealth, standard of living, economic development, technological and industrial progress, it cannot be denied that the 200 years when science and capitalism have been most prominent have provided a much better record for humans than the thousands of years prior to that when religious belief was most prominent.

This does not, of course, mean that the progress science and capitalism have provided are the only kind of progression available to us - for it would be impertinent to measure human progression in terms of science and capitalism without mentioning the importance of Christianity in the areas of life into which science and capitalism make no real inroads. It stands to reason that the way Christianity enriches us is both locked into the material tenets of life, but also very much locked into metaphysical tenets too.

If things like science and capitalism show themselves to be good vehicles for human progression, or beneficial tools for lifting us out of poverty, curing diseases, feeding the impoverished, communicating globally, and generally enhancing our knowledge of the world, then they are not at odds with faith, and can work alongside Christianity so long as they enacted with a Christ-centred heart. And that's why if God is a God who values the kind of human progression with which we can lift people out of poverty, cure diseases, feed the impoverished, and generally enhance our knowledge of the world, then it seems to me that God must like science and capitalism at its best, as history has shown them to be the two best vehicles to achieve those things.