On The Fine-Tuning Argument

Regular readers might be shocked to learn that out of 1500+ articles on various platforms, I’ve never devoted a single blog post to the fine-tuning argument. I’d say my two principal reasons for this are as follows:

1) My primary issue with the standard model was stated in the 2012 blog post Why Intelligent Design Fails As A Theory as follows: 

“We say the universe looks fine-tuned because our conceptualisation of fine-tuning has been attributed to the patterns we observe in nature. But don't forget concepts of fine-tuning didn't begin as cosmological observations; they began with concepts related to the adjustment of parameter models within engineering, and the electromagnetic spectrum, with low-end frequencies of things like radio waves, and the high-end frequencies of gamma rays. Fine-tuning is a human conception, and to call the universe fine-tuned for life is rather like claiming that our legs are designed for trousers because they fit in so well.” 

2) I have my own variation on the fine-tuning model, which takes a more expansive interpretation of God’s creation, as outlined in my book The Genius of the Invisible God (and as seen in blog posts like The Mathematical Bias Theory: Why There ‘IS’ a God – in 20 Steps 

But I want to write an article now, because fine-tuning arguments for God are interesting (and ultimately compelling at the deepest level, as per my number 2 above), and they have gained lots of popularity with the rise of online blogging and podcasts – it’s just that so many misunderstandings are uttered about them (from both sides) that you’ll do well to stumble upon a genuinely enlightening conversation about them.

So, let me try to produce something that proves to be worth my while writing, and (hopefully) worth your while reading.

The first thing to say, about point 1 is that, obviously just because fine-tuning is a human conception it doesn’t mean it’s not true. Every description of reality is filtered through human concepts; we have no other means of apprehending the world. The challenge has always been to determine which ones illuminate reality and which merely project our assumptions onto it.

And there are really two distinctions at play here:

1) Conceptual distinction: Fine-tuning is a human-imposed category and may not describe reality itself. 

2) Anthropic objection: We observe a life-permitting universe because only in such a universe could observers exist. To use an analogy, a creature can only awaken in a house compatible with its existence, but it does not follow that the house was built for that creature. Similarly, observers can only exist in universes compatible with their existence. Having established that, we are ready to move forward. 

How fine tuned does the universe appear to be?
It’s true that the universe appears to be exquisitely fine-tuned. The parameters that govern the laws of physics are set within an extraordinarily narrow band, enabling the existence of complex structures. Take the cosmological constant, which dictates the rate of the universe’s expansion: if it were slightly stronger, the universe would have torn itself apart almost instantly. Conversely, if it were just a bit weaker, it would have collapsed back in on itself before any meaningful structures could emerge.

The potential range for the cosmological constant, based on our understanding of physics, is immense. Yet, for complexity to arise, it must fall within a minuscule fraction of that range - approximately one part in 10^120, as the argument goes. This figure purports to represent how finely balanced the value must be within its possible range for a universe capable of forming complex structures. The odds of the cosmological constant being fine-tuned to 10^120  are so staggeringly small that it's difficult to comprehend. But if you imagine the entire observable universe filled with grains of sand, with each grain representing a possible value for the cosmological constant - then picking the one correct grain of sand by chance would be far more likely than achieving the necessary fine-tuning.

However, some people are not convinced that this is a good indication of a created universe. One of the most common objections to fine-tuning is the claim that we can’t say that the cosmological constant is rare as we only have one example of it taking on a value. But this gets probability wrong. By that logic, we could never identify any single observed outcome as improbable, because every outcome only occurs once.

No, we say something is probable or improbable as a ratio of favourable cases to total possible cases. That’s why we can say it’s highly probable that it will rain in Norwich at some point in November 2026, but highly improbable that lightning will strike every house on my road at precisely 12:01pm on November 25^th 2026.

What the objectors miss is that the rarity of the cosmological constant actually does arise from theoretical models of physics, which define the space of possible values it could take. These models establish the vast range of potential values and demonstrate that the subset compatible with complex structures is incredibly narrow. The rarity is not inferred solely from observing our universe as a single hit, but from the theoretical framework that defines the range of possibilities. Similarly, planet Earth only happened once, but the improbability of Earth-like planets can be evaluated by comparing the total number of planets and the conditions required for a planet to support life.

Consequently, then, the vast improbability of the cosmological constant is determined by comparing the tiny range of life-compatible values to the total theoretical range - and under that probability estimate, it is remarkable. Now, if it were possible that you could randomly choose one grain of sand somewhere on Cromer beach without my knowing which one and leave it in its place, and the next day I went to the same beach and found your grain of sand on my first attempt, you’d have good reason to believe I had some inside knowledge. Similarly, with the cosmological constant, there is a good reason to suppose that those initial conditions were specially selected by a God who knows what is required to create life in this universe.

And let me conclude by saying that the oft-proffered multiverse objection; that the fine-tuning of this universe could be explained by the existence of a multiverse - each with different physical constants - does not remove the explanatory challenge, it merely shifts the very same problem along to an even bigger problem of why there is a multiverse with the capacity to generate such a vast array of universes, each with different physical constants. Such a multiverse would require its own precise conditions or fine-tuning to generate a vast array of universes with varying physical constants.

For a multiverse explanation to succeed, it must generate a sufficiently vast ensemble of universes, with a distribution of constants that makes life-permitting universes unsurprising. However, if there’s no guarantee of equal probability across the range, the multiverse might need vastly more universes to achieve the same likelihood. The improbability of such a multiverse-producing mechanism might itself approach or exceed the improbability of fine-tuning in a single universe. And if the multiverse did indeed confer equal probability across the range, that would also require its own precise conditions or fine-tuning to generate equal probability.

Whichever way we cut the cloth, fine-tuning is astounding, and remains strong evidence for God the cosmic mathematician, but only when conducted in the right way. The reason is that the argument is not really about improbability alone. Improbable things happen all the time. A random arrangement of Scrabble tiles is improbable, but so is one of Mozart’s symphonies or one of Shakespeare’s plays. The difference is that the latter exhibits an identifiable structure that intelligence is known to produce. The real question is whether an outcome displays a recognisable pattern that points to intelligence in a way that augments basic fine-tuning arguments, which is what I’ve attempted to present in my works The Genius of the Invisible God, and The Mathematical Bias Theory.

The big failing of most fine-tuning articles I’ve read is that they underestimate the extent to which fine-tuning is unlike ordinary improbabilities because it concerns not an event within the system or an improbability within a set of probabilities, but the architecture of the system itself. We are dealing with the mathematical conditions that make a created system possible in the first place.

So, to put it in one simple line, it is the reasoning that says: behind the cosmic mathematics stands a cosmic mathematician.

Time For Grace

 

I liked the three series of Jimmy McGovern’s prison drama Time, and I think he’s generally a class act (with Cracker being the pinnacle of his work, in my view). But there’s perhaps a key weakness here with Time - or at least, a potential weakness at this stage of his career. The attempted Christian faith subtext is, in my view, weakened by the fact that the writer isn’t conveying how stupendous the subject matter can be when grace is revealed in action. In other words, with the writer’s own faith, there’s a danger that it comes across as not strong or devoted enough to convey how capacious God’s love is when expressed through people like Marie-Louise, the chaplain.

Just as comedy isn’t as funny if there’s no smidgen of truth at the heart of it, faith-based subtext isn’t as powerful if there isn’t strong faith at the heart of the creative dispensations. It’s similar to what the philosopher Simone Weil’s pointed out when she said that:

“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous, intoxicating.”

Similarly, the most authentic grace is rarely timid or merely therapeutic - it erupts from the author’s pen or keyboard in an unmistakable way. Because there is no mistaking forgiving what seems unforgivable, and loving those who seem most unlovable. At its most potent, it takes possession of us, and leaves us in no doubt that we are tapping into something extraordinary.

With Time, I felt similar to how I felt with his previous drama Unforgivable – he understated what the transformation would look like if grace really did break through. The vivid sense of humanity's fallenness is handled with aplomb, but less so the breathtaking horizon towards which astounding grace points.

Now, I want to be sure I’m being fair to Jimmy McGovern here. I sense with Time that what he is doing is choosing to depict a scenario in subdued form because he is still writing about damaged people living in damaged institutions, but crucially, where the chaplain has lost faith in the system and is struggling with her own faith.

That may not strike me as strange - it’s great to explore a diverse range of feelings and emotions associated with the Christian faith, including the pain, struggles and doubts. The strange part, for me, though, is the timing. If a writer's work exhibits a developing, cumulative theological comprehension, then one might expect later works to deepen rather than diminish insights previously explored. Building on the wisdom of past prologues, 

I find myself wondering why Time seemed like theological retrogression in light of his brilliant drama Broken that aired about ten years ago. I think McGovern did the faith subtext better in Broken than in subsequent works like Time or Unforgivable – although the latter two dramas do very well in heeding Bonhoeffer’s warning about ‘cheap grace’. In Broken, Sean Bean brilliantly portrays a Catholic priest trying to shepherd deeply wounded people while carrying his own scars, but where the grace shone through much more tangibly, and not all cheaply either.

To be crystal clear, none of this diminishes McGovern's gifts as a writer, which remain formidable. If anything, it is because he has previously shown himself capable of portraying grace so memorably in Broken that the relative restraint of Time and Unforgivable feels noteworthy to me. In Time and Unforgivable, McGovern once again demonstrates an extraordinary understanding of human brokenness. What feels less certain, in my estimation, is whether he still believes, imaginatively at least, in a grace sufficiently large to redeem it.

The Majority Are Wrong About Net Zero

 

Distraught at the good news that the UK government has approved extraction from the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea, the usual climate bedwetters have put on their parts about the cataclysmic effect this will have on the goal to reach "net zero".

Let me offer an alternative perspective. We have many big problems in the UK - one of the most serious of which is this crass, top-down imposition of “net zero”, with its projected economically ruinous cost of £500 billion, for which British taxpayers continue to foot the bill. It’s a policy of such folly that only the most reckless thinkers would support it - yet enough incompetent people in power do support it, so we have it unjustly imposed on us in the form of higher taxes, higher prices, less money in our pockets, and a less efficient economy. 

Now, I know what you might push back with. Opinion polls show that 60% to 65% of the public explicitly support the UK's legal commitment to cut emissions to net zero by 2050, so isn’t’ it more democratic that politicians enact it? I knew you were going to ask that - but in a word, no - not really, because it misses something important. Democracy has its merits, but it also comes with the hazard of throwing up advocation for highly damaging policies on the dubious pretext of uncritical consensus. These should be challenged at every juncture.

Support for Net Zero is rather like a toxic marriage of dependency made on the condition that nobody actually reads the prenuptial agreement. Public devotion to Net Zero flourishes precisely because it operates behind a philosophical Rawslian 'veil of ignorance', whereby voters enthusiastically endorse an ideal without ever auditing the economic realities required to achieve it. It’s a luxury belief - or perhaps more accurately, an unexamined luxury good - because professed endorsement exceeds any personal civic immediate cost, as most of the costs are spread more thinly in terms of diffusely inflated consumer prices, stealth taxation, compounding inflation and unseen opportunity costs

It behoves the rest of us - those who see policies with more considered cost-benefit analyses - to continue the challenge against damaging political ideas like Net Zero. A bit like a situation when a young child thinks having ice cream for every meal is a good idea, but a responsible parent would counsel against it, having the child's longer term well-being and future best interests at heart. In fact, that analogy works especially well here, because it conveys the idea of an appealing, feel-good, short-term indulgence that ignores long-term health and consequences.

Similarly, voting MPs into power should not give them the right to convert someone else’s resources into communal property in such a reckless way. Coercion disguised as “democracy” is still coercion, and catastrophic policies that are mandated by narrow-minded elected politicians are still catastrophic, even if the majority have been primed into believing they prefer ice cream for dinner. 

Further reading:
People Are Finally Starting To Wake Up To The 'Net Zero' Madness
Net Zero: Created By Madness For Madness

Out Of The Fire, Into The Frying Pan, Then Back In The Fire

 

I think that a lot of our current extremes are so excessive because in the second half of the twentieth century we got it so badly wrong at the opposite extreme. I can think of four obvious examples: 

1)    Racism was one of the biggest stains on our past, especially when it was ingrained in socio-political legislature - but now we micromanage identity categories in ways that are just as divisive and prejudicial, we frequently see reverse racism, and we even see preposterous scenarios where the police were reluctant to properly investigate Pakistani grooming gangs for fear of being called racist.   

2)    Abuse scandals like those in Operation Yewtree came out of a culture in which abusers like Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris were so protected that victims were frequently dismissed - but now we have taken it so far the other way that we frequently blur the line between genuine abuse and social discomfort, creating a culture of fear, extreme behavioural inhibition (especially for many young men), and social over-policing. 

3)    Homophobia was so mainstream that gay people were openly shamed (in the UK, it was even illegal to be a practicing homosexual until the late sixties) - but now we treat many criticisms of gay/trans parades and ethical choices like a potential crime scene, even to the point that people have been reluctant to challenge and intervene when children have been harmed in plain sight, young people are actively encouraged to identify as whatever sex they wish, and people are being hounded, fired or prosecuted for having traditional views about the reality of biological sex. 

4)    Mental health issues were frequently misunderstood, misdiagnosed or ignored in the past - but now we’ve become so eager to pathologise every discomfort that we have cultivated a self‑perpetuating mental health crisis, where ordinary struggles are treated as symptoms and people are encouraged to see themselves as fragile (see my blog How We Made a Nation Too Fragile to Cope). 

Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s been great that in the second half of the twentieth century Western societies finally confronted past wrongs. But I think it’s fairly evident that in so many cases we lurched into their opposite extremes - where symbolic virtue has crept up in replacing real responsibility. We moved from tendentiously overlooking injustice to the grossest policing of language, where people are routinely being censored like the great dystopian novels predicted, and are regularly afraid to speak openly for fear of recriminations.

And just as imprudently, we’ve helped create a nation of fragility, where distinctions between genuine harm and the required tenacity in navigating life’s many character-building challenges have been blurred (often deliberately so).

And both extremes have this in common: they fail to honour the sovereignty of the individual – in respect, dignity, and in regard for their potential.

Why Burnham Will Be More Damaging Than Starmer

 

We are in the mania of a new Prime Minister who wants to meddle, fix things, make a big impression, and leave a populist legacy that could radically change the impression people have of Labour. But, alas, as ever, this comes with huge problems because, like with Starmer, Sunak, and all the recent centre-left governments before them, they remain clueless about what they are clueless about in terms of sound economic principles.

Burnham, like his predecessors, walks around announcing policy after policy, completely oblivious to most of the elementary and fundamental economic truisms that we’ve known about since before he was born. Things like; you can’t tax your way to prosperity; if you subsidise something you get more of it, and if you tax something you get less; you cannot print money or borrow excessively without eroding the real wages and savings of everyday citizens; redistributive measures are futile without economic growth, etc.

On top of that, when it comes to his so-called targets, he is oblivious to loads of very basic laws of unintended consequences, such as Goodhart’s Law (When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure) and Campbell’s Law (The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures), and the basics of the Laffer curve (push tax rates too high and it actually reduces government revenues, causes wealthy taxpayers to leave, disincentivises foreign investors), etc.

But what should also worry us alongside this absolute medley of ineptitudes - like I addressed in another way in my blog Beware of Honest, Well-Intentioned Politicians – is that, unlike Keir Starmer, Burnham possesses a populism (if you like that sort of thing) that makes his misguided economic interventionism far easier for the public to swallow.

Consequently, most of Burnham’s further meddling and fixing is just making a bad problem worse - and much of the country seems to like him more and more for it, which means the damage will probably be greater. 

Odds, Ends & Stray Musings: Advice About Conflict In Marriage

 

In a way that may seem counterintuitive, a thriving marriage is not a marriage without contention. A thriving marriage is a marriage with productive contention, promoting mutual growth and development. You’re both very different, with varying backgrounds and a unique set of experiences. Expect contention, but use it as a vehicle of good intentions to work towards improving yourself and each other.

Good advice I’ve learned along the way is that when beloveds are in conflict, they are wise to try to focus on the most intrinsic parts of the dispute, and not get sidelined by personal charges and accusatory tones. There are often extrinsic causes driving the disputes, and their provenance ought to be identified, but in the immediacy of the quarrel, couples are wise to stay on track of the intrinsic part of the dispute, and try to address it on its merits and demerits.

In other words, if your dispute is about how often the hoovering should be done, or whether as a couple you’re spending enough time with your in-laws - be sure to assess the arguments on their strengths and weaknesses, not on whether one of you is generally too untidy or too anti-social.

Uniquely Senseless Acts

 

In life, there are manifestly good actions with good outcomes, like when you buy a bunch of flowers for someone who needs some support. And there are manifestly bad actions, but with perceived good outcomes for one of the agents, like when a thief steals a bicycle and believes their life is better because they’ve gained a bicycle (although at some point they may learn that it isn't). 

But there is a third set, which I’d call self-defeating idiocy, which are manifestly bad actions with bad outcomes – that is, when someone does something that causes harm, inconvenience or loss to others, but derives no pleasure or increase themselves, probably even incurring detrimental outcomes (net losses), at least psychologically.

Examples of the third kind would be things like gross acts of vandalism: graffiti tags, wrecking a children’s playground area, setting fire to a communal bookcase for village book swaps, walking past a row of parked cars and breaking their wing mirrors, etc – the kind of thing we see reported too frequently in local newspapers.

Other things that spring to mind would be spiteful gossip, trolling strangers online without meaningful dialogue, malicious mockery or character assassination, that sort of thing.

There are lots of things that humans do that are bad, but done for some superficial gain – theft, reckless indulgence, fraud, manipulation, status seeking cruelty, tribal spite, etc. But acts of self defeating idiocy are uniquely senseless, because they harm everyone involved, confer no benefits to anyone, impress nobody, and only serve to humiliate and diminish the perpetrators, even if they are blind to it at the time.

Listen To What The Exes Say

If it helps, a good way to see through the devilish lies, control and deceptions wrought on society is to listen to what the most thoughtful, intelligent ex-members are saying - those who’ve escaped the snare, and seen the light by realising the lies, control and deceptions at the top of their institution.

 Listen to, for example: 

• The ex-Scientology members who discovered it’s a racket, and escaped the hegemony, and the aggressive way dissent is pathologised by the leaders as a moral failing. 

• The ex-Extinction Rebellion/Just Stop Oil members who got swept in by virtue-signalling and ideological purity tests, but who got near to the top and came to experience that the principal aims are nothing to do with the climate - they are principally about leftist control, cronyist power acquisition, fear-mongering and ideological influence. 

• The ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses (or other ex-religious-cult members) who’ve escaped information control, and fear‑based doctrines that kept them compliant for years for fear of social/familial shunning. 

• The ex-young earth creationists who came to understand that they had been manipulated, directly or indirectly, to dishonour God by believing lies about His creative methods, to suppress their own interpretive faculties, and repress their own curiosity, and entire branches of human knowledge. 

• Those who were manipulated by bad actors to doubt their own ‘gender’ identity, and who have come to see through the mass social contagion, and are now living more secure, fulfilled lives built on self‑understanding rather than external pressure. 

• Those who’ve escaped the authoritarian hell that is North Korea, and can now see clearly what a mass brainwashing dictatorship it is. 

We know that psychologically speaking, people rarely join harmful systems knowingly - they are usually drawn in by the perceived allure of certainty, meaning, in-group belonging, or self-congratulation. That’s why, relative to the total number of cases, few actually leave or escape with such unique insight and revelation regarding the internal contradictions, control, absolutism, social pressure, and fear of dissent. That’s also why those who’ve seen the light and have acquired enough insight and balance to evaluate their former plight are frequently worth listening to.

Is Jordan Peterson Right About Activism?

 

Jordan Peterson is not a fan of most contemporary activism – he thinks it’s "appalling" and "almost the lowest calling." He certainly has a point. This is because, as many have rightly pointed out (including yours truly 7 years ago - see my placard theory blog post), it often serves as a form of prideful narcissism and performative social virtue for individuals who should instead be spending most of their time getting their own house in order first.

Of course, for balance, some historical activism has been worthwhile. The Civil Rights Movement, women's suffrage, and labour laws are three prime examples, where people fought to challenge systemic injustice and helped make society a better place. But just because an activity has a few successes, it does not mean the whole thing or even the majority of it is successful. Because the massive increase of narcissism in our society has meant that most activism now functions, less as a pursuit of justice, and more as a stage for personal attention-seeking, tribal signalling and finding a sense of belonging within the in-group.

And the easiest thing about these curated, self-flattering public personas is that the incentives reward virtue-signalling, but require no real intellectual effort, discipline or institutional work behind the stage door. You just turn up, make your symbolic gestures, while privately remaining unable to understand complex scenarios and be the force for good you pretend to be. In fact, I see it as one of the great ironies in modern society that those shouting the loudest about their own virtue are frequently the ones least able to do much social good, and most in need of taking more personal responsibility for their own lives. From getting to know some of these young activists myself, there is an outside chance that they attach themselves to grand political crusades to avoid fixing their own immediate, personal shortcomings.😉

And don’t forget the other psychological trick that goes alongside it; if you make the enemy something abstract enough to defy proper examination (capitalism, the patriarchy, fossil fuels, Israel, immigrants, etc) you further distance yourself from personal accountability, because you fix yourself on the side of a fabricated black vs. white war that has never been adequately defined or understood by pretty much anyone on your side. To that end, most modern day activism comprises some of the most squalid social conduct out there.

Why So Many Services Are Expensive Even When Britain Has So Many Low‑Paid Workers

The left remains constantly confused about why everyday services cost so much, yet so many of the people providing them earn relatively little in comparison. To the left, this is an epidemic of ‘injustice’ in our society - but this misunderstands the economics of labour markets where, over sustained periods, average wages in an economy tend to rise with average productivity, but individual wages are determined by sector‑specific productivity, bargaining power, labour supply, and institutional factors.

It’s certainly true that, from observing many sectors - social care, transport, hospitality, cleaning, etc - while prices continue to rise, the workers delivering those services often earn wages that barely cover the basics. But it’s not injustice - it’s the predictable outcome of how a modern, unequal, service‑heavy economy like ours works.

Here’s how it works. You need to think of economic sectors as having different levels of productivity. Finance, technology, and engineering typically generate high output per worker, and therefore they pay accordingly. In fact, their wages pull up the national average, just like how two giants in a group of seven would significantly pull up the average height of the group.

But there are also low‑productivity, low‑bargaining‑power sectors - like hospitality, retail, cleaning, care work, etc - which rely heavily on human labour, but through no fault of anyone, have limited ability to raise productivity, and face intense cost pressure. Again, through no fault of anyone, wages in these sectors remain low because employers simply don’t have much room to raise them - and workers often lack the bargaining power to demand more (see my past blog posts on the economics of labour markets).

This is the reality of the “expensive services, low‑paid workers” problem. The left demands higher wages by asking “If workers in many service sectors are poorly paid, why do the services themselves cost so much?” But it’s the wrong question in terms of setting wages, because the price of a service isn’t determined by the wage of the typical worker - it’s determined by the wage of the next best alternative. The carers looking after my father in his care home had viable alternative labour options in supermarkets, delivery firms or hospitality roles with similar pay but better working conditions, which is why the care home struggled to retain enough staff.

Even if a service industry job is underpaid, it still has to compete with the rest of the labour market. If it doesn’t, workers leave - and shortages follow. Service prices reflect the cost pressures of a wealthy, high‑wage economy, and service workers’ pay reflects the realities of low‑power, low‑productivity sectors. Consequently, expensive services and low‑paid workers are not in contradiction, and there is no wholesale injustice in this tension - they are two sides of the same economic coin.

Price theory predicts uneven wage growth, weak bargaining power in many service sectors, rising labour competition, and a deep divide between high‑productivity and low‑productivity work – all of which explain the pattern sufficiently – it’s Econ 101, yet a perpetual mystery to the left. 

The Four Types of Electorate

 

When it comes to the electorate, there are four types of people.

First, there are those who submit themselves to authority with an almost childlike trust. They imagine - often quite sincerely - that those who govern them must also have their best interests at heart, and that wisdom and benevolence naturally accompany power.

Second, there are those who obey not from trust or confidence but from fear or apprehension. They are riddled with internal doubt, yet they consent in order to avoid the repercussions.

These two kinds of people - though they seldom intend it - have, at best, furnished every government with top-down inefficiencies, and, at worst, furnished every tyranny in history with its power and control. That is, no political party has ever ruled by its own competence or strength alone; it is encouraged and carried along by the sub-critical persuasions of group one and the compliance of group two.

But third and fourth consist of two very different groups. Those who will look authority in the face, reject it, and challenge it. Those who say “I see what you're doing, but I'm not having it,” are either a force for good or for bad, depending on the individuals in question. Some reactionary groups - who we’ll call category three - are rather toxic and unwholesome, and in many cases comprise individuals as bad as, or worse than, groups one and two.

But some - who we’ll call group four - have the hearts, minds and wisdom to resist, hold politicians to account, and be a force for good and positive change. 

Try to be in group four, dear reader, because it’s only group four types who give this nation genuine hope - the ones who, when they reach critical mass, see to it that authoritarian systems lose the compliance necessary to sustain themselves, and become disempowered.

Turtles Nearly All The Way Down

Suppose we have an infinite regress of turtles, each supported by an earlier turtle, with no first turtle, and suppose that if there is any last item, it’s not a turtle. In this case, the multiplicity of the turtles explains why any given turtle is supported. But no multiplicity of turtles fundamentally explains the supported turtles. Consequently, then, something that is other than a multiplicity of turtles fundamentally explains the supported turtles.

Those who know about the cosmological argument can probably see where I’m heading next.

Sceptics of Divine creation cleave to multiplicity of turtles with an earliest turtle hypothesis, where turtles here mean physical reality (of, being generous, however many universes). But Christians insist on the multiplicity of turtles with no earliest turtle as the cause of all turtles, because if turtles have an explanation, then their fundamental explanation cannot also be turtles, or even a first turtle.

A Type I multiplicity does not explain the turtles, because it does not explain any turtles earlier than the earliest turtle in the multiplicity. And a Type II multiplicity explains any turtle in the sequence as having an antecedent turtle cause, but not the cause of all turtles.

Applying this to real physics, because all physical causation is transitive, then all physical systems that exist must have a non-physical cause. Or in turtle language, anything non‑physical that explains the multiplicity of turtles explains all turtles (that is, all of physical reality) - because for any physical item, it is either a supported turtle or there is a supported turtle prior to it, and no regress can be explanatory as a whole.

That’s a simple way of stating why it has to be the case that a non‑physical entity explains all of physical reality.

 

On Monothinking

 

The reason it’s hard to take seriously people like Richard Dawkins on religion, Owen Jones on economics, Jermy Corbyn on politics, Naomi Klein on climate change, Afua Hirsch on discrimination, Paul Mason on geopolitics, to name a few examples, is because on that subject they are monothinkers; that is, someone who can only process ideas through a single worldview or framework. Their demand for explanation exceeds their supply, producing the intellectual equivalent of a mispriced asset.

As a consequence, they draw inadequate conclusions because they don’t know what they don’t know. On these subjects, they operate in a permanent state of cognitive overdraft, where they can offer only a single explanation for the thing they oppose: Religious belief = ignorance; wealth = exploitation; inequality = injustice; climate change = doom, discrimination = oppression, and so forth.

This works alongside the slightly more subtle phenomenon of what’s called ‘belief-clustering’, whereby the probability of an individual believing x increases the probability that one could predict their belief on y and z. Like, if I know where you stand on inequality, I can probably predict where you stand on Israel; if I know where you stand on they/them pronouns, I can probably predict where you stand on climate change (interestingly, though, probably not so much if you reverse that); if I know where you stand on feminism, I can probably predict where you stand on welfare and state intervention; if I know where you stand on abortion, I can probably predict where you stand on chastity and homosexuality; that sort of thing.

Don’t be a monothinker, because it gives strong indication that your beliefs have been imprudently implanted, not carefully thought through.

On Sola Scriptura

 

I met with a minister recently who espouses the idea of Sola scriptura. Sola scriptura is the belief that scripture alone is the supreme authority for Christian faith and practice. If as Christians we mean that authority shouldn’t drift into human invention that undermines scripture, that no leader, tradition, or institution should override scripture, and that scripture is therefore the final court of appeal on matters of faith, then there is a sense in which Sola scriptura is onto something.

But Sola scriptura cannot be literally absolute, because scripture is not self-interpreting, and Christians rely on extra‑biblical resources to get a handle on scriptural authority. Consequently, scripture is the highest authority, but it cannot be the only authority, otherwise we have a self-refencing problem. So, sola scriptura works only within a theological framework that assumes interpretive components, because nothing contains meaning except by extrinsic relationship to the texts. We need logic, philosophy, and critical thinking to interpret scripture responsibly, to evaluate interpretations, avoid contradictions, apply scripture to socio-cultural situations, and engage with politics, science, ethics, and culture. Therefore, Sola scriptura is relatively true, not absolutely true.

I think most balanced Christians would go along with that. Fundamentalists often resist this idea, because they often weaponise scripture to construct a hermetically sealed, self‑contained in-group of willing adherents (often cults), denying even that meaning depends partly on the reader’s context, to keep the mindset within the circle solely conforming to their aims. That’s why they often warn against “worldly” knowledge like science, philosophy, or human reasoning - treating it as being opposed to scripture in cases when it clearly isn’t. Obviously, there is a lot of “worldly” stuff that is opposed to scripture, but that’s where our old friend critical interpretation and discernment is needed to determine which is which.

The upshot is, being interpretive agents replete with a multitude of extra-biblical resources, and mental and emotional artillery, we clearly read the Bible through our own lens, so we can’t justifiably claim that the Bible is the lens through which we see the world. Instead, it’s more nuanced - scripture is the supreme authority in a relative sense, rather like a compass bearing: it gives the direction we should follow, but we still need maps, terrain knowledge, and judgement to complete the journey. The bearing guides us, but it doesn’t replace the tools.

An even better way to frame this is to say that scripture is a fixed authority, but it is not a fixed direction - because truthful direction emerges only when a reader interprets it correctly, and each individual interpretation comes alive in accordance with their own personal journey of circumstances, background, talents and application. So, it’s perhaps more like a fleet of ships, all trying to travel north (closer to God), but each on their own distinct, unique adventure as they travel. Think of scripture, then, like the ship’s anchor, holding the vessel in the right waters, keeping it from drifting into danger, and providing stability - but with sailors who still need a rudder, charts, experience, and discernment to navigate.

What Nathan Cofnas Got Wrong About Human Intelligence

 

Jason Arday may have been exposed as a deceiver, but Nathan Cofnas, the man who helped expose Arday, gets his interpretation of human intelligence wrong. Cofnas has built his reputation on saying that genetic differences contribute to average differences in cognitive ability between human populations, and that the evidence suggests that environmental factors do not fully explain group differences in cognitive test performance.

He is referring to, among other things, Harvard’s Students for Fair Admissions case, which showed that black students were about 12–14% of the class at the time, but under pure SAT + GPA admissions, black representation would fall to around 0.7%. That part is correct. But Cofnas used the 0.7% figure to argue that if admissions were based only on merit, black representation would collapse, therefore the gap is partly genetic.

It’s true that black representation would severely diminish as things stand, but there is no evidence that the gap of these selected groups is anything other than environmental. The error Cofnas is making is like saying that children who grow up near airports have worse sleep, so they must have genetically inferior circadian rhythms. Or it’s like saying that people who can’t afford pianos are worse at piano playing, therefore they’re genetically less musical.

When environments are equalised, the gaps shrink dramatically, and in many cases all-but disappear. For example, black African immigrant students in the UK outperform almost every demographic group academically, which undermines the genetic‑deficit hypothesis. There are plenty of studies that show an environmental performance gap between what are wrongly labelled ‘races’, and that when the environment changes, the gap shrinks or vanishes. Moreover, the Flynn effect shows that IQ scores rose in the UK by approximately 30 points across the 20th century, mainly because the environments changed, especially around lifestyle and nutrition, like what happened to the Dutch and height.

And it would be very easy for Cofnas to find this out, so I’m not sure why he misinterprets performance gaps under unequal conditions as genetic differences under equal conditions. Modern genetics, neuroscience, and developmental psychology are against him here. If a group can outperform under different environmental conditions, then the indication is that it is not genetics at play.

Lastly, and what I’d say is the most compelling reason to reject the genetic factor, is that lower IQ in people with different skin colour or ethnicity is not what we’d expect genetically from an evolutionary standpoint either, as there is no reason to expect lower cognitive ability in any human population, save for environmentally. Genetic differences in cognitive ability between human populations would require long isolation and strong selection, and human groups have simply not been isolated long enough, nor subjected to the kinds of selection pressures, that would produce such meaningful genetic differences in general intelligence.

On DEI Part II

 

Here I show the limitations of AI while simultaneously elaborating on the issues with DEI I laid out in the previous blog. The best way to use AI is to ask a very specific question about a matter of fact where it would be a prohibitively long-winded task to find all this out oneself. So, I asked Copilot very specifically “What do firms, businesses and institutions cite as the most positive claims about DEI, and please list them in a top 5, strongest to weakest". Here is what it said:

Top 5 commonly cited positive claims about DEI (strongest → weakest)

1. Improved talent discovery
The strongest empirical claim: DEI initiatives can widen the recruitment funnel so organisations don’t overlook high‑ability candidates from less traditional pipelines (e.g., non‑elite universities, non‑networked applicants).
This is the argument that structural bias hides talent, and DEI can help surface it.

2. Reduction of discriminatory barriers
DEI is credited with reducing procedural discrimination (e.g., biased interview questions, biased evaluation rubrics).
This is not about quotas — it’s about standardising processes to reduce arbitrary bias.

3. Better organisational decision‑making
Some studies argue that cognitively diverse teams (different backgrounds, training, heuristics) produce fewer blind‑spots and more robust decisions.
This is the “diversity reduces groupthink” claim.

4. Higher innovation rates
A number of business‑school studies claim that heterogeneous teams generate more novel ideas because they combine different mental models.
This is often cited in tech, R&D, and creative industries.

5. Improved customer alignment
In sectors with diverse customer bases, DEI is said to help organisations better understand and serve those customers.
E.g., banks serving multilingual communities, hospitals serving multicultural populations.

If you’re like me (and I’d highly recommend it 😃), you’re probably thinking how weak they look. And you’re not imagining it; they are weak, because they don’t actually describe the benefits of DEI, they describe the benefits of choosing to hire on merit, which mindfully and proactively includes candidates from diverse backgrounds (something we should all support). That is, competence‑based broadening of opportunity is a sine qua non for firms looking to hire the best candidates, and the benefits AI cited in the above list are not benefits of DEI, they are benefits of a merit-based broadened search space. In fact, the DEI-inspired identity-based prioritisation and arbitrary quotas actually work in opposition to broadened meritocracy.

To be fair to Copilot, I did ask it to list on behalf of what firms, businesses and institutions perceived as the principal benefits of DEI, which shows fundamentally that firms, businesses and institutions tend to remain confused about DEI. The irony, of course, is that Copilot’s list doesn’t reveal the strengths of DEI at all - it reveals the strengths of meritocratic hiring done properly. Every “benefit” it cites is simply what happens when organisations widen their search space without lowering standards, without prioritising identity, and without introducing representational distortions. The upshot is, DEI is in direct competition with meritocracy, and the only thing that works is the thing DEI doesn’t actually do.

The Road To DEI Is Paved With Good Intentions, But......

 

I'm sure it'll be obvious what has compelled me to elaborate on what I’ve said in older articles (see my Discrimination tab in the sidebar): that the DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) ideology is one of those things where almost everybody knows it is bad and unwelcome, but they tolerate it, because in the broadest sense there is little they can do about it. Let me highlight why DEI is such a net cost to society, starting with the most obvious, but going down to the least obvious. 

1)    It has a negative effect on everyone who would ordinarily be hired on merit but is not hired due to a DEI hire. 

2)    Because of number 1, it means lots of skilled, qualified people take longer or find it harder to get jobs suited to their skills, experience and competence. 

3)    It has a negative effect on everyone who is let go in order to increase DEI hires. 

4)    It has a negative effect on competent individuals whose traits are often associated with DEI hires (sex, ethnicity, skin colour, etc) but who actually earned their role on merit. They are wrongly suspected of being DEI hires, and it can be hard to shake off that stigma. 

5)    It harms customers, consumers, students, etc, who receive poorer service because the DEI hire is less qualified, skilled or competent than the person who would have been hired on merit. 

6)    It creates a feeling of wider resentment in industries and institutions, and likely increases unfair negative discrimination in terms of immutable characteristics (sexism, racism, etc). 

7)    It creates even further social tension, because the bad actors who try to defend unfair hiring (hiring not on merit to boost minority representation) look to attack those who are justly resistant to it, stoking more hostility and socio-political division. 

Now, the reason I said DEI ideology is because it's clear that in a merit-based recruitment process diversity and inclusivity are positive things when we simply mean widening the merit-based recruitment process to ensure high-ability candidates are not overlooked. But here’s what I think the real picture shows. Meritocracy achieves the highest efficiency in the market because jobs are matched to the applicants most qualified to perform them. The trouble is that as a society we have never made the most of the benefits of meritocracy, because in practice we have always allowed other types of bias to dictate some of our hiring choices – especially affinity bias, network bias, and structural bias. And because merit-only hiring systems would still involve biases towards people with, say, better upbringings, people with better networks of influence, people with better social capital, etc, DEI can really only introduce a new distortion to adjust parts of an old distortion, but where I believe the new distortion is worse overall. Any employment strategy that is quota-driven, unfairly selective or ideological instead of meritocratic makes an already imperfect system worse. 

We should all want to live in a society in which unjust barriers are removed, access is equal, fair and wide, standards are identical, and the best candidates are hired – but DEI cannot adequately correct prior biases by merely introducing new ones. It’s rather like how, if a lake has too many algae (original bias), conservationists try to fix it by introducing a new species of fish that eats algae. But the fish also eats native species, disrupts the food chain, and causes ecological imbalance in a different direction. Like the lake scenario, the attempt to fix the first bias in employment creates a second, more complicated one.

Except I think it’s even more problematic than that, because the first biases weren’t necessarily too dominant, just mildly distortionary. But adding the so-called corrective variable of DEI has introduced new distortions that are likely to make the prior biases even stronger than they were beforehand. So, DEI becomes a negative skew in two distinct ways - both intrinsically (as per my above list of 7) and extrinsically as per the knock-on effect. So, instead of the consequences of my lake analogy, think of it instead in terms of a particle system governed by several interacting fields. One field - let’s say the electromagnetic interaction - is slightly dominant (the original hiring bias). Then we introduce a new compensating field designed to counteract the dominance, but the new field doesn’t simply oppose the original force, it interacts with the entire system in non‑linear ways - like, say, coupling unexpectedly with the weak force, altering vacuum energy, shifting mass terms, that sort of thing.

Consequently, the new field amplifies the original imbalance through feedback loops. Instead of neutralising the dominant force, the compensating field actually destabilises the system, forces additional corrections, and creates even stronger asymmetries. And just as in this illustration the new field magnifies the very imbalance it was meant to fix, DEI similarly introduces new variables that don’t just distort the system - they interact with existing biases in ways that make those biases even stronger.

To that end, in net terms, DEI makes problems it purports to address even more problematic – and just about everyone is made worse off by that. The only people made better off are bad actors in society who look to exploit or personally benefit from the situation at the expense of everyone else, where those costs are spread thinly (a bit like with government tariffs and subsidies).

The Psychology of Comfort Recalibration

I’ve noticed a psychological trap that people employ on themselves for consolation when they need the solace of not being all they have the potential to be. Let’s give it a name…..er….let’s call it comfort recalibration. I’d say comfort recalibration is basically like this. If an individual cannot attain some element of the subset of all they have the potential to be – like, say, creatively, morally, vocationally, in discipline, in effort, in treatment of others, in goodness, in intellectual progress, in taking responsibility, etc – they prime themselves not to desire or value it. Like a striving cat that wants the mouse in the shed but forgoes the effort to find it by teaching itself that it’s not really hungry. Cats don’t really do that, by the way, it’s just an illustration.

And in human behaviour, it’s not just priming yourself to believe you don’t really desire what you do, or what you should, at the same time it’s priming yourself to be satisfied with what you can easily obtain. Like if the cat can’t catch the mouse he’s desperate to eat, he pretends that insects and grass are what he really desires (a bad medium to long term strategy, as he’ll soon be malnourished).

Observe people in life and you’ll see how frequently they behave like this, often beneath their own conscious inspection. They can’t get the girl they want, so they tell themselves ‘she’s not all that’ anyway. They can’t get any girl, so they tell themselves that relationships are more hassle than they’re worth. They lack the motivation for health and fitness training, so they tell themselves everyone in the gym is just a performative egoist. They can’t obtain the status they crave, so they denounce it all as a tyranny of unjust inequality. They don’t have the combination of will and skill to think through a complex matter proficiently, so they tell themselves their over-simplified opinion is sufficient to state their case.

The problem is, with enough people like this in society opting out and resorting to their own extension of Wittgensteinian games, not only do the truth narratives get bent all out of shape, but the shared values and standards that can make humanity thrive begin to dissolve. I think this is one of the most prominent assaults on our society and our language, where so many people are rewriting the rules to protect their comfort and their ego. We’ve sleepwalked into becoming a culture that normalises comfort recalibration, and I think that’s why truthseeking and truthtelling are becoming like endangered species. 

The Paradox of Similarity in Decision‑Making

 

Regular readers may have heard of Fredkin’s Paradox – which says that the more similar two choices are, the less the decision should matter - yet the harder it is to choose between them. I mentioned this at a recent social event, and received an interesting response back:

“But surely that isn't true, and it doesn't bear out in my experience. If I have to choose between a Chinese restaurant and an Indian restaurant, it's a harder choice than a Chinese and a Thai, or Indian and Bangladeshi?”

On the off chance that readers might find it interesting, I’ll share my response here – which is to say that the above retort actually strengthens Fredkin’s Paradox more than it undermines it. This is because Fredkin wasn’t talking about similarity of category - Chinese vs Indian, Thai vs Bangladeshi, etc - he was talking about similarity of value. That is, two choices are “similar” in the paradox only when they satisfy your goal equally (or nearly equally) well.

Think about your own experience of walking around a capital city trying to help your wife decide where she wants to eat. If the goal is simply “eat something tasty,” and both Chinese and Indian hit that spot near-equally on that day, the decision becomes hard. Not because the cuisines are similar, but because your desire for them is equally strong.

This is why the restaurant example doesn’t contradict the paradox. It actually illustrates it. If in Chinese vs. Indian they are both equally appealing, then the decision is hard. If in Chinese vs. Thai they are not close to being equally appealing, because, say, you had Chinese last weekend and you really fancy a Pad Thai today, then the decision is easy. Similarly, Indian vs Bangladeshi might be similar cuisines but not equally appealing for a number of reasons, making the decision easy, and not a close call.

Of course, a key thing to add about Fredkin’s Paradox is that most human decisions aren’t of this nature. Humans rarely experience true indifference, especially with socio-cultural factors and identity driving so many decisions. Fredkin’s Paradox applies only when you do care, but the options seem equally good in terms of value.

At this point in writing this blog post, I then just started to ponder Fredkin’s Paradox in terms of the dating pool and people’s search for their optimum beloved. If Fredkin is right about the difficulty applying in situations with agonising similarity of value, and I think broadly he is, then if you’re agonising between two prospective beloveds, it’s likely that neither is your optimum beloved. Because as anyone who has fallen in love knows, despite the impression one might form from being a single person immersed in the dating pool search space, the optimum beloved is not the result of a difficult optimisation problem - the optimum beloved is the person who ends the optimisation problem.

Another reason for this is found in Pascal’s great wisdom that “The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.” While the beloved is chosen through many rational and empirical-based decision processes, the heart is not really captured by weighing marginal gains or running a mental cost–benefit analysis; it is captured by a kind of intuitive clarity that smothers mechanical deliberation. Yes, reason tries to optimise, compare, and evaluate, but it’s the heart that does the falling.

That’s why, when the heart knows, the decision process comes to a natural cessation, as the optimum beloved becomes the one who makes the very act of further choosing feel unnecessary.