Playing Dice With God Probabilities

I just watched this debate about God’s existence between prominent atheist Matt Dillahunty and Matthew Adelstein (Bentham’s Bulldog). They got into a fine-tuning-based dispute based on the following claim “Just because A is likelier given B than not-B, that doesn’t mean B is likelier given A than not-A”, disputing the extent to which it’s true. They argued this back and forth for ages – using this illustration “John walks up to Jack and sees two dice with two 6s on the table. Is it more likely in terms of probability that Jack placed them like that or rolled them?” – and they couldn’t resolve the dispute because both were partially wrong in their analysis.

The proposition is actually mathematically valid - just because A is more likely given B than given not-B, that doesn’t mean B is more likely given A than not-A. But in some specific scenarios, the probabilities may line up in such a way that both directions appear to hold - even though the principle still warns us not to assume that. I think that was at the heart of why Matthew and Matt talked past each other on this (see footnote*).

The footnote has a slight elaboration on why “Just because A is likelier given B than not-B, that doesn’t mean B is likelier given A than not-A” is not actually true, but it’s easy to think of very simple examples that warn against the error of hastily flipping conditional probabilities. For example, just because A (smoke) is more likely if B (a house on fire) happens, does not automatically mean that the presence of A makes B more likely - unless you consider the whole context, because house fires are quite rare and other sources of smoke are common. Or an even more obvious example, just because A (clouds) is more likely if B (it's raining) happens, does not automatically mean that the presence of A makes B more likely - unless you consider the whole context, because clouds often appear without rain. 

Let’s move on to apply this to God. Here is an easy example from the dice rolling scenario the debaters used. Imagine you're rolling two fair six-sided dice. Let’s define two events: Event A is that the total of the two dice is 7, and Event B is that the first die shows a 3. Now, if you know the first die is a 3, the only way to get a total of 7 is for the second die to be a 4. Since the second die is fair, there's a 1 in 6 chance of that happening. So the chance of getting a total of 7 given that the first die is a 3 is 1 in 6. Now suppose the first die is not a 3. That leaves 30 possible combinations (that is, suppose first die is not a 3. That means it could be 1, 2, 4, 5, or 6 - giving 5 × 6 = 30 possible outcomes). Out of those, there are 5 that total to 7 - like (1,6), (2,5), (4,3), (5,2), and (6,1). So again, the chance of getting a total of 7 given that the first die is not 3 is also 1 in 6. This means that even though the probability of A (getting a 7) is the same whether or not B (first die being 3) is true, knowing that A happened doesn't actually tell us anything about whether B is more or less likely. So, in this case, even though A is equally likely given B or not-B, that doesn’t make B more likely given A - which is exactly the kind of situation that shows the original statement is true.

Now we’ve cleared that up, let’s go back to the initial question. John walks up to Jack and sees two dice with two 6s on the table. Is it more likely in terms of probability that Jack placed them like that or rolled them? On the surface, the answer seems obvious – it’s more probable that he placed them. Here’s why. The probability of rolling two sixes in one roll is 1 in 36 (1 in 6 x 1 in 6). But if Jack intentionally placed them, the probability of seeing double sixes is 1, because he could simply set them that way. So, the evidence (double sixes) is 36 times more likely under the “placed” hypothesis than under the “rolled” hypothesis.

Doesn’t that mean we should believe Jack placed them? No, not quite. As any good Bayesian will tell you, you don’t get to a posterior belief without a prior. In this case, we must also consider; how likely is it in general that Jack would place the dice instead of rolling them? What if Jack is known to always play fair? What if he’s never been seen to manipulate dice, and we have no prior evidence suggesting deception? What if Jack is just a thoroughly honest and decent guy all round, with almost unimpeachable character and integrity? Then our prior probability that Jack placed the dice may be extremely low - say, 0.001. And despite the evidence (double sixes) being better explained by "placed," the posterior probability may still favour "rolled" unless the likelihood difference is sufficient to overcome the low prior. Here, posterior probability means your updated belief in a hypothesis after taking the evidence into account. You need likelihood x prior to determine the posterior (your actual belief after evidence).This is why Bayesian reasoning is so powerful - it respects both what you believed before and what you just learned, combining them to form a rational belief.

As I’ve written in previous posts and articles, this is the right way to consider the probability of Christianity being true. The existence of a finely tuned, life-permitting universe has often been likened to seeing dice all land on six (although in this case, across an entire world of casinos). The physical constants appear finely calibrated, as though they are set by a cosmic Mind with astronomical purpose and intelligence. But we should proceed with caution there, because even if this state of the universe is vastly more probable given the hypothesis of God than under a godless process, having sufficient prior probability to believe in God in the first place requires a little more, and a lot more if we specify the Christian God.

You may recall my probabilistic model proposed in my Mathematical Bias Theory, in which I framed the universe's apparent structure in terms of a “biased random walk.” As outlined in that blog post, imagine all possible physical configurations forming a vast probability space, with a neutral "random walk" through them generating the high order we see before us, without which such order would be astronomically unlikely. Given a mathematical bias towards law-like coherence - a structure that systematically tilts the cosmic narrative toward order - then such a bias suggests that our universe is the product of an ingenious Cosmic Mathematician (God).

Apply that to the dice model above. Even if your prior for theism is low, then according to the exquisite degree of structure, order, and life-permitting constants we see in the biased random walk - all of which are vastly more likely under theism than atheism - then just as with the dice, our posterior belief in God should increase substantially. That would get us to deism or even theism, but we must keep going to get to Christianity. To keep moving from theism to Christianity we must go further along a Bayesian staircase - a sequence of probability updates, each supported by its own priors and evidential strength. Once you factor in the cumulative evidence for Christianity’s truth – Biblical evidence, Christ’s teachings, credibility of the Resurrection, Biblical prophecies, miracles, healings, personal testimonies, to name just a few - each of which incrementally increases the plausibility of Christianity to such an extent that we have every reason to believe it is true.

For some people, Christianity, like the hypothesis that Jack rolled the dice, may begin with a low prior. But through the accumulation of evidences, each step increasing the probability that the hypothesis is true, it becomes more and more rational to believe Christianity is the truth, as Bayesian reasoning provides a clear path for belief that is proportional to evidence - a climb up a probabilistic staircase, if you like, where every step is supported by reason, evidence, and explanatory power. 

*Footnote: In case it’s still not clearer, let’s break it down further Remember, it went like this:

Matt: “Just because A is likelier given B than not B, that doesn’t mean B is likelier given A than not A.”

Matthew: “Problem, it does.”

Matthew was right to say more likely, but misled by a symmetrical result in a simple example if he thinks it's certain - a situation where the numbers happen to align. But this symmetry doesn’t hold every time, and as I said above, Bayes’ theorem explicitly tells us that you cannot reverse conditional probabilities without re-evaluating all terms. Mistaking symmetry for a universal rule is a common intuitive trap in certain examples (like fair dice) but it is easy to mistake a coincidence for a law. Bayes' Theorem governs how P(B given A) behaves. You cannot reverse the inequality in P(A given B) > P(A given not-B) without evaluating all the terms. So we have to guard against misapplying conditional probability and assuming that an implication works both ways - which it mathematically does not, unless under special constraints. It’s a shame because Matthew has the better arguments generally, but this error proved to be an impediment to Matt seeing the broader point – although, personally, I don’t think Matt Dillahunty is very open or particularly teachable.

 Let me try to illustrate the error in simple terms. Take a fair 6-sided die. If I tell Matthew the number is 4, he knows it’s even. If I say it’s not 4, it’s less likely to be even. Therefore, “even” is more likely when it’s 4 than when it’s not 4. And if I tell Matthew it’s even, there’s a better chance it might be 4 than if I told him it’s odd. So, from Matthew’s perspective, that seems symmetrical, and I suspect that’s what fooled him. The trouble is, that symmetry is far less typical than the mathematical rule that supports the counter.  In fact, that symmetry is just a coincidence in the simple example I gave - it doesn’t work in general. There are many situations where A is more likely when B happens, but B is less likely when A happens, and I showed this with the examples I used in the blog post above. Conditional probabilities like that are not there to be flipped at will.

Edit to add: I think the distinction we must make is between more likely and guaranteed. The statement "the fact that X is more likely on Y means that the existence of X makes Y more likely" is true under standard probability assumptions. This is because Bayes' rule directly relates the two conditional probabilities, and if observing Y increases the likelihood of X, then it also increases the likelihood of Y when X is observed - though the strength of this effect depends on the base rates of X and Y. So, while this does not imply certainty or causation, it does imply a directional probabilistic dependence, making the original statement valid in the probabilistic sense, but not logically or causally guaranteed.

Peak Boil and Peach Yoghurts: The Art of Noisy Agreement

 

In one of my books, I have a chapter called To Err Is Human, To Agree Is Divine, which talks a lot about Aumann’s Agreement Theorem (which I’ve also blogged about before - see here and here). While Robert Aumann proved the original Agreement Theorem using ideal Bayesian rationality, the brilliant Scott Aaronson explored what happens when the agents are computationally bounded, and analysed the efficiency of communication required to reach (near) agreement (see here for a discussion I had with Scott on my Philosophical Muser YouTube channel).

In this blog, I want to consider an aspect of Scott Aaronson’s paper The Complexity of Agreement (which can be found here) - the "knife-edge" problem - in relation to domestic situations in marriage (my emphasis), where we have the agents “smooth their messages by adding random noise to them”. This use of noise not only helps stabilise communication in the face of minute belief differences (which is the knife-edge problem), but it also ties into Aaronson’s broader result; where he introduces a protocol that allows agents to agree within ε after exchanging O(1/ε²) messages, where the O notation describes how something grows, ε is how close two agents need to come to agreement, and therefore, the number of messages (or amount of communication) needed grows like the square of 1 divided by ε*.

Let me give you a few life examples from chez Knight, where my sweetheart and I humorously navigate the adventurous terrain of domestic harmony. What this will show is a way in which smudging the strength of our preferences through "noisy messaging" can help avoid deadlocks over desires that are only trivially different. 

1) Shall we have a Domino’s pizza or buy a Tesco Finest?

Me: It’s only worth having high quality pizzas, so Domino’s.

Zosia: Tesco Finest is very good quality too.

Noisy message: The outer edge of the Domino’s pizza has no toppings at all, to the circumferential measurement of about 450mm from the outer edge of the dough, and all the toppings are tightly packed within the centre area of the dough, with an area measuring no more than a third of the entire pizza.

Agreement: Let’s go for Tesco Finest.

2) Frequency of husband hoovering

Me: Now we have Robbie the Robot Vacuum Cleaner, does that mean I can hoover less often?

Zosia: No, Robbie doesn’t get in the corners or move furniture around.

Me: Neither do I (just kidding!)

Noisy message: Hoovering is a good opportunity to say prayers and be thankful for things in our home.

Agreement: James doesn’t outsource his hoovering to a robot.

3) Shall we have dessert straight after dinner or wait a bit?

Zosia: I’m full, I don’t think I can eat dessert just yet.

Me: I could eat it now, because eating it later means getting up out of our comfy living room chairs to make it.

Noisy message: If we model the post-dinner energy curve as an exponential decay function, the likelihood of voluntary dessert assembly drops sharply after every easily-accessible After Eight consumed in the living room.

Agreement: Let’s have dessert now, while morale is still high.

4) What shall we watch on TV tonight?

Zosia: How about The Crown?

Me: That’s more of a Sunday afternoon programme, not a Saturday night one.

Noisy message: It’s a bit early in the weekend to be reminded of institutional decline and quiet heartbreak through repressed sighs, ancestral tension and softly-lit drawing rooms.

Agreement: Let’s watch something where no one wears gloves indoors.

5) I’ll bet in a blind test you can’t tell the difference between Aldi peach yoghurts and Lidl peach yoghurts

Me: Yes I can!

Zosia: Right, I’ll grab two spoons and a blindfold!

Noisy message: While initial assumptions rested on a shared flavour profile across discount supermarket brands, empirical testing revealed statistically significant variance in mouthfeel viscosity and synthetic peach note latency.

Agreement: “James, I was wrong, you’re the winner at identifying different peach yoghurts that I mistakenly thought were the same.”

6) It’s important to hit peak boil when making a cuppa

Me: We should hit the pour-ometer within seconds, hun!

Zosia: It doesn’t make that much difference.

Noisy message: We simply can’t be those people who pause mid-pour for idle chat, creating a thermodynamic class system in the mug hierarchy - where the last pour is barely warmer than a laptop monitor, and where some unlucky recipient gets, at best, a tepid travesty of a brew, engendering the quite unjust result of tea temperature inequality.  

Agreement: Peak boil, baby!

Those were largely real life domestic situations that occurred in chez Knight, but with amusing embellishments, to show the theory in action. In domestic cases like the above, agreement can be reached by mutual consent through noisy messaging, as long as it applied properly. In a household where laughs are aplenty – as all households should ideally be – couples can blur the strength of preferences, embed a touch of absurdity, or lean on gentle tangents to tip the scales toward shared resolution. 

*For example, if ε = 0.1 (we want 90% agreement), then 1/ε² = 1 / (0.1)² = 100, so the process might need about 100 messages. On the other hand, if ε = 0.01 (we want 99% agreement), then 1/ε² = 10,000, so the number of messages might shoot up dramatically. The closer you want the agents to agree, the more work it takes - and it gets expensive fast.

Accusing Others of What We Suppress in Ourselves

I used to write a lot of psychology in the 1990s/early 2000s, and one of the pieces I wrote was called Accusing Others of What We Suppress in Ourselves. I think, nowadays it’s probably even more relevant, particularly with the rise of social media platforms that reward performative outrage and instant moral grandstanding - with the huge influx of people on Dunning-Kruger turbo charge, caught in the cultural contagion of narcissistic virtue-signalling. This evening, I rewrote it in a truncated version for a contemporary age:

Accusing Others of What We Suppress in Ourselves
In human psychology, there's a powerful tendency called projection, where we attribute to others the very traits, desires, or faults we unconsciously recognise but refuse to accept in ourselves. This occurs because certain aspects of our personality - such as aggressive impulses, selfish motives, or sexual desires - may be seen as shameful or socially unacceptable. Rather than acknowledging the socially unacceptable traits as part of our own nature, we repress them. But repression doesn't erase them, of course – it manifests stronger, later down the line. We see them “out there” in others, and predictably react with disproportionate judgement, disgust, or moral outrage to let ourselves off the hook.  Nietzsche believed that outward moral condemnation is frequently a form of inward resentment - repressed envy or hatred - that masks one’s own weaknesses. It’s the classic sleight of hand that Jesus warns against in Matthew 7:3 - blame them so we can avoid looking at ourselves.

The digital age, with its endless scroll of curated identities and ideological echo chambers, has become a breeding ground for the most obtuse narcissistic projection in public form. The very people who shout loudest about tolerance often display the most intolerance; those who claim to defend inclusivity often simultaneously promote tribal narratives riddled with division; and those who shout the loudest about justice readily support policies that foster some of the worst injustices.

And as Dunning-Kruger meets moral theatre, those least self-aware become the most certain, their projections emboldened by mutual reinforcement from like-minded influencers. Virtue-signalling becomes the perfect camouflage for unresolved personal conflict. Rather than confronting one’s inner contradictions, the energy is offloaded onto targets of abuse and frustration - and sadly, the intellect is often outsourced too in the process. It becomes an abject failure of self-recognition - one from which I fear many young people, as they grow into maturity, may not be able to recover. Let’s consider some examples of this manifestation.

We’ll begin with the odious, skin-crawling manipulator that is Andrew Tate. Andrew Tate certainly isn’t popular because he’s wise - if you take what he says to the natural levels, you’d be faced with a pitiful life of emotional vacancy, moral dejection, and existential hollowness. The most remarkable thing about him is that he shows (which most people can see) that acquisition of wealth and material luxury is impoverishing without the presence of true virtue and courage. Even though he’s clearly right about some things, he exhibits a fragile masculinity propped up by material excess, emotional repression, and a kind of brute-force detachment from the parts of life that give life true gravitas, and the individual, true fulfilment, contentment, connection and meaning. If you pay attention, he doesn’t really teach men to be strong; he teaches them to numb themselves into caricatures of strength, mistaking domination for self-worth, hollowness for status, and unjustified confidence for truth. He’s popular because he’s a surrogate for what many young men feel but can’t face – but his whole persona is a projection shield: hyper-masculine, unfeeling, domineering, rich, sexually unconstrained. 

His tweets and videos proclaiming his own invincibility become more and more bombastic, because they are built to distract from what’s clearly buried beneath – intellectual fragility, insecurity, and a desperate hunger to matter but without many of the qualities required to have a positive impact on people (qualities that people like Jordan Peterson, Douglas Murray, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and John Lennox do have). Sure, Andrew Tate has developed quite a following – but I’ll wager that if you could delve into their minds, most of his followers don’t admire him because they’re strong; they admire him because they’re weak. He gives voice to their suppressed resentment towards women, toward modern society, toward the discomfort of being unformed in a complex world that rewards truthseeking and responsibility. His medicine isn’t just poison, it’s actually an impossible heuristic because the priority of external dominance is never the path to inner peace - it's one of the most reliable paths to inevitable psychological ruin.

Another example illustrates the same mechanism. Take the current rhetoric surrounding Israel and Gaza as another good case in point. Many left-wing activists accuse Israel or its supporters of being colonial, oppressive, and (most ridiculous of all) genocidal. And yet, in the very breath of claiming moral superiority, they often ignore or even justify acts of terrorism, authoritarian control within Gaza itself, and anti-Semitic rhetoric in their own ranks. In their faux-outrage against perceived colonialism, they’ve adopted the very mindset of dehumanisation they claim to oppose - endorsing one narrative so that opposing voices are demonised.

Or consider the right-wing obsession with ethno-nationalism, especially in its online forms – it is riddled with projection masquerading as cultural pride. The constant accusation is that immigration, multiculturalism, or globalism is diluting identity, destroying tradition, and replacing the native population. But in the most extreme cases, beneath the surface lies a deep self-loathing - of decline, of perceived cultural emptiness, of one’s own failings and mediocrity – all of which is projected outward onto “the outsider.” Rather than reckoning with how their own culture became complacent, commodified, or spiritually vacant, they offload that anxiety onto migrants or minorities. I’m not saying there are no justified concerns of mass immigration – far from it, as I outline in this blog post – but there’s no question that in the cases of the hatred of the “other”, it is often a disguised hatred of the self; of weakness, of failure, of not having lived up to the ideals they claim to defend. And so, ironically, they become shrill gatekeepers of a culture they neither embody nor understand.

Or look at the endorsement of socialism, especially among younger people. The critique is aimed at capitalism; it’s greedy, self-serving, and exploitative, they’ll tell us. And yet, many of the loudest voices championing socialism do so with a kind of moral and material entitlement that is as ugly as it is ungrateful and self-serving. Ironically, the free market is the greatest driver of human material progression the world has ever seen, yet socialists advocate policies that are economically counter-productive, detrimental to progress, and require a constant flow of resources from others to themselves, with little acknowledgement of where responsibility lies or who foots the bill. It becomes a kind of reverse extraction, couched in ungrateful, entitled language that avoids personal accountability and expresses envy and malice towards those who’ve actually taken responsibility for themselves and created value (and jobs) in society. Dependency is lauded, but it’s always someone else’s responsibility.

In climate change activism, the projection emerges in the simultaneous language of crisis and moral purity. Critics of environmental inaction are denounced as lazy-minded, ignorant and selfish - but many climate alarmists themselves live lifestyles steeped in the very consumerism they condemn - travel, tech, fashion, and other industries that quietly fuel the carbon economy. The irony would hit them square in the face if they were ever perspicacious enough to notice. That’s their narcissistic, entitled narrative; the enemy is external – the industries that everyone relies upon - and the faux-outrage, again, works to absolve the self by offloading guilt onto abstract villains, while participating in the same structures they claim to fight.

Lastly, the social justice movement falls by similar standards, especially in its most institutionalised form, and especially online or in crowds, where you’ll see some of the most despicable behaviour. It’s one of the biggest ironies in contemporary society, actually, that those whose focus is ostensibly on things like equity, fairness, and compassion are some of the most squalid agents in society. Its methods usually involve ruthless division, ostracism, public shaming, mob mentalities, deplatforming and a perverse claim to victimhood that’s weaponised with hostility. But, again, the fight against the so-called bigoted, intolerant, or oppressive external forces are battles against what they suppress within themselves. The means by which this ‘justice’ is called for or enacted frequently reflect the very dynamics of oppression it aims to dismantle, which is silencing, exclusion, and social control - fighting against perceived oppression while wielding power in ways that humiliate and dominate. If you want to see moral sadism, cloaked in righteousness, go to a social justice event (as I have several times before, to try to get the measure of them).

The upshot is, when you watch how people behave – be alert to the tendency to accuse others of what we suppress in ourselves – and we mustn’t preclude ourselves from this evaluation either. In a world now where anyone turning on their phone or keyboard can be heard on multiple platforms, projection has become a cultural epidemic. And I do genuinely believe (and fear) that in this era of curated identities, the capacity for wise self-recognition is becoming more and more endangered.

On The Nature Of Fairness

The world isn’t fair and neither is nature. People are born with varying genetic combinations, talents, intelligence, looks, ranges of opportunities, and so forth, and yet a sense of fairness is usually developed in childhood by the age of about six or seven. Having developed a sense of fairness, it’s not hard to see why we’d keep passing that on to our children, generation to generation, and fairness would be a common value in humanity.

But I wonder where the sense of fairness first came from in human evolution. I can see why, in the inceptive stages of learning, it would be beneficial to adopt a sense of fairness in order to begin to thrive through mutual cooperation. But there is little that is egalitarian about nature, so it’s not obvious where the idea of fairness even came from.

All things considered, I think our concept of fairness has a twofold, proximal and distal cause. The primary cause is that we are created in God’s image, and we are reflecting God’s sense of justice in our very being. And I think the proximal cause is part of an evolved, learned phenomenon emanating from our hunter-gatherer era, where concepts related to fairness were developed in relation to trade and cooperation. Cooperation increases the likelihood of survival and advancement for the group, so it would have positive reinforcements, and the opposite would be true for uncooperative behaviour.

Further, the development of language helped us crystallise this concept of fairness into a more refined consensus, and our conscience helps direct us towards it. And given that we are all evolutionarily related, it is to be expected that crude notions of fairness are to be found in many of the sentient species too (especially other primates), just not at our level of sophistication. 

Extremes Are Nearly Always Bad

 

The emptiest and noisiest vessels out there are usually extremists in several of their beliefs – and, alas, they seem to be becoming more numerous with every passing year. Obviously the extremist to non-extremist is a broad spectrum, but the probability of someone being an extremist (like the Sorites paradox) increases when they display traits like excessively rigid beliefs, dogmatism, intolerance, lack of critical thinking, dismissal of alternative perspectives, and views that do not conform to empirical evidence or sit well against rigorous logical scrutiny.

Given that extremes are such bad and psychologically damaging places to be, it’s perhaps surprising that so many people are extremist in at least a few areas of their thinking. It’s also bad, of course, to be too far on the non-extremist end of the spectrum too – as almost every virtue taken to excess one way produces a negative outcome, and taken to excess the other way causes an equally undesirable outcome. To take Aristotle’s famous example; courage is a virtue, but if taken to excess amounts to recklessness, and if too deficient amounts to cowardice.

From this kind of wisdom, he postulated his equally famous “golden mean” – that it’s usually best to occupy the “mean” between almost any two extremes, to get the perspective of both extremes, but possess the requisite balanced, critical analysis and emotional discernment to comprehend the full, complex realty of the situation as best as you can.

To that end, when you encounter anyone who is shouting or pontificating from one extreme, or apathetically disengaged at the other extreme, I’d suggest they are usually untrustworthy or not not at the forefront of reasoned discipline.

The Higher Points To God

 

Christianity says that God is perfect, and that He created the universe. I think it’s easier to believe that that is the profound reason reality is as it is than the naturalistic alternatives. It’s odd to think that the universe is naturalistic and infinite for no profound reason, or that it is finite but came into existence for no profound reason, or that we have a multiverse for no profound reason. And if we posit that there is a profound reason behind everything, it’s much more plausible that it’s God than some other profound reason – especially as there are so many strong reasons to believe that God has made Himself known in creation.

I also think that in terms of knowing God in creation, the following holds; the higher the excellence experienced (in truth, love, goodness, grace, justice, mercy, compassion, generosity, wisdom, and similar virtues) the more it reflects God revealing His nature to humanity, as these virtues are a reflection of His Divine perfection

Moral Conscience As An Argument For God

 

I’ve seen many arguments over the years for our moral conscience being a good argument for God (most recently by a blogger called Bentham’s Bulldog in this article). Let me start by what I think is wrong with the proposition, then I’ll turn to where I think it has strength. First, naturalistic explanations of moral conscience are more robust than theists often concede, and the underplaying of the evolutionarily utility of our moral conscience doesn’t help the argument. Evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and social psychology offer plausible accounts of how humans developed moral faculties and the survival utility of such traits. Traits like empathy, fairness, and cooperation have clear survival value in social species. For example, groups that fostered trust and punished cheating or foul play would have had a better chance of survival, passing those behavioural tendencies down. At an evolutionary level, I think it’s possible to conceive how moral intuitions could have developed without needing to be designed by God. The fact that such traits are evolutionarily advantageous somewhat explains both the strength and the universality of many moral intuitions from a Darwinian perspective without obvious recourse to Divine intervention.

But on the positive side, it is stretching it a lot to say that moral truths are mere evolutionary products of human agreements, emotions, or rational deliberation. If moral truths are human constructions, then it's no mystery why we believe them - we created them. But if you look at all the things we have created and all the things we have discovered, moral truths look a lot more like discoveries than creations – and we certainly don’t behave as though we merely created them.

Unlike social conventions or human inventions, which we recognise as malleable and negotiable, moral convictions are often experienced and acted upon as if they are binding, external, and independent of personal preference or societal agreement - especially the most consensual ones (like “do not torture innocent people”, “do not rape”, “do not murder”, and so forth). Even if we argue intellectually that morality is constructed, we do not live as though that is true. Consider how we respond to paradigmatic moral wrongs like genocide, child abuse, or slavery. These aren’t viewed as merely "wrong" according to our societal preferences or cultural norms - they are condemned as wrong regardless of whether a society endorses or permits them. That response carries the character of discovery rather than invention. We act as though we have recognised a set of moral truths that stand apart from us, not truths we simply consented to or designed.

Compare this with how we treat actual human inventions. Take the rules of chess or metric measuring systems - both human-made systems. While we may care deeply about these systems functioning well, we generally accept that they could have been otherwise, and we don’t treat them as morally binding in the same way. Violating a chess rule may invalidate a game, whereas violating a moral rule is often seen as a violation of something sacred or deeply true. If moral rules were on par with our other creations, we should feel the same latitude toward them as we do with design choices in technology, art, or law. Yet, even across cultures, people are willing to stand up, protest, and even sacrifice their lives for moral principles - far more than they would for invented systems like etiquette or bureaucracy.

Moreover, when we create things - technologies, institutions, customs - we usually acknowledge our authorship and our ability to revise or discard them. But when it comes to the deepest moral truths, we act as though we are accountable to something larger than ourselves. We behave not like authors, but like subjects.

Even though evolution, social consensus, and emotion contribute to how we perceive morality, they seem insufficient to account for the weight and authority we assign to the deepest moral truths (see here for more on this). No, we act as though morality is grounded in something deeper than human minds - as though it has its provenance in God Himself, or for unbelievers, in a standard ultimately so high that it simulates God.

At the heart of the “our moral conscience being a good argument for God” argument is the epistemic problem that if our beliefs weren’t shaped by transcendent moral truths, as per the above, then it seems coincidental - and hence epistemically dubious - that our deepest moral beliefs turn out to be correct at every fundamental level. With my economist hat on, I can see how one could make that assumption as one of mistaken causality - that they evolve so consensually precisely because they work well enough to help us survive in a social species, rather like how scientific realism is justified because it is at least approximately true. On top of this is the oft-cited objection that if our moral conscience is designed by God to reliably tap in to transcendent truths, we might expect moral knowledge to be more consistent, stable and universal.

Here I’ll tackle both those errors in one hit. Under normal circumstances, experiences justify beliefs when the belief is explained by the fact that makes it true. If you know you’re not doing well enough in the capacity of serving as a volunteer in church, then your self-induced dismissal doesn’t justify believing you are doing well enough if you’re not serving on any team. Similarly, if our moral beliefs weren’t formed because of the truth of moral facts, we find it harder to justify those beliefs, in terms of explaining how we came to form those true moral beliefs, and explaining how we are justified in holding them.

Not only do we justify them because we believe they are true, we also don’t really believe their truth value lacks consistency by virtue that some people either fall so short of them or haven’t learned of their truth and absorbed it strongly into their culture. To illustrate, we don’t think that scientific facts are unjustified just because some people choose to reject them in favour of self-serving, counterfactual views. And we don’t really believe that about moral truths. In fact, to take an extreme case, even if 80% of the world’s next generation went on to believe that rape is no longer wrong, there’d be a better case that the 20% are still in the right than the 80%, who’ve been victim to a gross perversion of moral truth.

Moral discovery is, of course, part of our evolutionary story. But God guided the creation story so humans would acquire the faculties for correct moral beliefs - making those beliefs truth-discerning – and endowed humans with a bottom-up liberty of moral intuition that genuinely connects with His top-down moral truths (like He has done with mathematics, as I outlined in the articles in this tab). If a belief is only justified when the experience itself contributes directly to its justification, then it is stretching it to accept the naturalist assumption that all beliefs, justifications and truths just happen to have been converged upon over a lengthy evolutionary percentage game, and yet retain such powerful persuasion at the deepest level.

I don’t wholly endorse the sentiment that declares “naturalism is epistemically self-undermining because it cannot justify the very cognitive tools it relies on to claim knowledge”. Because justification only needs to be good enough, not absolute – and we have evolved plenty of traits that have been good enough to determine our survival. But I do believe it is the case that if our intuitions about moral truths aren’t caused by the truth of those moral propositions, then they can’t justify our evident certainty in the absolute nature of those moral beliefs. The only way out of that conundrum is to deny we have such certainty, but that would be to merely replace one untruth with another.

The weak theistic argument - such as that advanced by Bentham’s Bulldog - claims that if those deep moral truths do not originate with God, then the appearance of such truths is not more likely given their truth than given their falsity. But it’s a mistake to say that evolution makes it not much more likely that we believe moral truths if they are true than if they are false. Remember, evolution favours adaptive beliefs - but many moral truths (fairness, reciprocity, harm avoidance, and so forth) are adaptive, so there is a strong overlap between what’s deemed to be morally true and what’s evolutionarily helpful.

No, the stronger theistic argument would be to say that if the sets of moral truths are independent of God and happen to be right, then evolution through naturalism seems an unlikely route to such strong, certain conviction in their truth. The depth and certainty with which we hold these moral truths is more plausibly explained by theism than by naturalism. This is not a matter of statistical likelihood but of explanatory depth - a qualitative, not quantitative, argument.

Ideal Conscience

 

We have a sense of morality through our conscience, and we have a sense of God because we are made in His image. Our sense of morality depends on our individual experiences, and our individual experiences condition how consistent we are and how well equipped we are at making ethical decisions and doing the right thing. A man brought up by drug-dealing criminal parents would probably have different moral successes than a man brought up by two Christian charity workers. A homeless lady has to make different daily decisions to a lady who is the chief executive of a large finance company.

This is important, because every individual is aware of a kind of ideal self they aspire to be, but the conception of the ideal self varies within individuals according to our experience - especially our experience of family, our role-models in our life, our experience of diversity, our education of moral thinkers, our social development, and so forth. Just as tall and short people can reach different heights on the apple tree, and just as fit and unfit people can run different speeds in a race, so too can different levels of moral experience affect how high our moral ideals can be conceived at an individual level. In other words, people have varying conceptions of an ideal, and varying levels of effort to reach those ideals, which means they judge their own conduct differently, let themselves off with different levels of ease, and act or fail to act based on a number of other factors and considerations.

We assess our own thoughts and deeds through our conscience, and we examine ourselves through that conscience. Our conscience is a bit like a sergeant who we try to stay on the right side of, and try to satisfy ethically, but different people have stricter and not-so-strict sergeants, depending on the accumulation of their experience, where, to make matters even more complex, the strictness also varies according to which particular thought or action is being assessed. So our conscience is perhaps more like an entire police force, where a different officer deals with your financial dishonesty compared to the one who deals with your speeding or the one who deals with your bad temper, and so forth.

The point is, we build our considerations of both morality and God from different perspectives with different experiences. Even with our personal sense of an ideal, we are going to judge ourselves a lot less truthfully and a lot less honestly than God will (and probably with a lot more leniency than we deserve). Our conscience is only as competent as we are, just as our beliefs are only as good as our reasoning and evidential scrutiny has permitted, and both are therefore not fit to serve as the commander in chief at the police station of our conscience. Furthermore, our conceptions of God and of the Bible are only as good as our own weight of experience and intellectual considerations, so the likelihood that there is a lack of fitness in this area too is incredibly high. 

The Art of Negotiation

 

From my book The Divine Truths of Love:

"There’s a great piece of wisdom in Ephesians 4:26 about not letting the sun go down while we are still angry. It’s not a verse we should take absolutely literally in every instance – sometimes after an argument a couple needs some time out to absorb, reflect and come back to the table in a renewed place. But the instruction, alongside Jesus’ other concomitant instruction in Matthew 5:24 – that if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your gift – serves as a wise template for negotiating conflict early before it enlarges into something more serious and toxic. In marriage, there are going to be some things to negotiate, and some of them are likely to reveal a conflict of preferences, or personal improvements that each beloved needs to make. Negotiating these situations as early as possible will be of great benefit in the marriage, because anything that gets suppressed is not going to go away, it’s going to fester and multiply deep in the recesses of the belly, and come back with even bigger bite.

Early on in the marriage, keep a close eye on this in terms of domestic living, because living together is going to involve lots of repeated behaviour regarding routines. Develop an understanding of one another as honestly, as eagerly and as gently as possible. Be transparent about what is going well and what is not, and how your personality profiles differ, and work together to negotiate those differences. Even two well-matched beloveds are bringing different personalities, different perspectives and different experiences to the marriage - and it is because you each have a diverse range of skills and preferences to bring to the table that there’ll inevitably be conflicts to negotiate. If you tackle them early, keep them small and negotiable, and seek the truth together, you can become stronger and wiser together by navigating through them on your journey. But both of you must be courageous; don’t deflect and repress in hankering for the spurious notion of peaceful avoidance; be determined and truthful together, and learn to be honest as you master negotiation."

On So-Called 'Generational Curses'

 

Some Christians believe in generational curses; that some bad things have spiritual roots that go back generations - like if my great great great grandfather was into the Freemasons, it might negatively affect me. The idea is that the spiritual consequences of the sins or practices of your ancestors (like idolatry, occult involvement, or secret societies like Freemasonry) can somehow "pass down" through bloodlines, affecting future generations with things like recurring patterns of sin, illness, or misfortune. This idea comes from verses like Exodus 20:5, "I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation..." and Lamentations 5:7, "Our ancestors sinned and are no more, and we bear their punishment."

As you might expect, Christians interpret these verses differently. I know quite a few Christians who believe very strongly in ancestral curses, and some even have ministries devoted to praying against generational curses and breaking the link, so those currently affected by the curse can be set free.

Consequently, I thought I’d devote a blog post to considering whether I think there are generational curses inherited spiritually, or whether it’s an over-interpretation (or even just plain wrong). I have my doubts about the efficacy of the ‘generational curses’ hypothesis, and I’ll explain why. The best way to start an enquiry like this is to start with what we know for sure and try to work outwards from that. We know for sure that genetics influences heritability by passing down traits from parents to offspring through DNA, with certain genes increasing the likelihood of inheriting physical, behavioural, or health-related characteristics. We also know that adverse family legacies exist - such as poverty, substance abuse, unemployment, and limited access to education - and that these can be transmitted across generations through social and cultural mechanisms. Behavioural norms, expectations, and environmental limitations – both positive and negative ones - shape young people’s opportunities and life trajectories. This much we know for sure.

The burning question is, are the adverse social, cultural and family legacies sufficient to explain what is meant in Exodus 20:5 and Lamentations 5:7, or is there an extra level of spiritual inheritance that occurs on top of the genetic, social, cultural and family – one that presumably belongs in the realms of spiritual warfare that Paul talks about in Ephesians 6:12?:

"For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms."

The issue I have is that I can’t make much sense of the notion of these spiritual inheritances that need breaking – why would God not simply institute a system whereby every individual starts with a spiritually clean slate, where they are born with sin already forgiven (because of the cross) and get judged on their own life choices, not through some proxy that extends back way before they were born, and in which they had no say? Consequently, I can make more sense of “Our ancestors sinned and are no more, and we bear their punishment” in that my ancestors social, cultural and family legacies might go on to impact my life in terms of my own raw material and life opportunities (although I think these are generally overstated too), than I can “Our ancestors sinned and are no more, and we bear their punishment” meaning that because Jack’s great great grandfather was into the occult that Jack still bears some of the spiritual punishment, and needs to break free from the curse.

Ezekiel 18:20 says that "The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. The righteousness of the righteous will be credited to them, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against them.", and we know from 2 Corinthians 5:17 that “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.” If "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law” as per Galatians 3:13, then I would have thought each individual is redeemed from the curses of their forebears. The cross surely nullifies any notion that we would carry spiritual curses due to our ancestors' actions – otherwise we start getting into tricky territory where we attempt to determine what the cross covers and what it doesn’t – when I believe it covers everything. If “there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”, as per Romans 8:1, then condemnation due to the sins of our forebears makes no sense to me.

Hebrews 10:14 confirms that "For by one sacrifice He has made perfect forever those who are being made holy." My faith is centred on the belief that Jesus' sacrifice is sufficient to break all chains of sin and spiritual inheritance, where the focus is on the power of Christ’s sacrifice rather than the persistence of generational issues. And in one of the most famous instances in John’s gospel, Jesus saw a man blind from birth, and His disciples asked Him, 'Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?' and Jesus replied 'Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him’.

At this stage, I’m finding it hard to accept the idea of generational spiritual curses - it seems like an example of over-interpretation, where extra meaning is added to scripture to create a belief system or ministry that uses the concept of spiritual bondage as a tool for fostering dependency or creating a sense of ongoing spiritual struggle, on which they can capitalise - either, in many cases, through the innocent desire to feel needed, or, in worse cases, as a tool for outright manipulation.

To be fair to the other side of the argument, if those who believe in generational spiritual curses are onto something, we should not want to overlook any profound Biblical truths and be on the wrong side of this matter. Perhaps it’s the case that while the cross does cover every human sin for the individual who accepts grace, the spiritual warfare that’s going on is powerful enough to impute curses on generations, and that some of these need breaking, as per Ephesians 6:12. Perhaps in true Screwtape style, Satan wants us to not believe in spiritual generational curses so we remain enchained in their bondage. Sinful strongholds or patterns may still exist as a consequence of spiritual oppression or the ongoing influence of demonic forces. I suppose this would mean that ancestral involvement in things like Freemasonry or the occult could open doors for demonic influence, and therefore need to be specifically addressed through spiritual warfare – and this may be what Paul warns against in 2 Corinthians 10:4-5 when he says;

"The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ."

But being as balanced as I can, does "generational curse" theology truly hold up in light of the New Testament's message of individual responsibility and freedom in Christ? I have severe doubts, and I’ve heard no argument that convinces me they are anything other than an over-interpretation of scripture. I’m aware that spiritual realities are often subtle, mysterious, and not easily reducible to logic or observation – and that just because this kind of behaviour is rife, and just because something has been misused or overstated, doesn’t automatically mean there’s no truth in it. But whenever I face situations like this, I tend to apply a speculative probability-estimate to see which history shows is more likely. In this case, we know when we look at common human behaviour and incentives that people repeatedly behave in this way – they make a kind of tiny subset universe out of some doctrinal or theological element and make it part of their ‘thing’ - and are found wanting when called to justify their beliefs.

Readers are welcome to have a crack at a counter-argument – but thus far, I see no reason to accept ‘generational curses’ as anything other than an embroidered myth or narrative distortion that overlooks the complete way in which Jesus has broken all curses already on the cross. And you’re going to need to present a compelling argument to convince me otherwise.